Stand Against Yellow Face

LIST OF DEMANDS AND CHARGES by ORGANIZERS of STAND AGAINST YELLOW-FACE @ THE MFA
RE: ‘Kimono Wednesdays’ and Spotlight Talk ‘Flirting with the Exotic,’ originally running every Wednesday, June 24 - July 29, 2015

NOTE: Please explore this site for a chronicle of events and a more nuanced response (now in progress).

FRAMING La Japonaise is a painting by Claude Monet of his wife Camille ‘in Japanese costume’ and a blonde wig to ‘emphasize her western identity.’ The MFA’s Spotlight Talk about La Japonaise was titled ‘Flirting with the Exotic’ and visitors were encouraged to ‘Channel your inner Camille Monet and pose wearing a silk kimono just like hers in front of the portrait painted by her husband.’ This language begs the question, ‘Who is the intended audience?’ There is also an implied understanding that these selfies would be curated for desirability - ‘Our favorite photos will be featured on Facebook and Instagram!’

WHY? We have been organizing in response to the MFA’s events, ‘Kimono Wednesdays’ and ‘Flirting with the Exotic,’ because they are an Orientalist presentation of culture by an internationally-recognized art institution and because the museum chose to host these events during free admission hours - a time made to encourage members of the public who are not typical visitors to take a chance on the museum, a public historically suspicious of institutionalized representations of culture because representation is often insufferably classist or anthropologically racist and continues to other and reminds such visitors they will always be others.

These activities serve to erase the oppression Asia and its diasporic population have experienced and continue to experience from the West and reaffirm that Asian culture is an exotic curiosity. Instead of broadening the understanding of how cultures influence each other, the MFA reduces Japanese culture to an exotified experience.

Moreover, the MFA, instead of investing in redressing past wrongs in colonial representation, chose an exhibit activity that would compel members of the public to participate in Orientalism, donning the uchikake as a form of yellow face and thus viewing La Japonaise through a racially uncritical lens. This encourages museum goers-of color to reinforce their own history with oppression and oppressive standards of European beauty and others to walk away thinking nothing of the Orientalism internalized in our attitudes and normalized by cultural institutions engaging in this type of miseducation. This is truly devastating within the greater context of the current media attention that the often-vilified #blacklivesmatter and indigenous rights movements are commanding. What happens in ivory towers of culture is intimately connected with the iconography that is institutionally and uncritically supported and propagated that informs the justification of violence against othered bodies on the streets.

LIST OF DEMANDS AND CHARGES The museum needs to engage a contemporary look at how the influence of Japanese art is part of Western imperialism as well as its relation to the broader strokes of racism that Asian-American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) endure.

1. An apology - The MFA’s July 7 public statement is not enough. We demand that the MFA issue a formal apology through multiple media outlets and on social media acknowledging the reasons why this event is unacceptable, stipulating the specific logic that the MFA engaged in for this to occur in the first place and why they are problematic - not just a blanket apology that characterizes this event as a ‘mistake/accident’ - and what steps the museum will take to prevent this type of event ever to happen again. In this letter we demand that the MFA pledge to actively engage AAPI in future planning and discussions about education of Asian cultures and community cultural organizations in general for any other programming on cultures that are typically othered, which means most programming.

2. Stop ‘Kimono Wednesdays’ - We demand that the MFA stop inviting people to try on the uchikake (this demand was met July 7). The updated event, which invites people to ‘touch and engage with [the kimonos],’ continues to be inappropriate without proper mediation and acknowledgement of the Orientalism of cultural appropriation of dress and the implications of the Orientalist gaze on often-exotified and thus dehumanized femme bodies - especially given the past three weeks of museum-facilitated Orientalism. Though the replica uchikake may be a work of art in itself (the Orientalist underpinnings of its commission remaining highly problematic), a partner AAPI organization might facilitate this type of hands-on knowledge-exchange with careful curation.

3. Change the Spotlight Talk from ‘Flirting with the Exotic’ to a more critical public discussion - We demand that the title ‘Flirting with the Exotic’ be addressed but not erased, and in its stead, the Spotlight Talk become a more critical discussion of La Japonaise (on July 6 the MFA website continued to call the Spotlight Talk ‘Claude Monet: Flirting with the Exotic,’ but on July 7 the title changed to ‘Claude Monet: La Japonaise’). In fact, we demand that the MFA organize a public discussion where the organizers of this event and other community members and artists of color are invited as panelists. The MFA stated in its July 1 memo that ‘The Museum is a place for dialogue and we appreciate your feedback.’ We demand that the MFA, then, honor their stated commitment to dialogue by holding this public discussion.

4. Change the placards to acknowledge and explain the history of the museum’s art - We demand that the history of art, particularly, the story of its first acquisition, be properly acknowledged and framed as a way to begin reframing the history of the art. This would immediately begin to alert curators to engage critically, because language is a power tool in cultural narrative.

OUR PARTICULAR RESPONSE to ‘Kimono Wednesdays’ and ‘Flirting with the Exotic’

THIS IS A HYPHENATED-AMERICAN PHENOMENON Our concern with the MFA’s event has to do with the specific issues Asian American/ Pacific Islanders (AAPI) face in U.S. culture. AAPI have historically been either under- and misrepresented in American media and culture. AAPI are rarely portrayed in films or television, and when we are, it’s often as a sidekick, Fu Manchu, exoticized prostitute, or a near-sighted buck-toothed Mr. Yunioshi (i.e. Breakfast at Tiffany’s). This, therefore, becomes an issue about racism in this country, when replicated on this soil without critical discourse by institutions like the MFA.

Having the uchikake made in and tour around Japan does not validate the cultural appropriation specific to American history. Japanese people in Japan do not face the same under- and misrepresentation that Japanese-Americans and other AAPI do here. Also, the MFA claiming that ‘we don’t think this is racist’ doesn’t make it so. So often there is a declaration of ‘appreciating’ Asian cultures, then why are Asian-American peoples and voices not treated with the same kind of consideration when we approach the institution with our concerns? In fact, coming from the MFA, this denial is a clear example of Institutional Racism.

Cultural Appropriation is simply a manifestation of Institutional Racism. Orientalism is a branch of it.

WHAT SPECIFICALLY IS THE MFA INFORMING VISITORS ABOUT JAPONISME? About Monet’s personal collection of Japanese artifacts? Why not that Japan was an isolationist nation until 1854 when the United States forced Japan to open its borders at gunpoint, and that’s how japonisme got its start. Nor that japonisme is part of the larger narrative of Orientalism within the context of places colonized by Europe and the U.S. as a means to generate iconography that reinforces stereotypes that justifies imperialist domination and enslavement. Orientalism exoticizes (read: others, demeans and obscures) many cultures including South Asian, East Asian and Middle Eastern traditions, and resulting aggressive attitudes (both micro and macro) towards Orientalized peoples persist to this day. Also, what is the ‘better understanding’ they hope visitors to come away with? If the MFA wants to make a point about dressing up being a respectful and authentic cultural experience, then why call the event ‘Kimono Wednesdays’ when in fact the garment is an uchikake?

ON CHOICE OF PAINTING By choosing a painting of a European woman to highlight and to invite the public to dress in her ‘kimono,’ the MFA is continuing in this tradition of exoticizing the ‘East’ through the lens of a misogynist White patriarchal West while contributing to the invisibilization and erasure of the AAPI experience. Monet’s painting by the MFA’s own wording was ‘a witty comment on the current Paris fad for all things Japanese.’ By ‘witty comment’ we are meant to understand that the painting is supposed to be a satirical jab at the absurdity of Europeans fascination with ‘all things Japanese.’ What is the value of inviting the public to then dress up and participate in the very thing Monet was critiquing? Why not choose a print from the Hokusai exhibit to highlight the experience of Japanese women? Or why not provide a discussion on the historical context and criticality about the 1870’s obsession? MORE ON OUR READING OF THE ORIENTALIST ICONOGRAPHY IN LA JAPONAISE.

ON OUTREACH As soon as we realized this was happening, we reached out with our concerns and left voicemail with the MFA’s PR department. It was not until the afternoon July 7 that we received a private tweet to update us about changes to the MFA’s programming related to Monet’s “La Japonaise" with a link to their statement. They have still not reached out personally by phone.

In its most recent public statement, compelled by press coverage, the MFA claims that the talks provide ‘an opportunity to engage in culturally sensitive discourse.’ We were present at the third installment to see if they have taken any steps to modify their curation and was met with resistance.

FAQs MADE OF THE PROTEST While we have garnered much support from peers and the media, there has also been an absolute denial from some members of the public with many negative comments on various digital media platforms. The often aggressively defensive tone and boldness are examples of vitriolic Orientalist attitude. By extension, these behaviors are precisely what events like ‘Kimono Wednesdays’ and ‘Flirting with the Exotic’ foster and make acceptable. The MFA is essentially helping to perpetuate these Orientalist perspectives and doing little to eradicate them.

XTINA * AMES X * AMBER YING * PAMPI * LORETO PAZ ANSALDO

In progress.

From the Statement:
ON CHOICE OF PAINTING By choosing a painting of a European woman to highlight and to invite the public to dress in her ‘kimono,’ the MFA is continuing in this tradition of exoticizing the ‘East’ through the lens of a misogynist White patriarchal West while contributing to the invisibilization and erasure of the AAPI experience. Monet’s painting by the MFA’s own wording was ‘a witty comment on the current Paris fad for all things Japanese.’ By ‘witty comment’ we are meant to understand that the painting is supposed to be a satirical jab at the absurdity of Europeans fascination with ‘all things Japanese.’ What is the value of inviting the public to then dress up and participate in the very thing Monet was critiquing? Why not choose a print from the Hokusai exhibit to highlight the experience of Japanese women? Or why not provide a discussion on the historical context and criticality about the 1870’s obsession?

MORE ON OUR READING OF THE ORIENTALIST ICONOGRAPHY IN LA JAPONAISE Even the curation did not escape orientalist language: At the first spotlight, the curator described the Japanese musician/warrior on the uchikake as a “creature.” ON THE WESTERN ARTIST AS A GENERATOR OF MISOGYNIST ORIENTALIST TRASH POP ICONOGRAHY Monet was known to be living in extreme poverty. Aware of the fascination with Japanese culture and intrigue over Japanese courtesan culture in particular, it might be hazarded that he dressed his wife in a bold kimono, performing a teasing smile, thereby capitalizing on the conflation of wife as courtesan, a public way to be risque in Parisian circles and a sure way to sell a piece. This speaks to a certain sexual voyeurism that is made quite evident by the choice of the uchikake as the painted object itself. Additionally, the piece centers the European female beauty emphasized by the blonde wig and also by the cameo of the othered Japanese woman, her expression described by the curator as seemingly stunned upon gazing on Camille. Yet it is the white male gaze that Camille is soliciting after all, as private as her husband’s perhaps, but we know the piece would be sold to a patron, presumably white and male. Monet later referred to La Japonaise as ‘a heap of trash.’ His own repulsion with being compelled to make refuse like this at all makes him complicit in continued Orientalism, both in generating Orientalist iconography and in his personal disgust for it. And this is the dynamic the MFA celebrates by holding the dress-up event - without any irony - without acknowledging that the painting’s only redemptive quality is that it is a testament to a time when Orientalist iconography was reinforced by master Western artists. As museum patrons, we are asking to let’s keep this mess in the past.

As we develop our language, we figured we would appeal to work already done and link them as responses to some of our FAQs. (No need to reinvent a wheel that keeps spinning.) More to be added.

From the Statement:
FAQs MADE OF THE PROTEST While we have garnered much support from peers and the media, there has also been an absolute denial from some members of the public with many negative comments on various digital media platforms. The often aggressively defensive tone and boldness are examples of vitriolic Orientalist attitude. By extension, these behaviors are precisely what events like ‘Kimono Wednesdays’ and ‘Flirting with the Exotic’ foster and make acceptable. The MFA is essentially helping to perpetuate these Orientalist questions and doing little to eradicate them.

-What about Japanese and Asian Americans wearing Western clothing? Isn’t that racist or hypocritical?
(TBD: what is reverse racism and why it’s not a real thing.) Here’s an article on reverse racism and why it’s not a real thing.

-The Japanese government promotes foreigners to wear and appreciate kimonos. How is this different?
(TBD: The Japanese government is promoting its own culture in a context where Japanese people don’t have a history of being discriminated against IN Japan for being Japanese.)

-I’m not racist, I just really love Japanese culture.
(TBD: It’s great to really love and want to appreciate a culture different from yours. To do that responsibly know the wider impact your actions have in how that culture is both perceived and received by those who have not put in the time to study it. Appreciate the culture by providing knowledge about it. A culture is more than a set of aesthetics. Learn about the background behind the ‘pretty style.’) Be sure also to assess and acknowledge your privileges and the history of power from which you might benefit.

-I’m Asian American, and I think it’s okay.
(TBD: about model minority myth and asian complicity with white supremacy are inter-linked. Also there is historic discrimination against AAPI as well as other POC when not assimilating into Western norms of culture) Read more!

-Wasn’t Japan a racist imperialist power too?
(TBD: Yes, Japan has a legacy of racism and imperialism. That does not impact the racism Japanese-Americans in the U.S. have experienced (e.g internment camps).) and continue to experience by association (recent e.g. is the racist reception of the Japenese women’s soccer team cup loss to the U.S.). The idea is that even the Japanese have not escaped Orientalism (imagine the rhetoric used to justify U.S. internment and atomic bombs during WWII.)

-Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. This is just a costume.
(TBD: the context of war, that Japanese people in Japan and Japanese-Americans are different people with differet experiences. The way institutional racism against all AAPI manifest in homogenization.)

-What’s the big deal?
(TBD: why orientalism matters -however perceived the injury- is how it manifests. Part of this is the role of white supremacy leveraging AAPI as a model minority and ‘the good’ immigrant populations to further oppress and demean Black folks in America. Part of this is that darker shades of Asian people who most certainly bear violence from the same kind of thinking and how Orientalist violence is related to aggression against dark-skinned and black bodies.

(In Progress)

From the Statement:
WHY We have been organizing in response to the MFA’s events, ‘Kimono Wednesdays’ and ‘Flirting with the Exotic,’ because they are an Orientalist presentation of culture by an internationally-recognized art institution and because the museum chose to host these events during free admission hours - a time made to encourage members of the public who are not typical visitors to take a chance on the museum, a public historically suspicious of institutionalized representations of culture because representation is often insufferably classist or anthropologically racist and continues to other and reminds such visitors they will always be others.

These activities serve to erase the oppression Asia and its diasporic population have experienced and continue to experience from the West and reaffirm that Asian culture is an exotic curiosity. Instead of broadening the understanding of how cultures influence each other, the MFA reduces Japanese culture to an exotified experience.

Moreover, the MFA, instead of investing in redressing past wrongs in colonial representation, chose an exhibit activity that would compel members of the public to participate in Orientalism, donning the uchikake as a form of yellow face and thus viewing La Japonaise through a racially uncritical lens. This encourages museum goers-of color to reinforce their own history with oppression and oppressive standards of European beauty and others to walk away thinking nothing of the Orientalism internalized in our attitudes and normalized by cultural institutions engaging in this type of miseducation. This is truly devastating within the greater context of the current media attention that the often-vilified #blacklivesmatter and indigenous rights movements are commanding. What happens in ivory towers of culture is intimately connected with the iconography that is institutionally and uncritically supported and propagated that informs the justification of violence against othered bodies on the streets.

MORE WHY The way the MFA chose to go about advertising this event via social media (facebook particularly - how it first came to our attention) had familiar Orientalist markings that upon actually experiencing the on-site curation demonstrated an all-too familiar uncritical regurgitation of Orientalist framing that often occurs when institutions do not use their considerable resources to flesh out the acceptability of various PR campaigns, particularly ones referencing historically othered cultures, given the U.S.’ own problematic complicity in othering whole peoples abroad and great populations of their own citizenry here. What is quite telling is that this MFA campaign was met with outcry from the public, checking the Orientalist framing of the event almost immediately upon their launch on social media and yet the institution still chose to go forward with the event. Their dismissal of public opinion shows the absolutely unapologetic stance many cultural institutions first take when alerted to wrongdoing. Further, though we personally solicited a dialogue on the morning of the launch event, there has been no attempt by the MFA to address us as members of the public, either by phone, Twitter, or via our subsequent Facebook event page (Note: On the afternoon of July 7, after growing media attention, the MFA sent a private message on Twitter to update us about changes to the MFA’s programming related to Monet’s “La Japonaise" with a link to their statement indicating they would remove the dress-up component of the uchikake). As members of the invited public, many of us labeled Asian-American, many of us with an immigrant experience, some of us organizers in the community, many of us with a formal intersectional understanding of critical race, gender and art theory, all of us femme and/or gender-queer, we came together for the second showing upon meeting at the first, because we found this event unacceptable as it propagates in public the Orientalist gaze, inherently white supremacist and misogynist by construction. We felt the only way to bring our concerns to the public was to walk in as the public and hold up signs messaging to the contrary. We were there as citizens holding space as people and for people who are marginalized by white supremacy and challenging those who benefit from white supremacy to consider a perspective the museum was keen to gloss over. The first Wednesday, we spoke to everyone who came up to engage us. At the second event, in addition to engaging dialogue with the public, we approached docents and people trying on the kimono in the midst of a modeling stint and artists drawing the models.

We understand that museum exhibits such as this one try to “bring to life” and, if possible, attempt to provide a hands-on component to the experience of history. We are seeking that the MFA acknowledge that a greater part of the public the museum purports to serve have a painful connection to this same history and that it is the museum’s duty to responsibly engage critical museum studies to redress their process so this kind of miseducation never happens again.