"Spoiled attends to the significance of forms and feelings of hostility for contemporary Asian American artists challenging the expectation that their work should provide therapeutic sites of identification, healing, and care. Across works by Catalina Ouyang, Wu Tsang, TJ Shin, Jes Fan, and Ocean Vuong, formlessness and deformation express a refusal to become disciplined, self-possessed Asian subjects. For Summer Kim Lee, the deidealization of acting and being "spoiled" opens space for another kind of feeling and relating that relinquishes fantasies of power and control. Observing behaviors and affects that are often banished from the social in Asian American aesthetic practice-embarrassment, asociality, appropriation, ravenous eating-Kim Lee rethinks what it means to "feel Asian" and what kind of a politics that might entail. Spoiled shows the ways that hostility and the damage it can inflict are integral to processes of repair that Asian Americans seek in their aesthetic encounters, political commitments, and social and psychic lives"-- Provided by publisher.
Summer Kim Lee examines how contemporary Asian American artists challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma.
In Spoiled, Summer Kim Lee examines how contemporary Asian American artists challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma. Kim Lee turns to the spoiledthe racialized, gendered body and all that it consumes, wrecks, and inflicts in its desire and excessin visual culture, performance, music, and literature. Reading works by Cato Ouyang, Patty Chang, Wu Tsang, TJ Shin, Jes Fan, and others, Kim Lee highlights moments of hostility and deformation that spoil idealizations of Asian Americanness and incite modes of feeling and relating that relinquish fantasies of wholeness, power, and control. She observes the latent aggressive behaviors and negative affects in Asian American aesthetic practice: the embarrassment of asociality, the imposition of speaking as someone else, and the indulgence of ravenous appetites. In so doing, Kim Lee questions the political desires for repair expressed in feeling Asian and stays with the damage that spoilage creates as integral to the kinds of repair that Asian Americans seek.
