Solace in Painting? Diasporic Artists and the Market for Conflict

In fall of 2022, I was in the process of teaching a newly developed graduate seminar, ‘East Asian Art and American Modernism’. Conveniently, the course aligned with the opening of the major exhibition Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances at the Dallas Museum of Art. Generously guided by the organizing curator, Vivian Li, I was able to take my group of students through the exhibition. Marking the first dedicated retrospective of Matthew Wong’s (1984–2019) work, it was a significant occasion. My graduate students were eager to explore the existing literature surrounding Wong’s artwork. However, I was surprised to find that they almost universally took umbrage with how Matthew Wong was portrayed in the wake of his death. In the initial articles grappling with Wong’s legacy as an artist, most famously that of Raffi Khatchadourian (Khatchadourian, 2022), the discourse overwhel-mingly centred on Wong’s mental health struggles, neurodivergence, and untimely death as he was reaching apparent maturity as an artist. Gradually overwhelmed in this broader narrative was the vibrancy of Matthew Wong’s work itself (Purtle, 2022).

With students from nontraditional backgrounds, in some cases neurodivergent themselves or concurrently enrolled in my university’s longstanding disability studies curriculum, my seminar was sensitive to the apparent exploitation of Matthew Wong’s biography. The critical response just after his death stood in stark contrast to The Realm of Appearances exhibition itself, as well as the accompanying catalogue. Both included only minimal discourse on Wong’s personal life—aside from a subtle link at the end of the exhibition recommending further resources for those experiencing mental health struggles (Li, 2022, 9-22). Vivian Li decided on this direction in conversation with Wong’s mother, who has pushed back against prevailing narratives surrounding his mental health.

At the time, I was in the early stages of organizing an exhibition of Asian diasporic art as part of my charge coordinating the University of Texas at Arlington’s museum studies curriculum. The classroom exchange about Wong inspired me to revisit a broad observation I am sure many readers have experienced within the international art scene. Contemporary art discourse and markets are often driven by an unspoken interest in conflict and traumatic biography. Certainly, Matthew Wong is not unique in this regard; for instance, Jean Michel Basquiat’s (1960–1988) legacy continues to be plundered through recent scandals like that associated with the Orlando Museum of Art (Metz, 2023). The artist’s working processes, documented mental health concerns, and early death enhanced the market appeal of his limited oeuvre but left his estate vulnerable to the ‘discovery’ of new works by unscrupulous forgers.

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Cover
Fletcher Coleman and Yukio Lippit, *Solace in Painting: Reflecting on a Tumultuous Century*, London, 2025

Blue-chip artists are often at least partly minted by publicly exploiting their mental health struggles, sensationalizing their tragic deaths, and politicizing their traumatic experiences. Art markets also frequently exhibit a preference for artists whose work represents conflict and trauma in a way that is readily legible to the viewer—to better monetize biography in relation to art. While cynical, these practices are nevertheless applicable to an array of modern and contemporary artists and have served as a powerful force in shaping the art canon over the past century.

Reflecting on the hypocrisies raised by my students’ line of inquiry ultimately led to a series of questions that would generate the first national traveling exhibition organized by my university gallery—Solace in Painting: Reflecting on a Tumultuous Century (fig. 1). What do we make of artists from underrepresented communities whose lives were fundamentally altered by major conflicts of the twentieth century but who chose to never directly represent their traumatic experiences? Such artists are often doubly ignored. First, as members of diasporic minorities, they were ignored or treated as enemies during the late-twentieth-century American public reckoning over the military, political, and cultural conflicts they endured. Second, as artists choosing indirect approaches to grapple with experiences of conflict, they have been left out of the academic discourse and market interest in artwork generated by the discord of the twentieth century.

Solace in Painting explores the foundational question of how we raise awareness about and effectively characterize the artwork of conflicted artists of the diaspora who never produced overt ‘conflict art’. This question is examined through the lives and artwork of three Asian diasporic painters: Chao Shao-an (also known as Zhao Shao'ang, 1905–1998, Keisho Okayama (1934–2018), and Ann Phong (b. 1957). Beyond their biographies that have been similarly touched by major U.S.-led conflicts in East and Southeast Asia over the course of the twentieth century, these artists were also selected based on resonances among their philosophical and technical approaches to painting their experiences.

Each of these artists intimately explores the legacies of conflict across the diaspora without representationally depicting those themes. Ranging from classical Chinese bird-and-flower ink paintings to monumental abstract acrylic canvases, the artworks in the exhibition, upon initial encounter, resist biographical interpretation. The title Solace in Painting, abbreviated from a quote by Okayama, points instead towards a deeper connection to the lives and approaches of these remarkable individuals. How did their artwork offer solace from and provide a space for grappling with difficult questions of conflict and identity? And, in the face of work that obscures direct reference to the life of the artist, how can we as viewers understand their relationship between life and art in a way that is nonexploitative and remains grounded in celebration of the artwork itself?

Chao Shao-an was a Hong Kong painter who shaped modernist approaches to Chinese ink painting (fig. 2). Surviving all twentieth-century conflicts in China, from the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 to the return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, Chao ruminated on these events through the metaphorical subject of bird-and-flower painting (Lo, 2015). He spent most of his life separated from mainland China but is currently being reclaimed as an apolitical traditionalist by museums and art historians of China. This exhibition, by contrast, highlights Chao’s work as an innovative modernist who advanced the expressive possibilities of ink painting and subtly reflected on his biography within an otherwise staid genre. The fourteen album-leaf paintings selected for display represent a period late in the artist’s life when he examined intimate moments of transition within the natural world to reflect on the many seismic changes that had occurred across his own long life (fig. 3).

The repeated themes of transition and renewal suggest that the artist found some sense of personal solace and negotiated the tumult of his life through these paintings. One of the artist’s most important legacies throughout his long career remained unchanged—his role as an instructor. Chao began teaching in 1927 and continued instructing until he passed away in 1998—seventy-one years of public painting demonstrations, private lessons, and exhibitions while traveling across four continents in times of conflict and eventual peace. Chao Shao-an revolutionized the international world’s understanding of the living traditions of Chinese ink painting through decades of demonstration, instruction, and travel. The album-leaf paintings displayed in this exhibition were largely created in the context of studio demonstrations for Chao’s students. While the international art world undoubtedly shaped Chao Shao-an’s personal and artistic identity, these works, as pedagogical objects, also embody how his style became part of the personal and cultural identity of painters around the world.

Keisho Okayama was born in Osaka, Japan, and immigrated to the United States at the age of two (fig. 4). He was the son of the Reverend Zenkai Okayama (1898–1973), who became the second-highest ranking priest of the Pure Land sect of Buddhism in the United States. The artist’s ethnicity and his father’s influential position led to the family’s incarceration within the Japanese camp at Topaz, Utah, for the duration of World War II. Okayama was deeply affected by his camp experiences, as well as his father’s later alienation from the infrastructure of the Buddhist church following generational shifts in leadership. He studied art at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s, subsequently producing work as an independent painter over a fifty-year period in Los Angeles. Despite the remarkable, often monumental paintings that he produced, Okayama remained little known during his lifetime and never exhibited beyond the greater West Coast. Even more striking, he has not been included in any of the prominent recent projects concerning the creative lives of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II (for example: Wang, 2018; Wang, 2023; Williams, 2019).

Sixteen works by Okayama introduce for the first time to a national audience the range of the artist’s mastery over the course of a prolific career. Almost uniquely among American painters of the latter half of the twentieth century, Okayama’s work reveals a deeply informed, personal understanding of Buddhist compositional formats and subject matter. He utilized this content to explore the psychological impact of Buddhism on his family. Paintings from the late 1980s, such as Bath (fig. 5), reflect on episodes from the waning years of his mother’s life. The painting captures a moment when she could no longer control her bodily functions, and Okayama and his brother tenderly bathe her, yet the painting reimagines this intimate moment through a classical composition of the infant Buddha being lustrated by deities following his birth. The exhibited works all focus broadly on the artist’s complex family history within Pure Land Buddhism and the difficult questions of personal identity he faced as an intergenerational American of Japanese descent. These connections remained unexplored in Okayama’s paintings due to his abstract approach and the complete lack of existing scholarship on his life and work.

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Ann Phong in her studio, 2021
Photo courtesy of the artist, Orange County, California

Ann Phong is a Vietnamese American painter whose work reflects on her escape from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, as well as the cross-generational experiences of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States (fig. 6). Her recent paintings also tackle the localized effects of pressing global issues such as climate change on Vietnamese and American communities (Tran, 2022). Phong’s works in Solace in Painting focus on the manifold aspects of her identity as a diasporic artist, as well as the increasingly devasting effect of broad global calamities on Vietnamese communities. Despite her harrowing life as a young woman and striking body of work, she has not yet been the subject of focused academic research on the post–Vietnam War Vietnamese diaspora.

Phong’s ten works in this exhibition represent the evolution of these themes in her work over the last twenty-five years. They are selected from her two primary bodies of work—series titled ’Immigrant’ and ’Environment’. Each of these groups include subseries of works that examine topics ranging from her flight out of postwar Vietnam, to the destructive impact of humanity on the environment, to the challenging experiences of Americans of Asian descent during the global pandemic (Armen, 2024). Woven throughout all is an exploration of the relationship between personal biography and the shared challenges of human existence, particularly as they affect immigrant communities around the globe.

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*Searching for the Hill to Climb*
Ann Phong (United States, born Vietnam, 1957), 2022
Acrylic on canvas; 121.9 x 213.4 cm
Collection of the artist, Orange County, California

Of the three artists in this exhibition, Phong’s work comes nearest to representationally referencing her life experiences. Her large-scale canvases first engulf the viewer with vibrant colours and thick, tactile brushwork (fig. 7). However, the initial power of her work invites closer inspection, where one finds continued allusions to her chosen themes and experiences. This scaffolding of intent within her artwork—from large to small and back again—has remained consistent across her bodies of work over the course of her career. It also encourages reflection not only on her personal biography but also on how her message applies beyond her own life to broader communities and issues of global importance.

Solace in Painting: Reflecting on a Tumultuous Century arrives during a period of critical re-evaluation of the definition of American art and the nature of American identity for diasporic communities in the United States. This exhibition engages with these broadening efforts first and foremost through remarkable paintings born of the experiences of three artists of the Asian diaspora. It also does so by re-examining the role that the United States played in generating the twentieth-century conflicts that shaped these artist’s lives. This exploration ranges from the early destabilization of China to the treatment of Americans of Japanese descent during and after World War II, as well as the resettlement of Vietnamese collaborators in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In the lives and work of Chao Shao-an, Keisho Okayama, and Ann Phong, Solace in Painting seeks to provide a platform for three artists whose remarkable biographies and artwork have been underexplored even within the newly inclusive discourse on American art. I believe this oversight is in large part due to entrenched biases that exist within the academic and art market worlds concerning the nature of art, conflict, and representation.

Solace in Painting: Reflecting on a Tumultuous Century opens at The Gallery at UTA, University of Texas at Arlington (4 February–29 March, 2025) before travelling to the UNO Gallery, University of Nebraska at Omaha (2 September–31 October, 2025).

Fletcher Coleman is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Selected bibliography

Karine Armen, ‘Celebrating Diversity: Vietnamese Artist Ann Phong’s Unique Collage “Proximity During Pandemic” Highlights Asian Contributions to American Culture’, Immigrant Magazine, 16 May 2024, https://www.immigrantmagazine. com/celebrating-diversity-vietnamese-artist-ann-phongs-unique-collage-proximity-during-pandemic-highlights-asian-contributions-to-american-culture/.

Raffi Khatchadourian, ‘Matthew Wong in Light and Shadow’, New Yorker, 9 May 2022.

Vivian Li, ‘The Realm of Appearances: The Abstract Reality of Matthew Wong’, in Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances, ed. Vivian Li, Dallas, 2022, 9–22.

Fione Lo, ed., The Pride of Lingnan: In Commemoration of the 110th Birthday of Chao Shao-an, Hong Kong, 2015.

Melanie Metz, ‘How 25 Dubious Basquiats Created a Massive Museum Scandal—And Exposed Some Dark Art Truths’, Vanity Fair, 24 May 2023.

Jennifer Purtle, ‘Matthew Wong: Blue View, Art Gallery of Ontario’, Orientations 53, no. 2 (March/April 2022): 127–31.

Quan Tue Tran, ‘Lost and Found in Transition: Ann Phong and Memories of Ruptures’, in Ann Phong, ed. Quan Tue Tran, Fullerton, California, 2022, 2–5.

ShiPu Wang, ‘Moonlight over Topaz: Picturing Displacement in the Japanese American Internment’, in Chiura Obata: An American Modern, ed. ShiPu Wang (Santa Barbara, California, 2018, 32–42.

ShiPu Wang, ‘Introduction: Pictures of Belonging’, in Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo, ed. ShiPu Wang, Los Angeles, 2023, 10–19.

Duncan Ryūken Williams, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2019.

Solace in Painting? Diasporic Artists and the Market for Conflict

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