Almost every Thursday for the past three months, Linna Wang toured a different cultural center, art museum or artist studio in Los Angeles. But the tours lost their spark after the one place Wang was most eager to see turned out to be her biggest letdown: the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena.
Her disappointment had nothing to do with the stories told at the museum, moreso with the people in charge — non-Asian leadership where she thinks Asian representation should be.
Wang is a first year Roski School of Art and Design graduate student at USC, pursuing a dual degree in studio art and art history. The program has been an adjustment following her forced transfer from the San Francisco Art Institute after its closure earlier this year, but she enjoyed her Thursday curatorial studies class.
The 24-year-old from Shanghai visited the Pacific Asia Museum, a USC-operated space, with her class in September.
The historic site at 46 N. Los Robles houses one of Southern California’s only collections of Asian and Pacific Island art. It was once named after the Native American and Asian cultural art collector Grace Nicholson, who hired a Pasadena architectural firm to model the building after traditional Chinese construction.
In 1929, the building and courtyard were opened to the public as a center for art galleries and events before Nicholson gifted the building to the City of Pasadena in 1943. From 1954 to 1970, it operated as the Pasadena Art Museum. Its next owners, the Pacificulture Foundation, redesignated the structure as the Pacific Asia Museum in 1987.
In November of 2013, the museum partnered with USC to expand its educational programs related to Asian art, history and culture. Today, the Pacific Asia Museum operates as one of two university museums, alongside the Fisher Museum of Art.
Wang’s experience at the museum was spoiled once a tour of the gallery’s permanent exhibit began. She had concerns about displays from the collection of 17,000 items assembled by the museum’s former and current operators. In the museum’s Chinese gallery, Wang was troubled by a wooden shrine, a Feng shui diagram and a set of jadeite earrings and a matching bracelet.
Using a handwritten chart in her notebook, Wang explained to me the differences between grade A, B and C jade, which she learned about in school growing up in Eastern China, along with lessons about the Qing Dynasty. Because of its color, texture and reflection, she had suspicions that the set of jewels on display in the gallery were not authentic jade, or grade A, despite how they were listed.
Officials at the Pacific Asia Museum determined Wang’s disquiet about the jade to not be true, based on confirmation from gallery docents, but that didn’t ease her frustration.
“I don’t know why white people can become the main curator of Asian art,” Wang said in an interview a few weeks after the visit. She took issue with the authority responsible for the collection, the same person who led her class excursion: a white woman and the Pacific Asia Museum’s sole curator, Rebecca Hall.
“Some of the stuff, she can only know the first layer,” Wang continued.
Despite Hall having a doctorate in Southeast Asian art history, Wang feels as though the approach to display different cultures in the museum lacks a depth only an Asian person can properly construct.
The Asian population is the largest ethnic demographic — roughly 62% — of the San Gabriel Valley, where the Pacific Asia Museum is located. Further, Asian individuals make up USC’s third largest ethnic group.
Wang wondered why an Asian resident, student or USC faculty member wasn’t curating in Hall’s place.
“Her way of thinking is really shallow,” Wang said. “Like America’s culture.”
Joining Hall as a non-Asian, executive leader for the Pacific Asia Museum and Fisher Museum of Art is director Bethany Montagano. Montagano accepted the Pacific Asia Museum’s director role in 2019 following former director Christina Yu Yu’s departure. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies and studied at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan. She also carries a master’s in museum studies and a doctorate in American history with a focus on gender, race and cultural representation.
Wang’s apprehension about the museum’s leadership joins a larger conversation about diversity in culturally specific museum spaces. And Hall agrees that representation of diverse cultures should be top of mind.
“I think people are right to have those concerns,” Hall said during an interview at the museum. “I can never change who I am, but as a person in power at a museum, I’ll do everything I can to work with people of diverse backgrounds.”
Most of the items on display at the Pacific Asia Museum were present before Hall’s start as curator in 2018. Still, she reaffirmed the executive team’s work with the Pacific Asia Museum’s board of directors — the majority of whom are Asian — and entities such as the China Society of Southern California to accurately label and present items in exhibits, such as the jadeite earrings and bracelet.
“One of the things that I’m fostering are these labels that I call ‘community labels,’ [for] which we have conversations with members of communities that are represented in the museum, to hear their perspectives on the objects,” Hall said.
However, for student Storm Bookhard, who joined Wang on the class tour of the Pacific Asia Museum, consulting diverse voices for the museum’s setup isn’t enough. She wanted to know how the gallery was actively fighting for Asian communities.
“We directly asked [Hall] about how they, as a space, have responded to current violent movements against Asian and Asian American people,” recalled Bookhard, who is Black. She was referring to the increase in AAPI hate crimes following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hall told the class she hadn’t curated any exhibitions that specifically fought against hate; her job was to give Asian artists a platform to share their own messages through rotating exhibits such as “Off Kilter: Power and Pathos.” The summer exhibition highlighted the experimental attitudes of three female Asian artists and their ability to address sociopolitical issues with satire and critical commentary.
The students shared one other concern about the Pacific Asia Museum regarding what audience the institution caters to and what messages it’s trying to send.
“For me, if I were working at the [Pacific Asia Museum], I would add more language,” said Wang, referencing the museum’s use of only English on labels throughout eight galleries spanning art from Japan, Korea, China, Himalaya, Pacific Island and South and Southeast Asia. “First think about [the] Asian community. Then think about other audiences in the U.S.”
Various language options are available for audiences to translate information on the museum’s website, however.
Stacey Queen, a museum scholar and the Director of Education and Visitor Services at Tudor Place Historic House & Garden in Washington D.C., published an academic journal in 2018 on upholding diversity in cultural spaces that historically served predominantly white audiences. In an email, Queen added to the conversation surrounding representation in leadership at establishments such as the Pacific Asia Museum and the importance of uplifting culturally diverse voices.
“Today, more than ever, museums, cultural spaces and historic sites must embrace diversity, inclusion, equity and accessibility challenging those who want to rewrite the facts of history with narratives that whitewash the truth and boost falsehoods and lies,” she wrote. “The responsibility of engaging the public in an effort to unite mankind falls into the lap of our spaces.”
Hall said she understands the apprehension Wang and Bookhard have about leadership at the Pacific Asia Museum. She wished more people were willing to talk about their concerns with cultural diversity in museum spaces of all kinds. The students, meanwhile, are hopeful that speaking up about their concerns leads to more active and obvious representation at the Pacific Asia Museum and similar culturally specific spaces.
As Bookhard said, it’s not a matter of standing against something: “I don’t think that this is a conversation to oppose [Pacific Asia Museum]. It’s a matter of us continually reevaluating how these systems work and what it looks like to have a public-facing position — a position in which histories are in your hands.”