December 2008, Shifted Focus @ space180 Gallery

For ten years, Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture festivals have been exciting and illuminating events showcasing multi-disciplinary works by emerging Asian Pacific American artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. For a city that has a large Asian Pacific American population, Kearny Street Workshop aims to represent this community and create engaging dialogues through the arts. Though I will confess, as a Korean American artist and curator, I often find myself conflicted with being labeled as such. How often do you see Caucasian artists being labeled as ‘Caucasian artist,’ yet we brand others by these identifiers – queer, African-American, Asian, etc. It’s a conflict that has yet to be resolved and may never be. 

A look back on APAture’s history could have taken the easy way out. It could have very easily been a ‘best-of’ compilation of past works or of works that were only about the Asian Pacific American experience. SHIFTED FOCUS: A 10^th Anniversary APAture Retrospective provides an alternative. Curators Ellen Oh and Sally Szwed have chosen to show new works by past APAture participants, this both celebrates the past and emphasizes the new. Furthermore, the works are not necessarily dictated by what box the artist checks-off in a Census survey; the diversity of the works act to shake up any preconceived notions of what “Asian art” should look like.