What Does Queer Art Look Like?

In celebration of Pride Month, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art Naz Cuguoğlu spotlights three artists whose work appears in the museum’s collection. Challenging the idea that queer Asian art must express pain, these artists instead offer kinship, joy, spirituality, and radical self-expression as modes of resistance. “It’s our responsibility as a museum to create a space not only where these artists’ voices are heard,” Cuguoğlu says, “but also where future artists from marginalized communities can feel seen.”

TT Takemoto is a fourth-generation Japanese American artist based in the Bay Area. Takemoto’s video On the Line (2018) excavates overlooked histories of WWII-era Asian American women working side by side in a cannery while their husbands are away at war. Resisting narratives of painful victimhood, the women form intimate bonds of shared memory and joy.

Bernice Bing, a Chinese American lesbian artist, centered care and community in both her practice and her activism. A beloved Bay Area figure, Bing co-founded the Asian American Women Artists Association and mentored generations of younger artists. Paintings such as Self Portrait with a Mask (1960) reflect the artist’s lifelong exploration of belonging. Shaped by the power of chosen family and the interconnectedness of art and life, Bing understood that identity was never a solitary creation.

Hong Kong-based artist Wesley Tongson turned to spirituality and landscape as a way of navigating identity and mental health. Diagnosed with schizophrenia and grappling with his queerness in a less accepting era, Tongson immersed himself in the lineage of Chinese ink painting. His later works brim with a spiritual intensity that transcends tradition, offering viewers a sense of inner space.

Mountains of Heaven 1, 1998, by Wesley Tongson (1957–2012). Ink and colors on paper. Asian Art Museum, 2019.102.