Art as Healing:

Resilience in Multiple Truths

14 Asian American artists join in community, creating a 2-color Risograph printed publication

Mourning, Healing, Celebrating.

I reached out to my friends and DM’d fellow students over Zoom and asked if they were interested in collaborating on a publication. I applied to the Daynard Microgrants in Racial Justice and was granted $3,000 to execute this project.

Organizing

Once we secured funding it was time to create. I held weekly Zoom meetings with everyone involved to make sure we were on track for the grant deadline.

One of the main reasons I wanted to organize this publication was in response to the overwhelming rise of anti-Asian hate crimes. On our campus, we were targeted with racial slurs, and in the world it was painful to hear about more and more attacks and murders towards our community.

It was peak Covid and we weren’t allowed to meet in person, I couldn’t mourn with my community, and I wanted there to be a space for us to be together.

Designing

Given the difficult timing of creating this publication, I wanted to make contributing to this publication as stress-free as possible. I planned the zine to have a Table of Contents that doubles as a Meet the Artists introduction. Following these fun graphics of each contributor, each person could fill two spreads with whatever they wanted to create.

Too often in art school settings are students of color pigeon-holed to create things overtly about experiences of oppression. While these conversations of inequality are necessary, we are asked to make these works to educate White students and professors rather than for ourselves.

To push back on these common narratives of oppression vs power in a very surface-level way, our stories ranged from reminiscing on haircuts, to mantras, and brain dumping queer affirmations.

Together we brainstormed what we wanted to create and decided on which ink colors to use.

Editing

As everyone created, I instructed how to set up files for printing with the Risograph. Since it was many peoples’ first time preparing work for the printer I ultimately went back into each persons’ files to make sure they were all good to go. I created the layout for the publication, added page numbers, and wrote a letter to the readers.

I then sent the files to Little Mountain Press, an Asian-run Risograph printing press based in Hong Kong and NYC. 

What is a Risograph? A Risograph is a digital duplicator that specializes in printing vibrant ink colors with delicate gradients and grainy textures. Similar to screen printing, the Risograph prints one ink at a time.

Marketing and Distributing

Once the printing was complete and we received the 150 editions of our publication, I created an Instagram account and made email templates for our team to use to send to libraries.

We wanted this publication to exist in libraries and book collections, and send to friends and family. We jointly decided that we wanted to donate 20% of proceeds to Red Canary Song, a non-profit supporting Asian American sex workers. The listed price for one edition is $35 with possibility of donation.

Currently our publication is carried at:

  • Cynthia Sears Artists’ Book Collection, Bainbridge Island, WA

  • Center for Book Arts, New York, NY

  • Erika Adams (private collection), Montreal, Canada

  • SMFA Library, Boston, MA

  • John M. Flaxman Library at Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, IL

  • Fleet Library at RISD, Providence, RI

  • Bernard Zine Library, New York, NY

  • Neilson Library at Smith College, Northampton, MA

  • Booklet Library, New York, NY

  • Sojourner Truth Library at SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY

  • Independent Publishing Resource Center, Portland, OR

Dearest reader,


We are a collective of 14 Asian / Asian American artists who found one another seeking to collaborate as a community that would respect and find solace in each others’ voices.

There have been numerous conversations among Asian American students and faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) related to the invisibility of our realities, as well as endless microaggressions that plague us in both the classroom and general social environment within the institution. Many of these conversations ended with expressed desires on the parts of many to make art grounded in resistance that “talked back” to oppression and erasure.

In the fall of 2020, the announcement of the Daynard Microgrants for collaborative artwork in the service of racial justice provided the incentive to turn desires into concrete action. A joint grant proposal submitted by SMFA affiliated Asian American students and faculty was accepted, and the collective project that led to this publication was launched. 

COVID-19 constraints of social distancing and lockdowns did not stand in the way of communications that reached from New York to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam as members of the collective met for critical conversations on Asian/Asian American diasporic experiences. Common daily realities of being racialized and orientalized emerged as well as other shared sensibilities of being Asian/Asian American. We are mistaken for one another in our classes and have our art compared with one another's. We are unwillingly sexualized to the point of being murdered, as with the Atlanta spa shootings that took place this year. We are neither foreigner, nor enemy alien, nor fetish. We are born out of histories of imperialism, violence, war, unhomings and unwelcomings — and we are artists, collectives/communities, and movements.

Early in the discussion, we agreed that we did not want to make art that focused on a single theme. Instead, through image and text that reflected different topics, the collective work would fight the mainstream habit of silencing Asian/Asian Americans by treating us as a monolith.  

The artists behind Art As Healing: Resilience in Multiple Truths offer you a series of vignettes shaped by relationships and recollections, identity and imagination. We’re happy to have you holding our collective creation, and hope you enjoy flipping through these pages, and engaging with our works and words. 

Warmly,

Maxine Bell, Aidan Sky Chang, Amy Chu, Luna Doherty-Ryoke, Maria Fong, Hannah Kim, Quin Luong, John McKean, Ava Sakamoto, Priya Skelly, Kelly Tan, Martina Tan, Khan Keith Truong, and Angela Wei