Review of ‘Distant Visions and Lucid Dreams: South Asian Art in the Diaspora’, Asia Society, Whitehot Magazine
Nationalism is messy business. But it is mostly business. With it comes a web of attachments like identity and culture. While the United States, despite its popular rhetoric, has never been a truly welcoming country, it is, in words Isamu Noguchi wrote in 1942 from within his somewhat voluntary confinement in an Arizona concentration camp, “...the nation of all nationalities.” But as someone trapped within the liminal space of his biracial identity, he was keenly aware of his own unique perspective, opening this same essay (“I Become a Nisei”) just a sentence earlier proclaiming, “To be a hybrid anticipates the future.”
It is this very anticipation that takes center stage in the Asia Society’s latest exhibition, Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora. The show features works by nineteen contemporary artists, all of whom live in the United States, but who nevertheless trace elements of their biographies to a larger South Asian diaspora from countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Tibet.