Artist Lecture: Scott Tsuchitani

Scott Tsuchitani's artist lecture was held on September 2^nd. Tsuchitani is interested in interventional activism. As a Japanese American, his works often involve to cultural norm, especially Asian culture in the U.S.

Two projects, Memoirs of a Sansei Geisha and Lord It's the Samurai were introduced during the lecture. The names actually came from the titles of the exhibitions taken place in Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Tsuchitani thought the displays only showed the fascination toward racial stereotype of Asian culture. He said we often saw the same problem in popular songs or Hollywood movies, but when it happened in a museum, which supposed to be a learning institution, it definitely would cause a stronger impact. So he decided to take some actions. He used the poster from the museum and combined his face with the geisha image as a message about how Asian looked like in the reality. Then, he printed a large number of parody flyers, and put them everywhere in the city and the visitor center front desk in the museum. The feedback from people were quite successful. The samurai show was also done in a similar way. But besides using Photoshop to the poster, he created a parodic webpage, a branding, and many information cards of the exhibition to pass around. The whole intervention had even greater response than the geisha project. It had been spread out by interviews, newspapers, and academic journals.

Tsuchitani had a great humor. As being an Asian as well, I felt his works were extremely funny but also contained powerful message. People in the U.S often concern racial problem of African American, Tsuchitani's projects may be able to let us pay more attention to the minority group issue.