Asian American Women Artists: Performative Strategies Redefined

Abstract

When a woman artist uses her body in a performative fashion, the viewer becomes witness to an active process of cultural navigation. The body becomes a site of immediate engagement. The choice to employ artistic strategies drawn from cultural experience conveys and highlights the problem of constructing identity in a world that rejects and even fears what is unknown. By transcending stereotypes long held by Americans and rejecting traditional Asian Confucian ideology of the respectful and submissive woman, Asian American women of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese descent draw attention to cross-cultural fluidity in negotiating language, history, politics, and cultural perception.