writing
books
Making Chinatown (advance contract, Princeton University Press)
“The things she makes are of her, but they are not her.”
Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism
“If this is a book about small things in a vast world, it is also an account of the way these things might contain a world—if only for a moment.”
“Glittering Visions: Martin Wong and the Queer Counterculture” (2022)
articles and essays
“In California, Wong learned that Heaven and Hell are not some distant realm, but just where we live.”
“Joan Brown’s New Age.” (2022)
“But what of the cat? She has no say in this matter.”
“Wooden Fossils: The Time of Japanese Incarceration.”
“The wooden grain of the reptilian torso is arrested in time, like a wave petrified at its crest. The rattle that warns of its venomous bite remains flush to the ground, forever frozen, forever silent.”
“Introduction: Asian American Art: Pasts and Futures”
“What can he teach us, and how does our desire for what he can teach us constrain him? Are his shoulders not stooped enough already? What did he do before this picture was taken, and what did he do after? What would it mean to queer him? How can we see the women who are nowhere in this picture, and honor their specific burdens and joys? Who loved him, and whom did he love? What did he dream about?”
“The Education of John Kane.”
“To recognise the intelligence of ‘self-taught’ artists, art historians must therefore begin by questioning our learned assumptions of what constitutes ‘intelligence’ and what counts as ‘learning’.”
Folk Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art (2020)
“MoMA’s attempts to expand the idea of who counts as an artist and what counts as art thus touched upon the paradox inherent to attempts to level established cultural hierarchies, which, taken to their logical extreme, threaten to destroy the boundaries between art and the world around it.”
“The Fence and the Chair: Isamu Noguchi, Appalachian Spring, and the Setting of Japanese Internment.” (2018)
“At any moment they might rejoin the dancing onstage or move outward into the distant wilderness, imbricating the real time of the production with the historical time of settler colonialism—which of course had already come to pass by 1944.”
short essays
“Naming Martin Wong” (2023)
“Wong’s work showed us that one thing could be many things.”
“Dear Casey” (2021)
“When I teach this class, I search for the threads that connect our experiences to deeper histories. I tug at these threads to see how long they are, how far they extend, where they are anchored.”
“Its dream of a world in which everyone quite literally takes up the same space is at once disturbing and beautiful, hopeful and a bit sinister in the way its idealism is enforced by that ur-form of modernism, the grid.”
