Explore the exciting themes of this timely exhibition—the plurality and fluidity of Asia and the Asian diaspora as cultural construct and creative practice with Chang Tan, guest curator, and Adrian De Leon. 

Free with cost of admission

More about our guest speakers:

Chang Tan is an Associate Professor of Art History and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University, specializing in modern Chinese, East Asian, and Asian diasporic art. Her publications address topics that range from ecological and activist art to exhibitions of Asian and Asian American art in the United States. Her upcoming book, The Minjian Avant-garde: Contemporary Chinese Artists in Search of the Public (Cornell University Press, 2023), critically assesses the rise of populism in both art and politics. She is currently working on two projects that examine, respectively, 20th century studio photography in the Chinese diaspora and community-based ecological art in the Sinophone world. 

Adrian De Leon is an award-winning public historian and writer at the University of Southern California, where he is an Assistant Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity. At USC, he serves on the steering committee of the Center for Transpacific Studies, and holds affiliations in several other initiatives across campus. De Leon studies the relationship between indigeneity, settler colonialism, and resource extraction through a multi-sited archival and ethnographic analysis of the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora.

More about the exhibition: 

Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art examines the cosmopolitan, playful, and subtly subversive characteristics of contemporary Asian and Asian American art drawn from the exceptional and diverse collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation. The exhibition highlights the work of fifteen artists of Asian heritage who draw on a rich array of motifs, techniques, and experiences to envision complex identities in a modern global context.

What do we mean by Global Asias? Is it a place? An idea? This exhibition moves us away from considering Asia as a geographical location and instead invites us to think broadly about how “Asia” has long served as an imaginative construct. By focusing on the conceptual dimensions and visual expressions of Asia in plural terms, Global Asias encourages us to see art as a powerful platform that reflects, critiques, and reshapes cultural identities.