Godzilla: Echoes of the 1990s Asian American Arts Network: Curated by Jennifer Samet, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York

The exhibition showcases the work of individual artists involved with the network at the time. Spanning two gallery spaces, the show includes established artists and also amplifies the voices of artists who have not been centered in the canon, and who made their careers showing in alternative spaces.

Godzilla founders—artists Bing Lee and Ken Chu, along with art historian Margo Machida—wanted to negotiate the visibility and representation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the art world. Godzilla functioned as a support structure and source of collective action.

Godzilla is a New York-based group of Asian American visual artists and art professionals whose goal is to establish a dynamic forum that will foster information exchange, mutual support, documentation and networking among our expanding numbers across the United States.

The artists in the current exhibition are drawn from those who showed in historically significant Godzilla-organized exhibitions. The 1991 exhibition at “Dismantling Invisibility,” curated by Ken Chu, included work that explored AIDS invisibility within the Asian American community. The “Curio Shop,” organized by Skowmon Hastanan, appropriated the idea of a Chinatown curio shop in order to confront the mainstream exoticization of Asian Americans and display the myriad cultural differences within the monolithic label Asian American. Godzilla members continued to collaborate until their final exhibition “Why Asia?” in 2001 which included a series of banners hung on Canal Street lamp posts.