Yun Gee's overall experience in the Western world was filled with unacceptance as a Chinese Modernist painter. He died living with unfulfilled dream. On the other hand, his works have become a reflection of the Chinese American point of view in times without unity and boundaries set to constrain and control the lives of fellow humans. The painting, 'New Year's Day in San Francisco's China Town' opens the viewer to a grand monumental depiction of China Town in vivid blocks of colors, but the lack of social activity and emptiness of the place lead us to think just that of it. The strokes created rays of light in a hopeful direction. The lack of social activity might relate to an illusion of a place with horizontally hopeful structure. It is an …show more content…
Death (lynched figure above) presents the contorted figure of an African America man hanging from a rope supported by a rectangular armature. Its brutality of the form shocked critics at the time (1930s), particularly Henry McBride, who called it “a little Japanese mistake.” The offsetting critics of Noguchi’s sculpture were simply acts of justification in order to divert attention from the ethnic minorities who had important social messages to convey in the 1930’s. The fascination with modern abstraction after WWII turned the public eyes away from art that appeared to have social messages or overt ethnic connections. Art produced by Asian Americans and other minorities displayed such markers at the time and were overshadowed by the interest in abstraction. Noguchi confronted spectators directly with the horrific figure that emphasized the sadistic cruelty of the act. The sculpture of the lynched figure open our eyes to the racial issues going on, but an expression of the artist himself to show the agony many have to go through as a minority figure in the United …show more content…
A year or so prior this exhibit, the United States dropped atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The show however was a sprouting growth of Contemporary Art in the United States. It also showcased and embraced the diversity of the recent American Art. Kourus, was made in 1945 during the Japanese internment. The curator, Dorothy Miller, offered a form of universal communication found through art, which contains the Orient, no less than Europe and the Americas. Kourus, over nine feet tall, was huge in scale and heavy with context as it is a direct reference to the heroic male figure from Ancient Greece. Kouros was made from marble directly referencing the Greek form and its material. The form Noguchi constructed is abstract in style with asymmetrical balance that highlighted the role of negative space. Most importantly it was a sculpture with mobility, that can be assembled and disassembled into separate pieces without nails or glue in just a few minutes. The mobility of this sculpture mimics the life of Noguchi as he relocated from Mexico City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and an Arizona internment camp for Japanese Americans during 1930s to 1940s. More significantly, the mobile monument communicated complex ideas that make us question the viability of our idea of ‘man’ that lineated from the ancient tradition and to subject challenges of how we view humanity