Art is Me: The Personal is Political

Striking reds, sharp blues and fading yellows — these blurring colors make up most of the art you undoubtedly see when you’re in a museum. In these settings, you can find yourself glancing and passing colorful images of changing city life, portraits detailed with melancholic expressions and history frozen in whimsical poses.

But there’s one piece that stands different from the others, one that directs your attention away from the rest: a mirror. Clear and reflective, the image of you stares back. And the people behind you that walk by, or stand off in the distance studying the artwork, whisper unanswered questions: “Who is this even made for?” “Who thought of making it?” “Is it some sort of political statement?”

But the question, essentially, boils down to this: who is art?

Art, whether that be fiction, poetry or paintings, has always been labeled as political — regardless of that be for the content itself or for the artist behind the work.

Throughout the course of history, art has been an avenue for personal expression and ideas. The canvas or page offers opportunities to create a narrative that fits our imagined lives. But these imagined lives are based on our own lived experiences. The details of colors and phrasings point back to how the artists, us, see the world and feel through life. Even the stories we tell or the scenes we paint reflect upon our experiences, as we can’t create narratives from a void. The art we create has to start somewhere, oftentimes that somewhere being within us.

Our experiences and emotions shape how we view the world and that appears in our art: with every brushstroke or line break we make, there is something within that mirrors our lives.

For Asian Americans, art was greatly important in solidifying our space in cultural and political spheres in America. Immigrants at Angel Island’s Immigration Station, which opened in 1910 and closed in the 1940s, used the walls of the detention barracks as a gallery filled with their poems and inscriptions telling of their personal experiences and thoughts. These writings, composed mostly by Chinese immigrants, detailed feelings of anger, sadness and homesickness. Poetry for these immigrants was a way to express their feelings and thoughts in the face of injustice.

In sharing personal experiences through art, Asian Americans planted their narratives and lives in America. But, in doing so, their creative expressions were labeled as political.

While some Asian American art is created with the intention of being political, such as student activists in the late 1960s using poetry and essays as a way to speak on civil rights, not all art is intended to be. Asian American artists and writers have turned to art to express themselves, search for their identities and immortalize their families and personal traditions. Poet Li-Young Lee often used poetry in a confessional manner where precious, private morning memories with his parents are shared openly in "Early in the Morning," or his deeply personal experiences with the language are exposed to the world in the poem "Persimmons." Yet, in speaking to his personal memories in his writing, Lee's poetry is often read through a political lens. Even the most personal art that highlights the artist’s personal experiences and identities is considered political.

Regardless of the artwork’s intention, the label is never far, especially when the artist is Asian American or an ethnic minority in the West. This is because race is a hot-button, political topic, especially in a country as racialized as America. The experiences that shape our livelihood as Asian Americans — as immigrants, students, activists and artists — are, without a doubt, political. Just as the food we eat, the languages we speak and the features inherent within our blood stand distant from the “normal” of a white American society, what makes us Asian American makes us political. Thus, our art, whether it is personal or political by its nature, is politicized by the very act of being seen.

Asian American art, and by extension our identity, is made of refusals, which makes it political. In refusing to be ignored and calling to be seen, the Western world labels us and our artwork as a political statement, that our personal experiences when shared are political. We are refusing to be the image of America — of white picket fences, of apple pies.

Rather, our art reimagines America where we position ourselves at the center, and not in the margins in which we are expected to be.

This reconstruction and repositioning of ourselves will always be political in a country that sidelines minorities who exist outside the image of the majority. In refusing to conform, we and the art we create are deemed political.

However, while the Western world sees our stories and our very identities as political, this shouldn’t stop or dictate the art we create. The art we create as Asian Americans, as ethnic minorities in a highly racialized society, breaks away from the conventions of the idealized Western image. No matter what we do, artistically, the work we put forth will never truly “fit” the standards of America or the expectation of conformity and assimilation. The very concept of assimilation is a façade we can’t achieve — instead, we have to create our own narratives to live, using art as a means to imagine a life we want. We shouldn’t let the majority decide the art we make; rather, our artwork should be reflections of ourselves and our communities, the lives we wish to lead.

To write, paint and create is to position and define your place in society, to speak for yourself and share your voice with existing or created communities. Art, undoubtedly, is a radical tool that can bring communities together and can change the way you view yourself.

Our art is a community, an individual, a memory and a future. And our art is personal, and our personal is political.

But again, we must ask: who is art?