Alien Abstraction: Isamu Noguchi and Racial Form

This paper explores the convergence of modernist abstraction, Asian racialization, and alien citizenship in “Exclusion Era” of the early and mid-twentieth-century United States. As historian Mae Ngai argues, US legislations including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1924 Johnson Reed Immigration Act produced the status of “alien citizenship,” whereby Asian migrants were legally excluded from the American citizenry and associated with perpetual foreignness and unassimilability.

In particular, I turn to the work of Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi to explore how the liminal position of Asiatic figures in the West—coded as inscrutable, inhuman, or even unrepresentable—manifested in visual form. While Noguchi’s turn to biomorphic abstraction has been absorbed by art historians into the narrative of high modernism, ascribed either to the belated influence of European modernism or an invocation of Eastern heritage and traditions, my paper departs from this framing to ask: how did Asian diasporic artists utilize both the artistic techniques and logical procedures of abstraction to reflect (or refute) their conditions of flattened, dehumanized racialization?

I trace Noguchi’s sculptural depiction of the body against historical conditions of racialized exclusion, Japanese incarceration, and the aftermath of nuclear war. In highlighting depictions (or occlusions) of Asian personhood through devices of fragmentation, reduction, and displacement, I argue that tropes of racialized alienation and ontological otherness were refracted and rearticulated through the artist’s engagement with modernist form. In turn, this underscores how the very logic of Asiatic racialization was central to the global transmission of modernist aesthetics.