In one image, a mother and three children crouch in a small bamboo hut, next to a mysterious fifth figure wearing a white mask and cast-off clothes. In another, a close-up of two fists reveals a disturbing tattoo referencing the genocide that shattered Cambodia in the late 1970s. In a third, the faces of a transplanted couple from India, now living in the United States, are lined with exhaustion as they clean rooms in a Tennessee motel.
If identity is a murky subject, photography is one means for trying to define it. That’s the thrust behind “Dislocation: Negotiating Identity,” a photo exhibit at the Smith College Museum of Art that showcases the work of several artists from South and Southeast Asia: India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.
The photographers, ranging in age from 30 to 80, and working in color and black and white, explore various types of identity in their work, from social class to the split nationalism of Asians who now live in other parts of the world, most notably the United States.
The SCMA exhibit, which will be on display through Aug. 14, also reflects the growing strength and diversity of photography from that part of Asia, where economic and technological growth has produced significant changes in the past two decades, according to Sandra Matthews, project advisor for the exhibit.
“It’s a really compelling show with a very eclectic mix,” said Matthews, a professor of photography and film at Hampshire College and the founder and editor of the Trans Asia Photography Review (TAP), an online publication. “I think you’re seeing a new generation of photographers really coming of age” from the region.
Matthews suggested some possible artists to the exhibit organizers, which included Aprile Gallant, SCMA’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs, and Samuel Morse, Amherst College professor of Asian Studies and a consulting curator for Asian art.
“I’ve been looking for ways to make TAP available as a local source,” Matthews said. “I really think [the exhibit organizers] have put together a great show.”
It’s the second exhibit SCMA has put on in the past year focusing on the work of Asian photographers. Last fall, the museum hosted “Dislocation: Urban Experience,” a show that featured photos of life in major cities in East Asia, from Toyko to Seoul to Taipei, as well as the increasing urbanization of rural areas of China and other countries.
Both exhibits have been staged in a new wing dedicated to Asian art, named after former Smith President Carol T. Christ. The gallery is part of an overall push by SCMA to develop that part of its collection, a response to Asia’s importance in world affairs and the college’s growing Asian student body and curriculum.
In addition, a special exhibit at the museum in 2013 celebrated the 100th anniversary of Smith obtaining its first pieces of Asian art. And last fall, SCMA hired its first-ever curator of Asian art, Yao Wu, a native of China who’s now working toward her doctorate in art history at Stanford University.
One important theme in the current exhibit is that of Asian diaspora — and in the last 40 years, perhaps the most dramatic example of that was the flight of Cambodians from the violence of the Vietnam War and then the Khmer Rouge regime, which killed an estimated 1.8 million Cambodians after taking control of the country in the mid-1970s.
Photographer Peter Pin was born in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border to parents who had escaped the Khmer Rouge; the family eventually resettled in California, and Pin has since concentrated on the lives of Cambodian-Americans as they look to rebuild their lives in their new country and escape the shadow of genocide.
In his most striking image, the two heavily tattooed fists of an unnamed, unseen person are set side by side. One spells out “Killing,” with an image of Cambodia’s famous Angkor Wat temple above it, while the other fist offers “Fields” with skyscrapers above it. Both tattoos also seem to be wreathed in flames.
Pin, who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, also has juxtaposed blown-up color photos of three older Cambodian-Americans with images of them, or mementoes, from their past.
In one, an elderly woman with close-cropped gray hair is paired with a worn identity card with a small black-and-white photo of her as a young woman. In another, an older man, Meas Duang, a vacant look in his eyes, is matched with a faded and partly torn black-and-white photo of four young women and girls and two small boys.
An old family photo? And if so, are any of those young people still alive today? The look on Duang’s face suggests they’re not. It’s a haunting and disturbing image.
Gauri Gill, an Indian photographer who did part of her studies in the United States, offers a look at the mixed experiences of Indian-Americans. In a split image, a taxi driver in Maryland, Prem Kumar Walekar, lies in a coffin after being shot dead by a sniper at a gas station; in the right side of the photo, the driver’s son, his face rigid, gazes at the camera near a line of cars outside the funeral.
Another split image profiles an Indian couple working as a cleaning crew in a Days Inn in Tennessee. The wife stands against a wall, her eyes closed, looking exhausted, while her husband, his image reflected from a mirror he’s cleaning, looks resigned.
Yet a young Indian-American woman, Nicole, looks more at home in another photo by Gill: she’s curled up on the floor of the stockroom of her mother’s convenience store in Mississippi, contentedly chatting on a cell phone next to boxes of soda and other goods.
Yao Wu, the SCMA Asian art curator, says she’s particularly taken by the photos of Jyoti Bhatt, from India, and Maika Elan, from Vietnam. Their work — Bhatti’s in black and white, Elan’s in color — has been hung directly across from one another’s, offering a noted contrast.
“They both capture these fleeting moments in time,” Wu said during a recent tour of the show. Bhatti’s photos, of scenes from rural India dating back to the late 1960s, are particularly artful, Wu added, pointing to a picture of two women at a small-town produce market partly hiding their faces behind their shawls, apparently from Bhatti’s camera: “There’s some real humor in that picture.”
Elan’s color photos are more like candid snapshots, Wu noted, showcasing moments of gentle intimacy between gay couples in Cambodia and Vietnam.
One of the most striking is a shot of the bare legs of two men, knees in the air, as they rest side by side on a mattress. In exhibition notes, Elan says many Vietnamese who saw her pictures initially expressed disgust, but she hopes that by showing the couples in simple, day-to-day activities, viewers eventually can “become interested, then gradually empathize with homosexual people.”
Wu says she’s led numerous groups, including students, on a tour of the show and has now gained a greater appreciation for how the space can be used for future shows showcasing Asian art.
“It’s a great space for showing the diversity of our collection and for putting together shows that can have a particular theme or thread. … I’m really looking forward to the things we can do.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
“Dislocation: Negotiating Diversity” is on view through Aug. 14 in the Carol T. Christ Asian Art Gallery at the Smith College Museum of Art. For information, visit www.smith.edu/artmuseum.