An Encounter with Another Artist

Note: The story I tell here is not intended to single out an artist and social worker, not to mention to cancel them. For this reason, I intentionally omit information that might make her easily identifiable.

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Two weeks ago, I visited the closing show of a group exhibit at M--- Studios. It was early evening on a Saturday in East Village, a few blocks away from the studio apartment that Erik and I live in. There were not very many people, so that I was able to talk to almost everyone that visited while I was there: the gallery owner, his assistant, the showcasing artists that were present, and several other attendees.

In following days, I would come to recount to a couple of male friends (in addition to Erik) about the easy and cool white (cisgender and likely heterosexual) male presence I felt in the dominant characters at the event that left me somewhat stumped.*

But at the time, I was in the moment, enjoying the relative approachability of this local gallery that showed street art and street art styles, and created spaces for the community like this to simply get together and chill.** Given my own long-standing aim to learn how to chill, along with my relatively newer aim to further understand how the art community chills, I even brought up to the gallery owner the possibility of a joint being passed around at some point. He affirmed, following up with various stories about joints, including one about Snoop Dogg’s salaried joint roller. They were good stories and he got some laughs out of me.

It was in this cheery and optimistic mood that I turned around and met J.

J was an elder white woman with an enthusiastic smile. Having a thin frame, she was wearing various layers –something I quite relate to given that I was raised by my halmeoni. We exchanged greetings and introduced ourselves. We are both artists. When she shared her Instagram handle with me, I recognized, by virtue of having hung around my Jewish-American husband a lot, that she has a Jewish last name. Whereas once all white people looked the same to me, now I am much more conscious that Jewish-American white people have a distinct ethnic history and identity than the broader white majority. I took a quick look through her ‘gram and there they were: the photos of her numerous paper figurines of police officers in riot gear.

This made me pause.

Then, I read the text below the post and learned that she had had them displayed at our local public library branch. And that created another pause for me. From here, I proceeded carefully.

It took three tries for me to finally get an answer to the question I was asking. Admittedly, part of the difficulty had been for me in formulating the question I intended to ask in a way that she would understand and that was considerate enough; I have learned the hard way the American politeness culture of being mindful of and protecting the egos of all individuals in the conversation. Or I might have been too circumspect, in a Korean sort of way, around a sensitive topic, hoping she might have caught onto why I am being circumspect. Maybe she just needs questions to be direct and clear. I don’t know. In any case, it took me three tries, and each time I tried there was a part of me that was doubting herself and afraid to potentially defy an older white woman.

The question, if I were to paraphrase it here, was, “I am trying to understand your intention behind your artwork. What sort of effect are you trying to achieve by displaying these figurines to the audience at such a safe and public space as a library?”

We were finally, then, able to arrive at a point where she gave her answer. It was an answer that she was wholly satisfied with, and she said afterwards that she herself was astonished at how she was never able to articulate it like that, so clearly, to someone before because no one had asked her in the same way. The answer was that she felt so much sympathy for police officers.

Additional bits of information that she revealed only added to my puzzled feeling. Her sympathy for police officers was akin to the sympathy she feels for the unhoused. I questioned this particular equivalence by bringing up that police officers are part of a very powerful and harmful institution. She acknowledged understanding and maintained her sympathetic stance. She also brought up, in the process, the fact that she used to be a social worker, as an explanation for the reach of her capacity for empathy. As someone who has also been professional trained as a social worker, I heartily let her know that I understood where she was coming from.

This situation immediately seemed to me like one that could take a long time to unravel, particularly given how long it took to even arrive to this point. As I think about it now, I wonder whether I noted time constraints as a way to avoid what was far uglier and scarier a truth. Nonetheless, facing an overwhelming task where I could not see the end, I decided that it would do much good to tackle this as a two-step process. First, I would clearly show my understanding and empathy for her stance. Then, I would try to help her see the potential harmful repercussions in her artful expression.

So following my plan, I shared a story with her of an occasion where I felt I was in a similar situation. Once, when Erik and I were in graduate school at the University of Chicago, we met a doctoral student in linguistics. This white person (likely a “he,” but I would be safer to abstain from gendering in this case), maybe only slightly older than us, was trying to help a particular South American Indigenous group preserve their language, which was very much at risk of being lost forever.*** One substantial problem that the community was facing, they shared, was that many of the men in the elder generation had become dependent on alcohol, which was causing them to be violent. This was leading younger members to turn outside of the community, leading to a loss in speakers of that language.

J was listening intently. I told her that at that moment, I had expressed sympathy for those elders. “Imagine how unbearable it must be to bear the knowledge of their people’s prospects, to turn to alcohol in that way.” The student responded to me incredulously. “The younger people didn’t ask for any of it.” I didn’t tell J this part, but then, I turned silent and inward to a moment of reflection on what had caused me to intuitively feel first, or more, sympathy for the elders. Nonetheless, I told J this exchange to share that I’d been in a similar position before, and that I think it’s related to being a social worker. She immediately said she felt understood. “Exactly! You get me!”

So it was abundantly clear that I had achieved my first aim, and the moments were passing by for me to tackle the next.**** But with each passing moment, as I looked into the newly energized kind eyes of this elder white lady who so clearly did not feel understood before, I was losing the heart to continue.

In hindsight, perhaps I could have been more attuned to that I was strongly reacting to what was visible in her figurines, and the immediate symbolism attached to them. Then, I might have pointed out to her how her artistic choice to depict the police in mass in their riot gear, rather than as human individuals in civilian clothes, might perhaps not have been the most apt or effective in expressing her well-intentioned regard. My task could have been significantly reduced. But I did not think of this possibility then.*****

She had blue eyes. And the triumph in her smile suggested to me how difficult it must be to live in and traverse this busy and tiresome city and come out to an event like this in order to meet another artist or social worker like me and be understood. Partly my mind was wondering whether social work’s demands for superhuman levels of empathy might severely skew the social worker’s perspective so as to lose sight of those most truly vulnerable. If this was the case, this elder white woman and I would have a lot more in common than I might have thought.

I was having a hard time maintaining a coherent train of thought. She knew that police are part of a powerful institution. And surely she was doing this as a reaction to the movement against police brutality, and the phrase “All cops are bastards” could be dangerous if interpreted to mean that all cops are bad people given their individual choices. But how could she have no compunction about creating and displaying these figurines in a public library? How did this come to be displayed at the library, given her intention being to affirm these uniformed figures? The window of time for me to drive my point home was closing in, except I still didn’t know exactly what my point was. The only “point” that seemed to be expanding in my mind ever more towards infinity was the great gulf of experiences and perspective between herself and I. This woman had no clue what it is like to have the force of legitimacy turned against you because of the way you look.

Here, I want to be clear about what I mean. I do not know what it is to experience that force of legitimacy through the direct threat and violence that the police force casually and regularly enacts against Black and brown bodies. I was aware of the Black male artist in the room just feet away from me and hoping he does not have to converse with this lady or see her art. And I was thinking of other kind and good Black men I’ve known who have no choice but to live daily with fear for their lives. But by no means do I make any claim remotely close to the possibility that I might know what it is like to be them.

My own claims to having the power of government and the law against you come from my own experiences as an East Asian-American undocumented immigrant young woman, as relatively indirect, spread out, and obscure as their effect on me may be.****** To me, at that moment, I thought that J might as well have made figures of ICE agents because she would have been equally oblivious as to the nature of state-sanctioned systemic oppression, and ensuing triggers that people have from the mere sight of the figures alone. ICE is as much a force of white supremacy as the police, though perhaps they are required to be more selective in which dark-skinned Americans they persecute. I have lived most of my life hiding in shame and fear from the sheer existence of this agency that was created as a racist reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Police on the road continue to terrorize all undocumented immigrants of color who need to drive to work, to see family, and to other places while afraid of being caught without papers.

After so much anticipation, all I managed to tell her, then, was that, “I would hesitate in so publicly expressing my empathy for the police, given that they have institutional power.” She nodded, and I politely excused myself to look at some of the art.

I was prompted to write this post because I noticed that she made a new post on her Instagram today of these paper sculptures. Along with the use of hashtags #socialpracticeart, #politicalart, and #artstudentleagueofnewyork, she has shared that the newly improved sculptures will be shared in a community space in Bushwick (a space whose Instagram has almost 12k followers). Every art institution that she and these sculptures of hers are attached to have made me wonder how it is that no one seems to have questioned her motives given such a powerful symbol as police officers in riot gear have come to be. Certainly, I imagine that they had application processes with fill-in-the-blank boxes. But where was the consideration for the potential impact, and therefore the importance of the artist’s meaning, in each of these processes? Seeing the institutional support provided to this (entirely diligent!) artist has been another blow to my dejected hopes for the art industry.

As a closing note, I emphasize again that I do not mean to attack J, who is simply one artist in a big field trying to make their truth be seen. Generally speaking, artists are not the enemy. This post isn’t about J. It’s not about me, either, though it is my story, told in my voice, based on my perspective and experiences. As to what it is about –I will leave that to the reader to decide.

* Interestingly, I would also then go on a walk with a white woman artist I met in the neighborhood who knows those same white men and would, unprompted, remark that “they’re very male.” This would leave me in that moment at once grateful, unsure, and, again, momentarily speechless. I detest being the first to bring up the fact of someone’s whiteness, and not only because I find myself having to do it semi-regularly. She would acknowledge white supremacy later on, and I would realize that I could have brought it up during this topic then. But at this moment, I wasn’t sure that it would be received in a manner that felt (psychologically) safe to me. Based on other interests, she was clearly a responsible and invested member of this rapidly gentrified neighborhood, self-aware and knowledgeable in many ways. These are also rare and valuable attributes. But, perhaps as one might realize, that is not the same as being racially conscious.

**At various times I’d fight an urge to blurt out, “wow, y’all just get together and chill like this here?? In New York, where space is sacred, whose monetary value is only trumped or equaled by time??” But I didn’t want to show my utter lack of chill.

***I unfortunately cannot remember which tribe, but when I brought up the Guarani of Paraguay, there was some strong relation –perhaps by geography or culture. I do not mean to generalize or otherwise erase the experience of different Indigenous tribes beyond what has already been done.

****A joke that Erik tells, which he credits his high school computer science teacher for: “How do you eat an elephant? You take a teaspoon of it, then you eat the rest.” Well, I had had my teaspoon of it and Erik hadn’t told me how to eat the rest, had he, now?

***** I wonder if perhaps that is a hallmark of the immigrant experience. You have a plan. Though it may be with various conditional alternative paths because you can’t see much beyond the first one or two steps, you are secure enough in knowing the first steps. So you proceed with it. You trust that when it comes to the following step, you will know what to do. The problem when that moment comes around, however, is that you didn’t calculate for the amount of heart it would take to take that second step, or to carry out the rest of the plan. You might have migrated to a country with the idea of keeping your family safe, together, and with greater opportunities, only in a different land. But your family might come apart for reasons you did not plan. So then how do you continue to carry out your plan?

******I am still healing and learning the full extent of how it affected me and my life. There is yet much that I cannot, or dare not, fully recall or express.