Frieze Los Angeles opens with a focus on Asian artists

Last year, Meeson Pae, a Korean-American multidisciplinary artist walked through the Frieze art fair in Los Angeles and thought, “One day I hope to be here.”

This year she will be present in the stand gallery owner Anat Ebgi at the fair, at Santa Monica Airport, which opens to VIPs on Thursday and the public on Friday.

Pae is just one of dozens of Asian artists, gallerists, curators and collectors in Los Angeles who have gained recognition and attention from the city’s galleries, museums and marketplace in recent years. The art world’s recent emphasis on equality and inclusivity goes beyond a focus on Black and Latino contributions include Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who have a long history in the city but, until recently, have tended to be left out of any discussion of the art market, and may have faced discrimination – even racist incidents – during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Los Angeles, Asian Americans represent the third largest racial group, behind Latinos and whites. And California’s Asian American and Pacific Islanders grew by 25 percent faster than any other ethnic group in the state over the past decade.

This heightened sensitivity to inclusion has made its way into the Los Angeles art world. Of the 98 galleries in Frieze Los Angeles this year, seven are from Asia – compared to just two in 2022. Three are participating for the first time.

And several American galleries are highlighting Asian artists, including Lehmann Maupin, who will have an exhibition there Kim Yun Shin, the eighty-year-old Korean sculptor who has just joined the gallery. Rachel Uffner will explore the mystical landscapes of Erica Mao, a Taiwanese American artist; and the Tina Kim gallery features Jennifer Tee, a Chinese-Indonesian Dutch artist.

A first retrospective exhibition of Pacita Abada Filipino-American artist, was recently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, while rising artist Mire Lee, from Korea and Amsterdam, was selected for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in October.

And Pace will show work by the Chinese artist in its stand here Li song song, whose thickly layered pigments will have their solo exhibition in the gallery’s space in Los Angeles in March.

“If you go into a museum in a big city in the US, it’s full of Asians looking at art,” says Isa Lorenzo. the founder of Zilverlens, a Manila and New York-based gallery that promotes Philippine art and will be at Frieze LA for the first time. “Why couldn’t they go into a gallery or museum and see themselves?”

This is also the case with the Felix art faira satellite meeting at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, opening Wednesday, Fridman Gallery of Manhattan shows works on paper by Azuki Furuyaa Japanese artist who recently received an MFA from Brooklyn College

Some galleries in Los Angeles are now run by Asians, including Make Room, which is owned and directed by Emilia Yin. In 2022, she was named one of Forbes’ ‘30 Under 30”, as a new force in the contemporary art world.

Yin started the gallery six years ago. “I didn’t see the kind of show I felt connected to,” she said. “It has to start somewhere.”

Over the past twenty years, art from Asia has also become an integral part of the program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), one of several institutions that, with the support of patrons, is increasingly organizing exhibitions of work from Japan, China and Korea. draw attention.

The permanent Asian art collection “has grown exponentially,” said Stephen Little, the museum’s curator of Chinese art and head of the Chinese, Korean, and South and Southeast Asian departments. “On the Pacific Rim and surrounded in LA by a lot of different Asian communities, we look to Asia,” Little added.

LACMA open on Sunday “Korean treasures”, 35 works of art – including traditional paintings, calligraphic folding screens and ceramics – recently donated by a former curator, Chester Chang of Los Angeles, and his son, Cameron C. Chang. It was the largest gift of Korean art in the museum’s history.

LACMA is approaching the end of a decade cooperation with Hyundaithe South Korean car company, to underwrite art and technology as well as Korean art fairs, the longest and largest commitment by a corporate sponsor in the museum’s history.

The Hammer Museum brings a show to the city examining the daring artists who emerged after the Korean War, “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s,” a collaboration with New York’s Guggenheim and the National Museum of Modern and contemporary art in Korea.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles opened this month “Scratching for the moon,” billed as “the first focused survey of Asian American artists at a major contemporary art museum in Los Angeles.”

“Given the Asian population in Southern California, it’s pretty remarkable that there’s never been a show like this,” said Anne Ellegood, executive director of the ICA. “It feels like a snapshot and it’s really important – there just hasn’t been enough visibility for Asian and Asian American artists in the mainstream art world.”

Several other galleries have highlighted the work of Asian Americans. Perrotin opens his Los Angeles gallery during Frieze Week with a solo exhibition dedicated to Japanese artist Izumi Kato. Blum Gallery is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary with “Thirty years: written with a dash of blood”, an overview of Japanese art from the 1960s to the present.

Jeffrey Deitch presented in 2022 “Wonder women”, featuring the work of “Asian American and diasporic women and non-binary artists” – such as Zoé Blue M. And Tidawhitney Lek – in a show curated by Kathy Huang. “What is the art world’s most important innovation in the past decade?” Deitch asked. “It’s been this opening up and embracing of the art community, looking at great artists who have been neglected.”

Several major East Asian collectors have propelled the movement in recent years as they become more widely known in Los Angeles. Dominic Ng, 65, the Hong Kong-born chairman and chief executive of East West Bank, headquartered in Pasadena, just pledged a $10 million gift for LACMA’s expansion and future exhibitions.

Ng and his wife Ellen have helped LACMA build its collection of Chinese contemporary art, including the purchase of a 3.5-meter Zeng Fanzhi paintingas of 2018, for its permanent possession.

The piece by Zeng, “who is considered by many to be China’s greatest living artist,” Ng said in a statement at the time, “contributes to the ongoing cultural exchange between the East and the West.” LACMA recently announced that an exhibition of new work by Zeng, “Near and Far/Now and Then,” will open at the Venice Biennale this spring. installation by the architect Tadao Ando.

In 2007, East West Bank purchased a $2 million collection of Chinese contemporary art for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Today there is an East West Bank Gallery at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures due to a $5 million gift, and a Art terrace on the East-West Bank at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco (named after Ng made a $5 million gift).

“My approach is that whenever there is an opportunity to support an art exhibition that highlights East Asian art, we will go a step further,” Ng said in a recent interview.

(Other collectors include Miky Leethe Samsung heiress, vice chairman of the South Korean media conglomerate CJ Entertainment and executive producer of the film ‘Parasite’, who serves on the Hammer board and as vice chairman of the Academy Museum.)

But many Asian artists say they simply want to be known and recognized for their work, not their ethnicity. Greg Ito, a fourth-generation Japanese-American artist whose grandparents met in an American internment camp, was born in Los Angeles. He said his work is “not about the Japanese American experience,” but instead explores universal themes such as love and loss.

“Do I want my art to be about me being Asian? No,” added Ito, who is one solo show opening at Ebgi’s gallery in New York in March. “It’s more about the current state of the human condition.”