Please Use Your Voice, Use Your Platform; A Call for Allies
Our call for allies to come together to eradicate hate and violence.
While this no doubt has been a difficult year, we must outreach in this difficult time to you.
We at Vessel Gallery would like to express our sorrow at the murders of 8 people, 6 of whom were Asian women, in Atlanta Georgia on March 16, 2021. Here are their names:
Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33
Xiaojie Tan, 49
Daoyou Feng, 44
Hyun Jung Grant, 51
Suncha Kim, 69
Soon Chung Park, 74
Yong Ae Yue, 63
Paul Andre Michels, 54
In solidarity we lift up their names and send our compassion, sympathies and healing to their families, friends, and community. We also send healing energy to Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz, 30 an injured victim of this act of violence.
We at Vessel Gallery recognize that this senseless tragedy is, in many ways, the culmination of a long history of imperialism, exploitation, misogyny, and racism which are foundational to modern day oppression. We are also deeply upset and appalled by the rise in attacks of violence against our elders, and ongoing violence, physical harm, and racial terror on AAPI, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities all over our country. These events of violence need to be handled with accountability. Anything less is absolutely unacceptable.
Though US-based English-language media and law enforcement have tried to explain the murderer’s racist and misogynist motives as solely a “sex addiction,” or that “he had a bad day,” we know that the murderer’s ability to see Asian women at a massage parlor as disposable is rooted in historical patterns of subjugating Asian women as racialized sexual objects. After all, the first piece of anti-Chinese immigration legislation passed in the US was the 1875 Page Act, which banned the migration of Chinese women on the grounds that all Chinese women were sex workers. The effects of this piece of legislation, long since overturned, are such that Asian women are still made targets of suspicion and violence on the grounds of their supposed sexual impurity, racial Otherness, and the kind of labor they perform. With knowledge of this history, we see this event not only in its specificity within anti-Asian violence in the last year, but also indicative of the ways that stereotypes about Asians put us in the intersection of white supremacy and patriarchy. It is with this in mind that we condemn racism, and the perpetuating forces of misogyny, patriarchy, and all violence against women, especially racialized and Asian women. We express our solidarity with im/migrant women, low-waged and working class women, inclusive of Asians and Asian Americans facing economic and material precarity structured by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of random, xenophobic, reactionary violence.
We at Vessel Gallery will continue to advocate for racial justice. In doing so we will reject the dehumanizing of Asian people, condemn anti-Asian rhetoric, and hold up the names of the victims of the Atlanta Georgia tragedy, while continuing to recognize the structuring violence of systems of oppression and white supremacy, and the centuries of pain, trauma, and violence enabled by these forces. We will advocate for our Asian and BIPOC sisters and brothers by raising our voices through art. We will continue to curate art and connect with artists that also recognize these histories. Our hope is to show art that creates dialogue, connects the public with artists, and mobilizes us towards the brighter tomorrow we envision. We invite you to our forthcoming online exhibition Excuse Me, Can I See Your ID – Two opening Friday, April 30, our second installation which provides a platform for Asian and Asian American artist voices from the Bay Area. Thank you for listening.
May you be safe, peaceful, and free from suffering,
Lonnie Lee and the Vessel Gallery Family
We join the chorus of voices organizing against anti-Asian violence, and ask you to speak up, protect and defend us, get involved, learn more, and donate / support:
Stop AAPI Hate https://stopaapihate.org/
Red Canary Song https://www.redcanarysong.net/
Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta https://www.advancingjustice-atlanta.org/donate
AAPI Women Lead and the #ImReady Movement https://www.imreadymovement.org/
Asian American Feminist Collective https://www.asianamfeminism.org/
Asian Immigrant Women Advocates https://www.aiwa.org/about/
Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council http://www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/
Oakland Chinatown Coalition https://www.facebook.com/chinatowncoalition/
For further reading:
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae Ngai https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160825/impossible-subjects
Ornamentalism by Anne Anlin Cheng
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ornamentalism-9780190604615?cc=us&lang=en&
More Policing is not the Solution to Anti-Asian Violence by Jason Wu https://truthout.org/articles/more-policing-is-not-the-solution-to-anti-asian-violence/
Defending Asian women, defending sex workers by the Barnard Center for Research on Women
http://bcrw.barnard.edu/defending-asian-women-defending-sex-workers/
Please contact your senators to support and pass these two bills into law: Hate Crimes Act and the No Hate Bill
Thank you again.
