Vincent

My sisters and I recently visited the Oregon Historical Society.

That sounds like the preface to a post on the travel blog. There will be posts there, but this is more about art.

We were there for the exhibits on Motown and the Jantzen Beach carousel, and also to see their Santa Land display, this year with an old Cinnamon Bear costume.

Something unexpected caught my eye.

It was a baseball bat on a base of toy cars with a photo on top and a timeline in the background. I did not really take in the timeline or the photo. 

It was part of the "I Am An American" exhibit, which I did not really know anything about in advance. It is by one of the featured individuals, artist Roberta Wong.

My first guess was that this represented someone's "All-American" childhood: baseball and cars, right?

(I have been reading about sports lately, so that may have influenced my thinking.)

Then I saw it was Vincent Chin.

Chin may very well have played with toy cars as a child and played baseball, but that's not what was being represented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Vincent_Chin

Chin was fatally beaten with a baseball bat by two auto-workers -- one recently laid off -- in Detroit. There was a lot of race-baiting in Detroit, supposedly based on Japanese competition leading to declining sales of US brands. Of course, Chin was also a Detroit resident, and of Chinese descent, not Japanese, but that's how hate crimes go. 

The trial was a gross miscarriage of justice and became an important point of civil rights activism for Asian Americans.

I would not have even known the name, except for the rise in anti-Asian American violence in the wake of COVID. Also, this year was the 40th anniversary.

Still, people know about the death for the most part, and not his life... except that he was killed on the night of his bachelor party, eight days away from getting married.

So, I don't know much about him as a person. I don't know if he was athletic or bookish or both, and yet there was still that familiar name, and the grim reminders.

I wanted to write about that now, because this exhibit is only up through January 8th, and that's not a lot of time to go see it. I am also writing because with that visit and some other recent visits (that will get reviewed on the travel blog), I have been thinking about art, and how it can work.

I saw the piece, and thought one incorrect thing. Then I saw more, and I got pulled in differently than simply knowing the background would have brought me in.

It's not just that there is an emotional difference, but there is also a shift in perspective. I feel something new about the death, but also I have a different perspective on it.

It's great when art is pretty, but the possibilities are much more.

https://www.ohs.org/museum/exhibits/i-am-an-american.cfm

https://www.portlandchinatownmuseum.org/exhibitions/vincent/ 

https://www.orartswatch.org/roberta-wong-conceptual-artist-tireless-advocate/