Taking, Breaking, and Re-Making

tions of the Vietnam War in her artistic practice and family history in her chapter, “American War in Viê.t Nam: We Are Besides Ourselves.” Beginning with her fascination with magazine covers from the 1960s and 1970s, Tru’o’ng illustrates how repeatedly seeing photographs of Vietnamese people during the war on in these magazines “sedimented a notion of Vietnamese people” within binary constructs of enemy/victim, to be killed/to be saved (152). The haunting echoes of antiAsian racism and subjugation under white supremacy and Western militarism pervade Tru’o’ng’s artistic practice. In her early work, she destabilizes the Western gaze, combining archival photographs of these early magazines with personal photos from her family. By taking influence from decolonial and postcolonial practices, Tru’o’ng’s later work grapples with her positionality in relation to those in her photos or in the texts she clips as part of her artwork. Influenced by Trinh T. Minh-ha, she writes of her notion of “speaking nearby” to avoid co-optation and power imbalance by art workers and scholars (157). Ultimately, Tru’o’ng’s reflexivity in her own art practice aims to rectify the historical erasure of Asians living in and influenced by America. The concluding section, “Connecting Asia and the Americas in the Global South,” centers the experiences of cultural workers in the Global South. Zhanara Nauruzbayeva, a native of Kazakhstan, chronicles the creation of a participatory art project and popup café in the region in her chapter, “The Artopologists: Rethinking Food Justice in Central Asia.” Working alongside two colleagues from the United States, Nauruzbayeva spent six weeks in Kazakhstan to create “an interactive cooking and eating space as a vehicle for exploring and reflecting on Central Asian foodways” (222). Her chapter outlines the plans and setbacks that her team went through in the process of creating the Borrowed Kazan pop-up café, echoing the reflexive nature of James Jack’s essay on cooperative artmaking in Japan. For artists interested in creating similar kinds of interactive, community-based art, Nauruzbayeva lays out key points to consider. Though life in many ways has attempted to move beyond the immeasurable loss and upheaval caused by COVID-19, its existence alongside anti-Asian sociopolitical responses by global leaders across the West urged Ho and Nam, and Lim and Pyun, to think of “new hope and directions in thinking about how to respond to ethical dilemmas and inequalities, in terms of art-making and reaching new audiences” (Lim and Pyun, 235). Though both Best! and American Art in Asia have similar aims, the collections utilize different approaches and target different audiences. Despite this, taking both into account urges readers to think broadly about the limits we place on artists and what can be done to recalibrate our own understanding of geopolitical and racial divisions that impact artistic cultural production. For those outside of Asian America, the larger questions present throughout both collections impact us all: What does it mean to have one’s identity influence one’s work, and how do we reconcile our work with the labels placed on us? Ultimately, Best! and American Art in Asia offer insights into why binaries like Global North/South or Asia/America are not only harmful to artists and curators, but also to the dissemination and proliferation of art en masse.