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Stanford Arts:Kindred spirits
With its visionary Spirit House exhibition, the Cantor gives Asian American art its ghostly due.
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Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, the curator of Spirit House, now on exhibition at Cantor. Photo: Jess Alvarenga
You see no face, just an arm. The arm connects to a hand, the hand holds a cleaver, the cleaver carves a suckling pig. Elsewhere in the painting a lobster drapes a claw off a table’s edge and a fowl lies limply beside a teapot. This is a ghost story. Maybe not the kind you’ve heard before.
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Dominique Fung (b. 1987, Ottawa, Canada; lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y.), The Largest and Most Formal Meal of the Day (detail), 2021. Oil on linen. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. Gift of Crystal Lin and Nelson Chu in support of the Asian American Art Initiative, 2021.50.
Arguably the story begins in Oregon. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander was the new kid not only in her middle school but in the United States, having just moved from Bangkok. Around her neck hung a small Buddhist amulet called a phra, ubiquitous back in Thailand. Here it was an emblem of difference. The teasing that followed was a reminder: This isn’t quite home.
But was Bangkok home? A foot in two worlds meant a swirl of contradictions and unanswerable questions. How do you miss a country that you don’t fully remember? What does “homeland” mean from an Asian American perspective, when there’s no such place as Asian America? How do you honor your ancestors while also being critical of aspects of your culture?
Alexander didn’t always have answers. But she had James Turrell, Ruth Asawa, Thornton Dial. Contradictions and unanswerable questions: These were the province of art. She got her PhD in art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and joined the Cantor Arts Center in 2018.
The ghost story part is coming up.
As the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and co-director of the Asian American Art Initiative at the Cantor, Alexander has been to no shortage of shows featuring Pollock, Rothko, and other giants of modernism. Ditto Asian artists—Ai Weiwei, Yayoi Kusama—albeit with less frequency. But she couldn’t help noticing a curatorial void in her universe: Where were all the Asian American art exhibitions?
Alexander began working last year on one of the museum’s most ambitious undertakings to date: a significant showcase of 33 contemporary Asian American and Asian diasporic artists, accompanied by a major catalog. Some of the artists, like An-My Lê and Do Ho Suh, would be well established; for others this would be their first museum show.
All that was missing was a conceptual framework: an organizing principle that would somehow connect an impossibly diverse and intergenerational group of artists with entirely different approaches to art, and roots fanning out all around the world.
As a girl in Bangkok, Alexander encountered spirit houses regularly. Small devotional shrines designed to provide shelter for the supernatural, they’re common throughout Thailand.
One day while researching potential artists for the exhibition—she would ultimately tour more than 50 studios—Alexander came across the work of Korakrit Arunanondchai, a multimedia artist born in Bangkok and living in Brooklyn. Arunanondchai, Alexander discovered, was using these very shrines in his work—alongside the charred remains of structures his mother had made. Something clicked.
The distance between past and present, the boundary between life and death, our understanding of the physical world: All these themes course through traditional Thai spirit houses, Alexander felt—just as they course through much of the Asian American art she was exploring. She had her conceptual framework. It was a little ghostly.
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Korakrit Arunanondchai (b. 1986, Bangkok, Thailand; lives and works in Bangkok and Brooklyn, N.Y.), Shore of Security, 2022. Repurposed wooden doll house made by the artist's mother, wood, house paint, polyurethane, fabric sculpture, ceramics, snake skeleton, LED lights. Courtesy of the artist and C L E A R I N G, New York / Brussels / Los Angeles
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“I don’t want people to think this is a show about spirit houses.It’s more about how an object like a spirit house—or a work of art—can allow you access to different psychic dimensions across time and space.”Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander
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Photo: Jess Alvarenga
Enter the cleaver and the pig and the lobster. A wall-sized painting by Dominique Fung, a Canadian artist with ancestry in Hong Kong and Shanghai, The Largest and Most Formal Meal of the Day is one of the more striking pieces in Spirit House. With its hazy tones and sumptuous subject matter, it nods to medieval Chinese paintings and Dutch still lifes at once.
Many of the pieces in the exhibition do this, straddling two realms and in the process gesturing toward something otherworldly—death weaves in and out of the show. The spiritual dimension offers, perhaps, a conduit to ancestors or histories long gone.
“The show is inspired, in part, by the idea that art can be a way of speaking to ghosts, or reconciling family narratives that have been severed because of war or migration or otherwise,” Alexander says.
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Lien Truong (b. 1973, Saigon, Vietnam; lives and works in Chapel Hill, N.C.), The Crone (detail), 2022. Oil, silk, acrylic, chiffon, oil-bronze pigment on canvas. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. Aey Phanachet and Roger Evans Fund for Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, 2023.1
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Jiab Prachakul (b. 1979, Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, lives and works in Vannes, France), Connecting, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 79 x 59 inches. Collection of Joseph Altuzarra and Seth Weissman
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Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992, Long Beach, Calif.; lives and works in Los Angeles; Refuge (detail), 2023. Acrylic, pastel, and oil on canvas, 72 x 144 inches (three panels, each 72 x 48 inches). Grouf Family Collection
Inheritance, she adds, is another theme in Spirit House.
“Many of these artists are exploring how they ended up here,” she says. “Some people have families who came here for the so-called American dream. Others arrived here as a direct result of American imperial violence. And you just have to make a new homeland out of that, and come to terms with all of those complicated feelings.”
Whatever the questions being taken up in the show, bringing them under one roof is itself radical—at an institutional level and a personal one for Alexander.
“As a young person who loved going to museums, it would have been transformative for me to actually encounter work by Asian American artists in a meaningful way. I hardly ever saw it,” she says. “I’m really proud of the creative and intellectual autonomy we have here at Stanford. I love that my co-pilot on this show, Kathryn Cua, also has family roots in Southeast Asia, and was able to weave that perspective into this project. We’re able to do a kind of cutting-edge work that I’ve always wanted to do as a curator, and I’m not sure a show like this could have happened anywhere else.”
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Spirit House curators Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander and Kathryn Cua. Photos: Jess Alvarenga
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As rare as a significant Asian American art exhibition may be, Alexander notes that this isn’t simply a show about representation.
“Spirit House isn’t just about identity, or celebrating Asian American artistic production in a simple, flattening way. Not every artist wants to be seen strictly through an Asian American lens,” she says. “It’s really a show about the way artists challenge the boundary between life and death, and how, in different ways, we are all haunted by something.”
Over the course of her work, Alexander realized she was bringing her own experience to bear on the exhibition, as a curator. She decided to reflect this fact in the catalog, and wrote her contribution to it in the first person. It felt right, given her own intimate engagement with these ideas.
“It’s a show I’ve been imagining my entire life, without quite realizing it,” she says.
As she sees it, the contradictions and existential questions threaded through her experience as an Asian American aren’t entirely different from those she might find in a painting or a sculpture.
“You can never fully explain a work of art. And similarly, you can never fully explain certain things that happen in your life,” Alexander says.
If Spirit House is a kind of ghost story, it might just be that art is, too.
Spirit House will be on display at the Cantor Arts Center Sept. 4, 2024–Jan. 26, 2025.
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Go behind the scenes
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Photos: Jess Alvarenga
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