Why I was never a fan of Barbara Kruger's work, but I will give her props, as I build my own museum

Choice = Freedom, Digital collage, Psuedo Pompous co.2022

My love of visual art began with Sargent. At 16 with dreams of becoming a fashion designer, during visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I would spend my time swooning over the painting of the textiles and the glamour of silk fabric. My mother a lover of the impressionists, hung reproductions of Renoirs and Monets in our house. Two prints of Degas' ballet dancers also graced my childhood bedroom. The dancer’s haunted me. I had recurring nightmares of a pair of ballet slippers in my closet that transformed into dirty sneakers. They exuded black smoke and stank of garbage. I would wake sobbing filled with horror, fear, and self-loathing. As a transracial, intercountry adoptee in a family with six kids there was neither money nor thoughts about ballet classes. The art reproduction had to suffice. Dreams were hung on the wall. 

At 20, after begging my mother for 200 dollars to take advantage of a flight layover, I was able to stop in Paris on my way back from studying abroad in Israel. At the Louvre I fell in love with the big Gs, Gericault, and Gentileschi.  The figures, the painted flesh, and the drama put me in a trance. On the flip side, the Musee Rodin was my garden of Eden. Love at the time was a tragedy set in stone while unraveling in my personal life. 

By the time I realized I could choose to pursue life as an Artist I was in love with Caravaggio. The classical Western palette would shape my studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. PAFA being the oldest classical Art school in the United States is steeped in tradition, history, and formalism. 

Naturally, as a student, I fled into expressionism and printmaking, rebelling against the nude female and constraints of what I had not articulated then as the white male gaze. 
Still, the text-based feminist shouts of Barbara Kruger held no meaning to me. "Why?" I would ask. "Art should be an aesthetic experience, luxurious color, and a passionate embrace with living," I always thought, I was taught.

Kruger utilized the language of commerce, a space women were already relegated to. She invited women into a critical conversation, thus creating a gallery in the Fine art wing for Whyte western women artists' and token explorations by African American women artists. 

With so little female representation in the canon and museum collections of Fine Art, words bypassed the line for the beauty contest and rattled the frame of our visibility and consumption. 

Art is a visual language. Any language may be defined by a social contract of communication, whereby the parties agree to use a certain mode of expression to exchange information, create understanding, and build community. Art is also simply an expression and reflection of our culture. 

As an Asian American wymyn artist, I still stand on the periphery as one living within this proto-feminist Whyte culture, but not reflected equally in the culture. But I have learned that these modern dioramas of Whyte female empowerment need no longer be the gateways for Asian American women's empowerment. There are so many powerful Asian American women creators code-switching in American spaces. In this latest project, Wymyn Byte, I will introduce you to the ones who help me create and understand a new language of thriving.