Archivist of the “Yellow Peril”: Yoshio Kishi Collecting for a New America
Americas Asian Angst Revealed in Exhibit of Kishi/Sun Collection at MoCA in New York through Dec. 31, 2005
Yoshio Kishi, a former film editor and life long New Yorker, began collecting Asian Americana over thirty years ago in a effort to better understand his Asian American heritage and history. Assisted by actress Irene Yah Ling Sun, the Kishi/Sun collection contains over 10,000 items and is noted for its depth and variety in documenting the Asian American experience.
Archivist of the Yellow Peril: Yoshio Kishi Collecting for a New America , the new exhibition at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MoCA) in New York Chinatown through Dec. 31, 2005, offers a rare glimpse into the extensive Kishi/Sun collection. The exhibition is on loan from the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program & Institute of New York University.
Archivist of the Yellow Peril is curated by John Kuo Wei Tchen, Director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at New York University. Tchen, who is also co-founder of MoCA, says, Yoshio Kishi is Asian Americas Arturo Schomburg, collector of the Black diaspora during the Harlem renaissance. Kishis visionary collection meticulously documents U.S. orientalism and yellow peril. It also documents the emergence of Asian American voices and activists challenging these stereotypes with a vision for a new America.
Yellow peril is a phrase originating in the 19th century referring to the supposed economic, political, and social threat that peoples of Asian ancestry posed to the United States Anglo American community. This threat was often personified in popular media as negative, menacing caricatures, such as the notorious Fu Manchu. Archivist examines the real versus imagined realities of Asian and Asian Americans by countering a selection of books, movie posters, political cartoons and paper ephemera that document stereotypic representations of Asian peoples with art and literature by Asian American writers and intellectuals who fought to erase these perversions.
Among the rarer pieces on view in Archivist are trading card advertisements dating back to the 1870s with popular, comical images of Asian Pacific Islanders; original sheet music to songs like For the Flag of Old Japan (1904) and Ching, Ching, Chinaman (1923); and first-edition copies of books like Story of Wretched Flea, a Chinese Boy (1901). Archivist showcases works from the Asian American community including Fighting Americans, Too (1943), a newsletter written by Japanese American soldiers from the Topaz internment camp in Utah; and groundbreaking pieces like Basement Workshops Yellow Pearl (1976), a portfolio of poetry, sheet music and drawings created by an influential collective of activist artists.
A/P/A is in the process of acquiring the Kishi/Sun collection for NYU, hoping to use the collection as an invaluable resource for academics and researchers, especially those based on the East coast where few collegiate Asian American studies programs and archives exist.
Archivist of the Yellow Peril
Museum of the Chinese in the Americas (MoCA)
70 Mulberry St., 2nd Fl. (corner of Mulberry and Bayard Sts.)
Through Dec. 31, 2005
Tues.-Sun., 12 noon-6pm
Fri. 12noon- 7pm.
ADMISSION: $3 adults, $1 seniors/students, free for children under 12 and MoCA members, Friday/Free.
DIRECTIONS: Public transportation routes include the N, R, Q, W, J, M, Z, or #6 train to Canal Street station or M103 and M15 buses to Chinatown.
www.moca-nyc.org
Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MoCA) is the first full-time, professionally staffed museum dedicated to reclaiming, preserving, and interpreting the history and culture of Chinese and their descendants in the Western Hemisphere. The Museum provides historical and visual arts exhibitions, walking tours, school and public programs, a museum shop and extensive archives in the fields of Chinese American and Asian American studies.