Best!: Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts - Paperback

by Christopher Ho (Editor), Daisy Nam (Editor)

"This refreshingly original anthology offers a remarkable window into the everyday spaces where art, biography, and cultural marginality provoke and enrich one another." --Arjun Appadurai, Max Weber Global Professor, Bard Graduate Center

This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experiences of Asian-American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. The form of the letter offers readers intimate insights into the complexities of Asian American experiences, moving beyond the model-minority myth.

Chronicling everyday lives, dreams, rage, family histories, and cultural politics, these letters ignite new ways of being, and modes of creating, at a moment of racial reckoning.

Author Biography

Christopher K. Ho is a speculative artist based in New York, Hong Kong, and Telluride, Colorado. His practice encompasses making, organizing, writing, and teaching. He is known for materially exquisite objects that draw from learned material about, and lived encounters with, power and otherness in an unevenly decolonized, increasingly networked world. Based between Cambridge, MA and New York City, NY Daisy Nam is an independent curator and programmer. Her areas of focus and research include feminist practices across mediums of performance, film/video, sculpture and installation. With over 15 years of experience in arts institutions, she was most recently the assistant director at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University from 2015-19 organizing exhibitions, public programs and publications.