Ghost In the Ghost

Ghost In the Ghost
Curated by Danielle Wu
Tiger Strike Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY

Ghost in the Ghost, a group exhibition curated by Danielle Wu that brings together artists who engage with the strange and synthetic life of Asiatic “yellow” flesh: Charlotte Greene, Tenaya Izu, Candice Lin, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, Juana Valdes, and Elliott Jun Wright.        

Featured artists confront the fraught history of how Asiatic femininity in the Western imagination has been repeatedly evoked through the perfected, manufactured, and assembled material, from anime (Charlotte Greene, Tenaya Izu) and porcelain (Candice Lin, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, Juana Valdes) to K-beauty products (Elliott Jun Wright). Anne Anlin Cheng describes this violent and deeply psychological process as “Ornamentalism,” or “the forging of the sense of personness through artificial and prosthetic extensions.” As Asiatic flesh continues to provide an ornamental, technological shell for the crisis of Euro-American personhood, Cheng asks, “What is inside the machine? The yellow woman: the ghost within the ghost.”

Juana Valdes invites a re-examination of broad, uncomplicated terms such as “female sexual objectification” or Otherness. Valdes’s photographs of carefully arranged craft objects and housewares sourced from the 18th century China Trade explore the different materialities, textures, and affects of surfaces that reference Blackness and yellowness.