Mistigram: Here’s our #stopasianhate story. It was...

Mistigram: Here’s our #stopasianhate story. It was mid-1997 and we were always trying to cultivate relationships with new practitioners of #ANSIart. Artist “Fire From Heaven” requested a lit (a rhyming poem) on a problematic topic – the fundamental superiority of Asian women as a focus for romantic and erotic longing. So many issues, where to start?

We carefully curated a complete collection of vile objectifying Orientalist tropes calibrated precisely to at once fulfil the request while demonstrating to the client that the lens through which the art was shown revealed a monstrous perspective, but we made a critical error: we put too much faith in the power of our art to communicate contrary positions. Perhaps it was too much to expect out of teenagers.

When he saw the poem its subtext went right over his head and he was delighted enough to incorporate it into his exotic blow-up-doll illustration, released, with deadpan sincerity, in both the 15th @fuelwtf and 2nd Everglo artpacks, with our name attached as if to endorse the positions contained in the art… the risk of sarcasm that fails to land properly.

Based out of the intensely multicultural area code 604 on the West Coast of Canada, we had a robust understanding that Asian women are just people like everyone else. (We counted some Asian women among our active membership at the time!) Upon receiving the request, we should have taken FFH aside and explained that we had to decline his proposition due to its flawed and othering premise, and that he had a lot of soul-searching and growth ahead of him. Encouragement was not needed, though privately we were intrigued by the creative challenge of convincingly writing from a position we found repugnant.

(It didn’t even make for good art in the end, so the entire regrettable venture was fruitless on every level! But it leaves us with this anecdote to share with you as a cautionary tale. You’re entitled to your kinks and erotic fixations, but if you’re going to create and share art celebrating their imposition on minority groups, you’d better rigorously interrogate their sexist and racist underpinnings first!)

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