The first initiative of its kind in the United States, the Asia Society Triennial is a multi-venue festival of art, ideas, and innovation across New York City that focuses on contemporary art from and about Asia and the diaspora.

Artistic Statement

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the battle lines have been drawn over what kind of society we should have. The current challenge to the post–World War II liberal-democratic status quo of developed countries has its roots in the excesses of globalization, with its denudation of local identities and enlargement of economic inequalities under global capitalism. Within the modern nation-state, tribalism and rising authoritarianism have frayed historical ties between states and cultures: North vs. South, East vs. West, Middle East vs. West, and on and on. This fracturing is mirrored within the modern state itself, with citizens increasingly clustering around religious, gender, sexual, ethnic, and class identities. Edward Said has commented that within nations, the forces aligning themselves with what is considered orthodox, conservative, and mainstream define their culture as pure, as “our” culture, as separate from other cultures. Conservative movements often look back to a historical golden age that may not have existed. There is thus an increasing inability to recognize the mutually constitutive nature of all cultures. Every culture contains a palimpsest of past cross-cultural encounters and also continues to be shaped by absorption, transmission, and negotiation with others. Being global is therefore also a condition of how we exist and not merely a stage in our development. The existence of diasporic and immigrant communities and ethnic minorities throughout history is a direct consequence of this. It is no wonder that as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the ugliest battles are now unfolding around systematic racism and xenophobic attacks on African American, Asian, LGBTQIA+, and other minority communities.

Bruno Latour, in an interview with the French online magazine AOC, published on March 29, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic exploded worldwide, notes that the devastating effects of the virus on the economy and society has ironically proven how pervasive and deeply embedded each of us is in the global networks of ideas, people, goods, and money. The virus as a global interrupter has, in fact, become the ultimate proof of how globalized we all are.

What is the role of art and artists in this fraught situation?

Taking inspiration from a line in Yoko Ono’s 1964 publication, Grapefruit—“A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality”—the title of the Triennial, We Do Not Dream Alone, attests to the power of art to resist our urge to silo during these uncertain times. Grapefruit, now considered a masterpiece of conceptual art, contains a series of what Ono calls “event scores” that provide instructions for simple, even daily actions that the reader might enact as a way of life. These suggest the possible efficacy of micro-actions and human agency, which is of particular resonance now, when governments and public institutions seem to fail us.

This inaugural Triennial, which encompasses visual art, theater, dance, music, and film, takes place in a nation-state on the eve of a presidential election, when its citizens will go to the ballot boxes to choose which dream of America will take hold. Leaping across geography and history, the artistic projects in this Triennial resist the condition of dreaming alone by unveiling the way that people, objects, and events across time and space are linked through a complex web of relationships. The objects and processes of contemporary art are micro-acts of world building, creating micro-worlds of meaning and relations that reveal the border-crossing nature of our modern existence, despite the current barriers drawn in the sand. For instance, Ken + Julia Yonetani’s Three Wishes connects the tragedy of the Fukushima nuclear-power-plant disaster, with its long-term impacts on wildlife and human life, to the effusive cheeriness of a victorious United States in its postwar embrace of a nuclear-powered future. A special project within the exhibition, We The People: Xu Bing and Sun Xun Respond to the Declaration of Independence, pairs an official nineteenth-century print of the Declaration of Independence with new work by the Chinese artists Xu Bing and Sun Xun as a launchpad for rumination on the early American leaders’ fascination with classical Chinese civilization, particularly the political philosophy of Confucius, as they were dreaming of a new nation that would be free of feudal bondage. Mina Cheon’s Eat ChocoPie Together stages a moment of sweet communion, when members of the public are invited to take and consume the ubiquitous Korean dessert, the Choco-Pie. This participatory project points to the role of this dessert that, by way of a complicated history between the divided Koreas, has become highly desired on both sides of the border. Cheon’s project amplifies the ironic relationship between the two states: politically separated yet connected through their love for this simple sweet. Through her practice, the percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra invites the audience to participate and cocreate musical scores, connecting performer and audience in a transitory moment of dreaming up a shared experience.

Underlying the Triennial is our belief in the power of art: its innate ability to embrace the paradoxes and contradictions of our increasingly complex global society while retaining the capacity to illuminate the thread of our shared humanity.

The presence of art shows that we are never alone in life and our dreams. We invite you to dream with us.

Boon Hui Tan
Founding Artistic Director and Cocurator, Asia Society Triennial

Special Project: We The People

We The People: Xu Bing and Sun Xun Respond to the Declaration of Independence

Project on view for Part 1: October 27, 2020, through February 7, 2021
Artwork by Xu Bing and the Declaration of Independence will remain on view for Part 2: March 16, 2021, through June 27, 2021

As a special project of the Asia Society Triennial, the artists Xu Bing and Sun Xun have created new works to respond to a rare nineteenth-century official copy of the Declaration of Independence.

The founding spirit of American democracy has often found resonance in Asia. What is less known is the fascination held by early American leaders including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, as well as European Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, for Chinese civilization. Within the vast corpus of classical Chinese philosophical discourse, The Analects by Confucius was of particular interest, in part because it discussed the ideals of good government and moral leadership. Today, the figure of Confucius is found on the eastern pediment of the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, to the left of Moses and Solon, revealing the important connection between the United States and Asia.

Xu Bing used a copy of The Analects by Confucius, a text that inspired the nation’s founders as they crafted the Declaration, to make a new work entitled Silkworm Book: The Analects of Confucius that comments on the fragility of such manifestos.

For his response to the Declaration, Sun Xun created a folding album entitled July Coming Soon that borrows from classical Chinese painting traditions to illustrate the fiery dynamics through which new worlds are born or established norms are questioned. Discordant images of a grim Statue of Liberty violently broken asunder are jarringly juxtaposed with Confucian bureaucrats shrouded in flames, creating a dark and dangerous environment that seems to threaten the very foundations of our democracy and the ideals espoused in the eloquent words of the Declaration.

Displayed together with the copy of the Declaration of Independence, these artworks encourage us to contemplate democratic values, especially pertinent in a United States presidential election year and during this time when we struggle to include the disenfranchised among us and strive to make democracy and equality real for all members of our nation.

This rare copy of the Declaration of Independence dates to 1833. In 1820, with the fiftieth anniversary of the original signing of the Declaration fast approaching, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams, one of the original signers, commissioned William J. Stone of Washington, DC, to create an exact-size replica of the original Declaration. The project, a copperplate engraving that included the signatures of the fifty-six delegates, took Stone three years to complete. A decade after the Stone engraving, Congress authorized Peter Force (1790–1868) to print additional copies of the Declaration from Stone’s original plate, including the one on display here. As one of the nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence reaffirms the legacies of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.

Susan L. Beningson, PhD
Guest Curator

Steering Committee

The Asia Society Triennial Steering Committee is a formal gathering of thought leaders from business, journalism, media, technology, and performing and visual arts. The Committee serves a twofold function as a think tank that counsels on the Triennial’s strategic directions and as an advocate on behalf of the Asia Society Museum to build broader programmatic initiatives through external institutional collaborations. Agnes Hsu-Tang, PhD, executive chair of the Triennial and chair of the Steering Committee, leads the Committee’s continuing discourse across diverse forms of artistic practice and convenes biannual meetings at the Asia Society Museum in New York. Committee members serve on a voluntary basis and represent an international, multi-disciplinary intellectual community.

Agnes Hsu-Tang, PhD

Agnes Hsu-Tang, PhD is executive chair of the Asia Society Triennial and chair of its Steering Committee, in addition to her continuing role as chair of Asia Society’s Global Council on Asian Arts and Culture since 2015.

Dr. Hsu-Tang is an academic and international cultural heritage policy advisor trained in archaeology and art history; in 2018 she was elected a Distinguished Scholar to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Dr. Hsu-Tang served on UNESCO World Heritage Centre’s scientific committees for the designations of the Qhapag Ñan and the Continental Silk Road; she also advised President Obama’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee on the renewal of the bilateral agreement with China to reduce the illicit trafficking of cultural objects. Dr. Hsu-Tang has authored academic publications on art and archaeology and white papers on critical issues in cultural heritage protection. She was an early advocate for adopting the then-new GIS technology for archaeological research and her work was published by Cambridge University Press and nominated for the Barwis Holliday Award by the Royal Asiatic Society (UK) in 2006. Dr. Hsu-Tang was a Mellon predoctoral fellow at Cambridge University before receiving her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She served on the faculty at Brown University and was subsequently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Prior to graduate studies, she was a special assistant to the former U.S. Ambassador to China and Korea, the late James R. Lilley.

Dr. Hsu-Tang has hosted and narrated two award-winning TV documentaries: Mysteries of China, an archaeology series on the History Channel, and Chineseness, a contemporary Chinese art series on Discovery Asia that premiered in 2014 during Art Basel Hong Kong. She co-founded and serves on the executive boards of the Tang Center for Early China at Columbia University, Tang Center for Silk Road Studies at the University of California Berkeley, and most recently, Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature by Oxford University Press. She is a trustee of the New-York Historical Society, where she has chaired its Exhibitions Committee since 2015. She is also a managing director on the board of the Metropolitan Opera and previously served as chair of the Nominating Committee. She serves on the advisory committees of the American Institute of Archaeology, Institute of International Education, New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and L’Institut pour la citoyenneté canadienne. Formerly trained as a classical musician, Dr. Hsu-Tang made her debut at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC in 1989.