Some jokesters have apparently created a parody site that mocks San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, and in particular its “Lords of the Samurai” exhibition:
The museum used as a promotional logo a helmet and armor from the Hosokawa collection, perhaps banking on the ensemble’s reminiscence of Darth Vader. The image may also have sparked local memories of the 1985 “Spectacular Helmets of Japan,” one of the most popular shows in the museum’s history.
The Web “intervention” by a local artists’ collective called Asians Art Museum, whose members remain anonymous, tricked out the samurai helmet with Mickey Mouse ears, to deride the museum’s stab at Disney-like mass appeal.
Their redesign also added a human nose, alluding to hyperlinked text that explains a practice carried out by 16th century Japanese invaders of Korea. To certify their subjection of the Korean population, the samurai cut off noses en masse and shipped them home packed in salt.
Behind the parody’s Mickey Mouse helmet rises a mushroom cloud, insinuating a grim linkage between the samurai ethos, modern Japan’s imperial hubris – which justified the atomic bombings from an American strategic perspective – and America’s ongoing effort to steer world affairs by military means.
Further passages in the Web intervention expose unseemly samurai practices such as pederasty and misogynistic violence.
[...]
To the riposte that they minimize the glory of the artworks displayed, the parodists write in a blog post: “we have great appreciation for objects in the Hosokawa collection; we’re simply arguing … that to deny… context from a warrior culture such as this one, particularly for an audience largely unfamiliar with that history, is to effectively aestheticize violence, knowingly, in a time of war.”
I’m sorry, but this is just being a dick. I’m sure if I wanted, I could deconstruct the Korea galleries of the Met or Smithsonian in terms of slavery, peasant exploitation, Confucian misogyny and the mass slaughter of Catholics. In fact, you could play this game with the art of just about any nation.
(HT to reader)
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In fact, you could play this game with the art of just about any nation.
looks like they might:
or whether the group will take similar action in response to future Asian Art Museum shows.
some art is precisely all about not having a point, though, it does sounds like these bunch of artists just want to make a point that they had a traumatic experience watching the teenage mutant ninja turtle when they were growing up, and never believed in the turtle power.
Anything that takes itself way too seriously deserves to be parodied. Having said that, this is just plainly not funny.
Why the overemphasis on Japanese art in the parody site for Asian art? Where is the parody on Korean art?
Are they afraid that they will get hacked by Korean netizens?
Just by judging from what was said in the Examiner piece, I’d say the artists in question ARE Korean.
Maybe… probably a few ABCs (American Born Chinese) in the mix as well. They are surprisingly anti-Japanese.
I think the obnoxiousness is helpful.
No one anywhere is buying any Korean myths hook, line, and sinker. So there really isn’t much need. But if people in the West started worshiping the tools behind any of the things you mention, buying them in Koreatown dollar stores and putting them on their mantles, educating people about them in their entirety would be a much needed endeavor.
As it is, Korean-American women generally do such a good job at talking up “Confucian misogyny” that often it’s all Confucianism is known for, and the mass slaughter of Catholics is a regular part of any discussion of Korean religious history.
I do feel for the Asian Art Museum, though. Ouch.
Oops, with the exception of Alejandro Cao de Benos de Les y Pérez.
BTW, I found a link on the “asians art” site that directs you to an article at Bowdoin College to be a good read.
That site violates commandment #1 of parody sites: Thou shalt be funny.
Looks like it was written by a collection of Berkeley Women’s, Peace and Asian Studies majors, who wouldn’t know what fun was if it bit them on the ass. [Anything] Studies majors: When being a productive member of society just won’t do.
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