Modern Asian art, flavored with history

A turn-of-the-century Laotian doll peers through wooden slats at a kite-shaped cage that rotates like a disco ball, casting diamonds of shadow on the blood-red walls. A scratchy, black-and-white photograph of a WWII-era Japanese couple, their backs to the camera as they survey the landscape of an internment camp, hangs in rose-colored resin. A length of barbed wire, a handful of soybeans and a modern Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt embossed with racist caricatures of Asian men completes the scene.

"How the Soy Sauce Was Bottled: Uncommon Stories of Common Objects," the new exhibit at Wing Luke Asian Museum, marks the meeting point between historic and contemporary immigrant experiences. By manipulating old photographs, artifacts and documents from the museum's permanent collection, five local artists created new works to reflect their own experiences within modern Asian Pacific American communities.

By showcasing objects from the museum's collection, "Soy Sauce" highlights WLAM's own journey through history, as the acting sounding board and mouthpiece for immigrant communities in Seattle since 1966. This is the last major exhibit WLAM will host before relocating and reopening in 2008.

Exhibition review


"How the Soy Sauce Was Bottled: Uncommon Stories of Common Objects." Works by Heinrich Toh, James Lawrence Ardeña, June Sekiguchi, Saya Moriyasu and Susie Jungune Lee. 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, noon-4 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, 407 Seventh Ave. S., Seattle (206-623-5124 or www.wingluke.org).

The dominant display in the mostly wide-open gallery space is James Lawrence Ardeña's suspended photographs and consumer products embedded in cobalt-blue resin. Skin-lightening serum, imported children's snacks and a pair of laborer's shoes offer portraiture not only of the past, but of a modern culture, caught in the sticky space between racism and the expectation of assimilation. In the next space, Susie Jungune Lee projects immigration documents through 2,000 pieces of tracing paper, stretching like shed snakeskin from a stark white wall. Snippets of personal information — birthplace, weight, eye color — that appear, then fade, then appear again on the display emphasize the reality of reducing a person to a stack of governmental records.

Lurking in the corner of the exhibit, June Sekiguchi's intricately designed wooden cages imprison dolls from several Asian nations. The display represents the tendency to objectify, and thus immure, immigrants by stereotype and, in case the lesson isn't apparent enough, visitors are invited to step behind a human-sized lattice for a visceral — and unnerving — sense of entrapment. Both Heinrich Toh's historical photographs, mounted on Chinese paper-cut designs, and Saya Moriyasu's contemporary portraits of old porcelain dolls, framed above a ceramic mantelpiece, explore the endurance and authenticity of a cultural family.

At the end of this exhibit's run in November, WLAM will close its doors for six months, reopening just a block away in the East Kong Yick Building the following May. The museum has raised 85 percent of its $23.2 million goal, and the complete renovation of the historic building — the Kong Yick was built in 1910 as a 50-room boarding house for Asian laborers — is on schedule to be completed in November. The reincarnation of WLAM in its new home will perpetuate the balance struck by "Soy Sauce": Some spaces in the new building will be restored exactly as they would have appeared a century ago, while some rooms have been designed with a new and dynamic Pan Asian American community in mind. A new 70-seat theater, multipurpose auditorium and permanent exhibit space will be reserved to display the work of local and emerging Asian-American artists who, like those showcased at "Soy Sauce," use history to inform a modern perspective.

Haley Edwards: 206-464-2745 or hedwards@seattletimes.com