O Sesc Avenida Paulista opens the exhibition Letters to Memory, curated by Yudi Rafael. The exhibition brings together around 90 works by 29 artists from the Americas and Asia, which investigate the complex relationships between art, politics, identity, and memory in the experiences of the Asian diaspora.
Inspired by the book Letters to Memory (2017) by Japanese-American writer Karen Tei Yamashita, Letters to Memory proposes a profound reflection on the vestiges of history and the ghosts of the present. Through paintings, photographs, videos, installations, documents, and posters, the exhibition revisits episodes of repression, displacement, and resistance experienced by Asian communities in Brazil, the United States, and Central American countries.
“The exhibition engages with the way the artist expands the Asian-American geographical imaginary, inscribing within it the North-South axis, beyond East-West, in order to traverse times and geographies that are simultaneously distant and interconnected, and brings together works by 29 artists from different countries of the American continent, the Caribbean, and East and Southeast Asia,” says Yudi Rafael, who structures the exhibition around transversal thematic axes – such as places, wars, activism, and communities.
These themes permeate the collection of approximately 90 works, proposing a historical and artistic journey that highlights how the 20th and 21st centuries were marked by wars and political crises, which promoted migratory movements from various countries in East and Southeast Asia towards the Americas, and consequently their unfolding in the experience of communities and in their identity constructions.
Among the works that make up the exhibition: the archives of the American of Chinese descent, Corky Lee (1947–2021), present the daily life, celebrations, demonstrations and struggles for civil rights and social justice of Asian communities in the United States; the revolutionary posters of the Cuban graphic artist René Mederos (1933-1996), produced from his visits to Vietnam; a film by the Vietnamese Tuan Andrew Nguyen (1976), which mixes documentary record and mythical language when revisiting an island of war refugees in Southeast Asia.
The exhibition also features four new projects by artists Caroline Ricca Lee, Tais Koshino, Alice Yura, and Lina Kim, who explore histories of ethnic enclaves and migrant trajectories in the Americas and Asia.
The curator explains that the artistic production of recent decades combines an interest in storytelling with family memory, confronting the historical legacies of exclusion and war in a fragile scenario of highly militarized pacification, and emphasizes: "the hot geography of the Cold War brings Latin America and Asia closer together also through the ghosts it left behind, straining the linearity of chronology and collapsing the boundaries between past, present and future."
Artists featured in the exhibition
Albert Chong; Alice Yura; Alípio Freire; An-My Lê; Bridge; Carlos Takaoka; Caroline Ricca Lee; Chantal Peñalosa Fong; Corky Lee; Danh Vo; Dinh Q. Lê; Dorothea Lange; Flavio Shiró; Gidra; Hisako Hibi; Jane Jin Kaisen; Kiyoji Tomioka; Lina Kim; Mario N. Ishikawa; Masayo Seta; Mimian Hsu; Rea Tajiri; René Mederos; Ryan Villamael; Susan Meiselas; Taís Koshino; Toyo Miyatake; Tuan Andrew Nguyễn; Yoshiya Takaoka.
Service
Exhibition Letters to Memory
From November 14th to May 03rd
Tuesday to Friday, from 10:00 AM to 9:30 PM; Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, from 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM.
