I have a confession to make: I have never gravitated toward the paintings of Jim Dine. Or, I should say, those where his subject matter was dominated by bathrobes, tools and Pinocchio, among other talismans of human culture.

It’s not that I didn’t like them. But despite Dine’s use of them as touchstones for autobiographical reflection (the bathrobe as a stand-in for himself, the tools a reference to his grandfather’s hardware store, Pinocchio as metaphor for the artist’s journey), they seemed to proliferate in a way that began to feel almost commercially Pop. They had more palpable depth, not settling for the slick superficiality of much Pop Art, but they just didn’t speak to me.

So, I was not intending to review “Jim Dine: Last Year’s Forgotten Harvest” at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art when I visited recently with a friend. I was headed, instead, for “Without Apology: Asian American Selves, Memories, Futures” (both through June 2). But the Dine show stopped both of us dead in our tracks, and pretty soon, we found ourselves in an almost trance-like state, hypnotized by the intensity and the woozy sense of time passing that emanated from the drawings.

Dine drew his subjects over and over again and worked on individual portraits over spans of several years. Even if we don’t know this, their sense of being in a condition of perpetual shift comes through. In her catalog essay, Anne Collins Goodyear describes this as a two-part phenomenon.

First, she writes that “drawing is less an image than an organic activity in itself” for Dine. “The act of drawing, carried out painstakingly over time and bearing within it the evidence of its own making, provides a poignant metaphorical analogy to the experience of life itself.”

Second is Dine’s intimate relationships with his sitters, most of whom he knew very well. This familiarity impels his quality of seeing – obsessively trying to excavate the various inner dimensions of his sitters as he experiences them. This is a Sisyphean task that can never be fully resolved because, as Collins Goodyear writes, his drawing always reflects “the ever-evolving nature of human relationships themselves and underscores his departure from a tradition of stasis in portraiture to a dynamic engagement between sitter, artist, medium, and memory.”

So we have images such as “Matt at Age 15½ #2” from 1977, in which his son is seen in a double profile, one the original rendition and the other a later addition, and “The American Painter Susan Rothenberg” of 1978-79, where her arm appears twice in a way that resembles time-lapse photography. These are, emphatically, lives that are literally unfolding and developing.

Sometimes, one image is not enough, as in a quartet of drawings of his wife, Diana Michener, a photographer, which Dine framed together because no one image satisfied his close knowledge of her faceted personality. Michener is a frequent subject.

“The pleasure of drawing my wife, Diana, is not just the pleasure of drawing, period,” Goodyear quotes Dine saying. “It is the opportunity to continue the 20-year conversation about everything that we began so long ago.”

Dine’s treatment of paper also contributes to the emotive nature of his portraits, which he executes variously in charcoal, charcoal mixed with oil (creating a blurred texture that enhances the sense of time passing), pencil, pastel, acrylic, etching, varnish and other media. Paper is at times collaged, accentuating both various layers of personality and his experience of a person through time. The artist sometimes also scrapes his paper, creating a rough texture that imparts a sense of aging to his subjects.

And then there are the eyes. Dine works and reworks them until, at times, he actually penetrates the paper. We get the feeling that his compulsive scrutiny of his sitter’s eyes and the concentration of his own stare have burned a hole into their eye sockets, leaving them with a ghostly affect.

WHAT IS ASIAN AMERICAN ART?

“’Without Apology,’” reads the catalog, “highlights how Asian American artists are resisting the tendencies toward racial stereotyping, caricature and marginality through self-portraiture and other forms of self-representation.” It also grapples with the “mutable legacies, sharing narratives of oppression, discrimination, and rupture alongside those of creativity, innovation, and resilience,” and “showcases the powerful, playful, and poignant ways Asian Americans seek to move toward new, more just futures and revivals.”

That’s a big task, but the team that pulled the exhibition together has done a wonderful job of presenting what Goodyear, in her foreword, calls “the sensation of liminality born of navigating a respect for inherited traditions while simultaneously immersed in a new environment devoid of, or even hostile to, these expressions of cultural identity.”

We learn that the term “Asian American” didn’t even emerge until 1968 and became common currency only in the 1970s. But within that deceptively homogeneous term is a universe of individual reference points and experiences unique to specific strains of Asian Americans, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Pakistani and so on.

One of the most powerful works on display, this one with obvious contemporary resonance, is Afghan American artist Mariam Ghani’s video “The Fire This Time,” which looks at three pandemics that became racialized in the same way as COVID-19 when then-President Trump began referring to it as “the China virus,” sparking widespread anti-Asian violence across America.

In 19th century Venezuela, politicians and public health officials blamed the cholera epidemic on the “Indigenous ethnic group” in order to deflect responsibility for their own medical service shortcomings and for not alerting the public about the seriousness of the disease (again, with echoes of the COVID pandemic).

Similarly, the appearance of bubonic plague in China at the turn of the 20th century led first to the inspection of ships in Chinese and Japanese ports bound for Hawaii, then to quarantines of Chinatown in Honolulu and, eventually, a controlled burn of businesses where bubonic plague was discovered to linger. However, fanned by wind, the fire ended up incinerating 60 acres of Chinatown and surrounding communities, leaving thousands of people homeless. Yet the disease continued to spread, despite these severe measures, by flea-infested rats that fled the fire and expanded the scope of the disease exponentially.

The third pandemic that Ghani weaves into this video thread is “Spanish” influenza of 1918-19, when African Americans were unfairly associated with the virus. Even though there was far less occurrence of it in that population than among whites, this and other factors – i.e. Black servicemen returning from the war who whites feared would take their jobs – led to countrywide race riots known as the Red Summer in 1919. You’ll likely emerge from Ghani’s screening outraged and horrified.

The forced incarceration of 125,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps in 1942 is the subject for some artists. Chiura Obata created over 100 drawings depicting the arrival of Japanese to these de facto prisons while doing his own time at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, and Topaz Relocation Center in Delta, Utah. Roger Shimomura, who was also interned as a child, does not depict the camp itself. Rather, his “American vs. Disney Stereotypes” crowds the frame with Disney characters portrayed in racially insensitive ways (a red-skinned Native boy, a sombrero-wearing rooster known as Panchito, and so on). Shimomura stands in the center pushing them all away.

Taiwanese American Stephanie H. Shih contributes porcelain sculptures of common Chinese cooking ingredients – “Bok Choy,” “Gold Plum Chinkiang Vinegar,” “Yang Jiang Preserved Beans” and “Red Snapper” – as a way of not only reclaiming a cultural heritage she “pushed to the back burner” in order to fit in at school in New Jersey, but also, in their pristineness, to counter racist notions of Chinese kitchens and cooking as unsanitary.

In “Asian American Identity,” Korean American digital illustrator Jason Raish depicts a little boy with chopsticks and his Dosirak (a traditional Korean lunchbox) sitting alone in the school cafeteria, shunned by his fellow students. Pakistani American Shahzia Sikander reimagines traditional Indo-Persian miniatures as statements of the othering she experienced through the East/West binary common in the U.S.

The points of view throughout “Without Apology” run the gamut from bitingly humorous to vigorously confrontational. In so doing, they reveal the rich multiplicity underlying the all-in-one term Asian American. Certainly this term is better than “Oriental,” the colonialist construct that Asian American was conjured to supplant. But the exhibition emphasizes the need to recognize all these cultures individually as contributors to the infinitely variegated character of humanity in general. This is an argument that incontestably deserves our respect and attention.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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