Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(30)
But having said that, how can I write about us living together when there isn’t too much precedent for it? Can I write about it without resorting to some facile vision of multicultural oneness or the sterilizing language of virtue signaling? Can I write honestly? Not only about how much I’ve been hurt but how I have hurt others? And can I do it without steeping myself in guilt, since guilt demands absolution and is therefore self-serving? In other words, can I apologize without demanding your forgiveness? Where do I begin?
AN EDUCATION
I FIRST MET ERIN AT A high school art camp in Maine. Since it was my first time away from my family in Los Angeles, I thought I could escape my geeky status and become the bad girl I always wanted to be. In my arsenal, I had my combat boots and my Fugazi and Pavement tapes and my pack of Marlboro Lights. But upon arrival, I knew immediately that I was out of my league, since the New York kids were nihilistically hip in that nineties Larry Clark Kids kind of way. Erin was the most striking among them: a tall Taiwanese goth girl with an asymmetrical bob who wore a full-length charcoal vintage negligee and knee-length combat boots as huge as moon boots. I was so intimidated by her I avoided her.
But we struck a hesitant friendship in drawing class because she liked my art. We kept our easels next to each other. We said nice things about each other’s work. She would borrow my drawing pens, or I, her masking tape. But once class was over, she paired off with her much cooler friend while I retreated back to my glum basement dorm room to hang out with my white Southern roommate who had hung a giant American flag on her wall as a defiant act against all the East Coast pretensions around her.
Once, on a Saturday night, Erin asked me if I wanted to go paint. The RA, she explained, said she could use the empty room and she would like the company. I immediately said yes although I had never done such a thing as painting with someone else outside of class. Making art was an entirely private affair. I did it alone on weekend nights at home to escape my life. To pin up unstretched canvas on a wall next to a friend in an empty room spotlit by clamp lights, with New Order warbling from a tape deck, felt too intimate, especially since we weren’t painting anything from life but painting from imagination. What was natural in private—sketching things out, stepping back to gaze at my painting—felt like a self-conscious act I was performing exclusively for Erin. I might as well have worn a beret and smock. But because I was acutely aware of the fact that I was playing the role of artist, my identity as an artist became real for the first time.
As we talked, Erin’s aura of intimidation evaporated. She was not from New York City but from the suburbs of Long Island, where she attended the local public school. Her parents were computer programmers. I was surprised that her parents were strict immigrants like mine, since Erin looked like an ethereal creature who’d popped out of Ian Curtis’s forehead. Not that Erin acted ethereal either. At one point, she ripped out a fart. When she saw my shocked expression, she laughed: “Why do we have to walk around with clenched butts? It’s unhealthy to hold it in.” Mostly we worked silently. Erin was influenced by Max Ernst and painted a humanoid birdlike figure that spooked me. I copied her and began painting my own humanoid figure. Hours passed and I painted furiously rather than with my usual studious care. The muffled background chatter and laughter died down as everyone in the dorm building fell asleep. Once the tape squealed to its end, all we heard were crickets crying to the bass of bullfrogs whose songs grew louder until our room seemed to dislodge itself from the dorm and float—like a room in a dollhouse without its fourth wall—into the heart of an overgrown forest.
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In 2013, Erin and I attended a Chelsea opening for the artist Jim Shaw, an L.A. conceptual artist who collected hundreds of amateur paintings from thrift stores and presented them salon-style in blue-chip galleries. He organized the paintings by subject: clowns, cats, UFOs, and other chintzy subjects that are often popular with amateur painters. Like our fellow viewers, we gawked our way through the portraits, which were as lurid as tabloids. This show garnered rave reviews. One critic wrote that Shaw “disrupted notions of biography or signature style by affirming the decentered subjectivity and fragmented routines of Postmodern society.”
Then we came across a work that had a familiar surrealist style, a painting with a birdlike figure in acrylic impasto. It was that unfinished painting that Erin had made in the art camp we attended years ago. Within this menagerie of kitsch, Erin’s painting appeared na?ve rather than deliberate, the spookiness an accident of the untutored psyche rather than a style developed for calculated effect. Shaw must have found the painting at the Long Island thrift store where Erin’s mother dumped her high school portfolio. Now, upon his discovery, this orphan painting became a collectible of value.
Erin was embarrassed by her painting. She said it was juvenile, an inconsequential piece of junk. I thought about all those famous artists whose crappiest juvenilia is now worth millions. Every doodle is an enshrined artifact for the archives because it unlocks the early stages of the artist’s style. I urged Erin to tell Jim Shaw that it was her painting. But she was against the idea. At that point in 2013, Erin had had exhibitions in Europe but had not yet shown in New York City. When I wouldn’t stop harping about it, Erin told me to shut up. She said, “This is not how I plan to debut in Chelsea.”