AAAinA’s “Vaguely Asian” Leadership Camp, led by Simon Wu and Daniel Chew, shares four collaborative zines exploring aesthetics, colonialism, solidarity, translation, and more.

In 2016, the art-fashion collective CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garment New York, or Cute Fucking Gay New York), coined the term “vaguely Asian” to describe a “feeling, or notion of Asianness, that isn’t really Asian, that connects us.” They used it to refer to a particular aesthetic in their work drawn from a “shifting set of symbols, experiences, and relationships shared by people with similar migration histories from Asia.” But being “vague,” it also conjures other associations—Rei Kawakubo’s bloopy dresses, cellophane wrapped around remote controls, gauzy plaids and, crucially, the ghostly presence of thousands of Asian workers who produce garments for the global fashion market. The term is meant to describe existing and yet to be formed potentials, inviting notions of expansiveness rather than foreclosure.

Historically, the “vaguely Asian” finds a cousin in the term “orientalism.” Originally coined by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said in 1978 to refer to distorted depictions of Middle Eastern subjects by French imperialists, orientalism was quickly adopted in the field of Asian American studies to describe processes of fetishisation, caricature, and demonisation that Asian workers as early as the mid-eighteenth century experienced when they arrived in North America. As we witness the latest episode of American-funded genocide in Gaza (which might also be known as “West Asia”) how can we assess solidarity differently through the “vaguely Asian”?

What might the “vaguely Asian” be? Who is it for? How does it try, or fail, to map what critical fashion scholar Thuy Linh Tu calls an “architecture of intimacy” across class and geography, stretching from the Asian diasporic elite to migrant labourers and crazy rich Asians? What possibilities does it open, and foreclose, compared to “Asian” or “Asian American” forms of racialised identity? Can the “vaguely Asian” model what writer Viet Thanh Nguyen has called “an Asian American identity revived by an expansive solidarity”—an identity that allows us to ask questions and seek possibilities beyond those given to us within the confines of racism and colonisation?

From August 2024 to February 2025, Asia Art Archive in America hosted the sixth iteration of their ongoing reading group programme, titled Leadership Camp. This iteration was led by Simon Wu and Daniel Chew under the theme “Vaguely Asian.” After an initial seminar led by Wu and Chew, the subsequent meetings’ readings were chosen and led by participants. As a culminating project, the campers produced a zine, designed by Xinyi Li and Lulu Gioiello, with each session as one component of the zine. Below are the digital versions of all four zines, each with their own theme and readings.

Initiated in 2016, Leadership Camp is a long-standing programme at AAAinA that brings together arts practitioners at varying stages of their careers to discuss through an “Asian” lens a wide range of topics impacting art, art practice, and the arts profession. This Camper-led programme encourages discussion, debate, and knowledge sharing, and begins with an overarching theme, an initial set of “framing questions,” and a reading list. Please join AAAinA’s mailing list for information on the next open call for Leadership Camp.

—Simon Wu and Daniel Chew

Led by Simon Wu and Daniel Chew, the first reader introduces the idea of the “vaguely Asian” through readings by Wu, Lisa Lowe, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Eileen Chang.

Led by Lulu Yao Gioiello and Johann Yamin, the second reader complicates the solidarity that the “vaguely Asian” proposes, looking to instances of Asian colonialisms, including their current manifestations, and their use of the idea of a pan Asian community to further their ends.

Led by Emma Ike and Julie Chen, the third reader explores “the intersection of art, protest, and solidarity” at important moments in US history to ask how Asian American politics can effectively address the issues of our current times.

Led by Sixing Xu and Xinyi Li, the fourth reader seeks to complicate ideas around translation, asking the reader to approach the subject through a new lens by questioning the validity of an “origin” while making room for ideas around untranslatability. 

Daniel Chew is a filmmaker and artist who is based in New York. He works collaboratively with Micaela Durand in film and with the collective CFGNY in art. Working in collaboration is very important to his practice and is an intentional political decision that models an alternate way of existing in a world that obsesses over the cult of the individual. He has shown work at International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Hammer Museum, Cooper Hewitt, MoMA PS1, MOCA LA, e-flux, Japan Society, Auto Italia London, and The Shed among many other venues. A trilogy of short films he co-directed with Micaela Durand is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. He has done residencies at Macdowell, Fogo Island Arts, BiljmAIR Amsterdam and has held fellowships with Jerome Foundation, Queer Art, and Asia Art Archive in America.

Emma Ike is an arts administrator and educator passionate about community engagement and promoting access, equity, and cultural citizenship in museums. As Manager of Education at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, she embraces anti-bias values and diverse models of co-creation to collaboratively organise education and public programmes serving access, adult, community, family, school, and teen audiences. Notable projects have focused on uplifting local Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander artists and communities, including commemorative Day of Remembrance programmes and Community Days in connection to the Museum’s Open Call for Artist Banners.

Previously, Emma held education programming roles at the Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Hall, Children’s Museum of the Arts, Rubin Museum of Art, Studio Institute, and Venice Biennale. She earned a BS in Art History and Museum Professions with a minor in Asian Studies and an AS in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology. In 2021, she was selected to participate in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Museum Education Practicum and is currently in the New York Foundation for the Arts’ 2024 Emerging Leaders Program.

Johann Yamin (he/they) is an artist, art worker, and educator. His current research and writing focus on digital cultures from the contexts of Singapore and its broader region of Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on the materiality of communication infrastructures and their entanglements with colonial histories. Responding to the technopolitics of virtual worlds, his practice has taken shape through text-based videogames, moving image installations, curatorial work, and varied forms of support. He was a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at Eyebeam, New York, for co-organising the online project Pulau Something, and a Curatorial & Research Resident at the Singapore Art Museum in 2021. He was awarded a Rhizome Microgrant in 2023. He is currently a PhD student at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication programme.

Julie Chen is from San Jose, CA. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College in 2024, and was a Fulbright Fellow researching Chinese fast fashion workers in Prato, Italy, from 2019–20. She works as a fundraiser for CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. She also makes music as Slime Queen.

Lucia (Lulu) Yao Gioiello (b. New York City) is a creative director and founder of the cross-cultural book series and platform FAR–NEAR, aimed at broadening perspectives of Asia through image, person, idea, and history to unlearn the inherent dominative mode. She lives and works in New York City. Working through the cross-cultural effects of imperialism and migration, her annual printed book series FAR–NEAR aims to blur the boundaries in which Asia is positioned and viewed on a global scale. She has developed an on- and offline space for the international Asian creative community to express and share cultural commentary freely. Her work has influenced curators and artists such as Kikuji Kawada and Xiaochan Hua of Hua International to curate further exhibitions on the topic. Her work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library Special Collections, The Franklin Furnace/MoMA Artists’ Books Collection, the SVA Library and ICP library. Her books are sold in various art bookstores and galleries across Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the UAE, such as the Walker Art Center, Tsutaya Ginza, 0fr Paris, Artbook at MoCA, and more. In addition to FAR–NEAR, she writes and directs stories for various publications, galleries, and art collectives such as Document Journal, Circa.art, Beyond Noise, and WHAAM Gallery. She supports herself and her artistic endeavors as a freelance creative director in still and moving image for clients like Prada, YSL Beauty, Apple, Marriott International, and other globally influential brands.

Simon Wu is a curator and writer involved in collaborative art production and research. He has organised exhibitions and programmes at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, MoMA, and David Zwirner, among other venues. In 2021 he was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and was featured in Cultured magazine’s Young Curators series. He was a 2018 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and is currently in the PhD programme in History of Art at Yale University. His first book, Dancing On My Own, is out with Harper in June 2024. He has two brothers, Nick and Duke, and loves the ocean.

Sixing Xu (b. 1996, Beijing) is an artist, writer, and translator based in Brooklyn. Informed by a crisscrossing movement between linguistic borders, she makes sculpture–text installations that mine other(ed) meanings and storylines out of the insignificant, the accidental, and the peripheral. Xu has exhibited works at 601Artspace, New York; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Current Plans, Hong Kong; Shanghai Himalayas Museum; Chengdu Times Art Museum; gallery no one, Chicago, among others. Xu’s writings and projects have appeared in print and on the digital platforms of Spike Art Magazine, Sine Theta Magazine, Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, and Macalline Art Center. She was a participant in Triple Canopy’s 2024 Publication Intensive and the co-founder of Pararailing, an artist-run nomadic space and organization. Xu holds a BA in Media Studies from Vassar College.

Xinyi Li is an educator and designer trespassing and dwelling on multiple thresholds. Her practice includes pedagogical expression, diagrammatic media, and visual opacity. Her recent work addresses diasporic experiences and food practice, digital resistance and creative subversions, and language and pedagogy in transnational and transcultural contexts. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute. With the group post-radical pedagogy, she questions the values and legacies that shape design pedagogical practice. Previously, she collaborated on Digital Humanities projects and engaged with design research for healthcare experience.

The copyrights of the materials contained within these zines reside with the original author and are strictly used for pedagogical purposes only.