Beyond Hybridity: Abstraction and Racial Legibility in Seong Moy’s Inscription of T’Chao Pae II (1952)

This paper considers the work of Chinese American artist Seong Moy, focusing particularly on his color woodcuts on paper produced between the late 1940s and the late 1950s. Central to the project is an analysis of his 1952 print Inscription of T’Chao Pae II. The print, composed of pseudo-Chinese characters centered in the middle of the composition against an abstract background, pairs lyrical abstraction and dynamic linework to produce a stimulating tension in which abstract form, character, and figure become indistinct. I argue that the artist’s use of calligraphic abstraction should be analyzed outside of the framework of a hybridized “Eastern” and “Western” aesthetic often present in scholarship about postwar Asian American artists. Instead, I read Moy’s Inscription as the artist’s effort to represent yet destabilize his racial identity within the Cold War context in a technique that challenges the authenticity and veritability of visible signifiers of race. In making this argument, what is also being interrogated are broader concepts about the immutable basis of race and its externalized, visible traces – both a subject’s physical attributes and the texts, images, and other visual material they create. Reacting against the perceived relationship between abstract art and Asian culture as it materialized particularly, amongst other appearances, in the Cold War-era “Zen boom” in the United States, my project makes way for a refusal of stereotypes that suggest that proof of essential and immutable racial differences can be indisputably found in visual signifiers.