July 27, 2006

[Originally published in the 2005 Expo newspaper]

[Read about other guerrilla art interventions in the Expo DIY Library.]

Throughout the summer of 2004, the city's visual landscape was blanketed with advertisements for the Asian Art Museum's "Geisha: Beyond the Painted Smile" exhibit, images whose Orientalist flavor I found inappropriate.

By emblazoning this Western cultural symbol of idealized oriental femininity everywhere, the aggressive advertising campaign refueled tired stereotypes. The images were trading the racialization of the Asian body for summer box office revenue.

As an act of cultural resistance, I pirated their poster image and turned it into my own, reversing the meaning in the process.

Using a digital point-and-shoot camera, a cheap photo printer and a 5-year-old Macintosh, I replaced the so-called geisha's visage with my own, returning the gaze, and created a new tagline for the poster: "Orientalist Dream Come True: Geisha--Perpetuating the Fetish."

On the closing weekend of the "Geisha" exhibit, my friend S. and I covered Japantown with my mini-posters and planted five dozen glossy inserts in the literature racks of the information booth inside the Asian Art Museum. I documented all of it in digital snapshots.

Various sources noted the wide-ranging impact of the small, simple action--in Japantown, on the museum, in academic discourse, and on public consciousness through the media.

Japantown insiders warned me that museum personnel were calling around the community trying to find out who was responsible. A professor contacted me to welcome my voice to the debate in Bay Area college classrooms, including Mills College, City College, UC Davis and SFSU.

The San Francisco Chronicle allocated nearly a full page, giving last word to a UC Berkeley art history professor: "To the extent that museums assert authority to speak for culture, they open themselves up for critique, and they should engage that critique."

An installation based on my intervention is circulating in exhibition, and I am continuing to guest lecture on it at local universities.

This year's summer blockbuster exhibition at the same museum is a show of treasures from the Dalai Lama's Potala Palace, titled "Tibet: Treasures from the Roof of the World."

The museum agreed with the Chinese government to censor any mention of China's invasion and ongoing occupation of Tibet. Once again, they deny contemporary cultural context in favor of revenue. How could we, in good conscience, stand idly by and let it go unnoticed ... ?

The Lone Lama responded by e-mailing an original image exposing this symbolic violence and brief issue summary to local media outlets.

Pratap Chatterjee of KPFA Radio contacted us; we directed him to spokespeople for both the Tibetan community and the Asian Art Museum. The museum declined to participate in Chatterjee's initial program, but did plan for a later interview on KPFA.

The Lone Lama and the Guerrilla Geisha are members of a Bay Area action network seeking to promote critical debate around practices of cultural appropriation.