Anida Yoeu Ali is published in a new contemporary art book

IAS faculty member Anida Yoeu Ali is one of nine featured artists interviewed in a new book, “Queering Contemporary Asian American Art” recently published by the University of Washington Press. The book edited by Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe takes Asian American differences as its point of departure, and brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialisms, and methodologies within Asian American art and visual culture. The book features cutting-edge visual artworks, including Ali’s The Buddhist Bug project alongside other notable contemporary performance artists including Wafaa Bilal, Viet Le and Saya Woolfak.

As part of the book’s launch in Portland, Oregon on April 15th, Ali took part in a roundtable discussion at the 2017 Association of Asian American Studies conference titled “Who Cares? Asian American Contemporary Art, Cultures and Queer Communities.” Ali’s panel discussed the contributor’s use of the verb and critical lens of "queering" to capture transgressive cultural, social, and political engagement and practice. Featured artists and essayists explored connections in the Asian American experience and the cultural production of surveillance states, decolonization and diaspora, transnational adoption, and transgender bodies and forms, as well as heteronormative respectability, the military, and war.