Mobius Artist Event: Lani Asunción and Joanna Tam in Willful Dialects

Exhibition dates: April 26 - May 24, 2025
Mapping Asian American Workshop with Joanna Tam: May 3, 2 to 4 pm
Curator's Talk: May 18, 1 to 2 pm
Closing Performance with Lani Asunción, May 24, 6 to 8 pm
Location: Distillery Gallery, 516 E 2nd St, Boston, MA 02127 x No Call No Show Gallery, 516 E 2nd St. 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02127

​​Curated by Yi Cynthia Chen, Willful Dialects considers spoken, visual, and felt languages and dialects through the lens of a few Asian-American and Asian Diaspora artists working in and around Boston.An anti-survey, this moment in time intends to refuse a monolithic descriptor of what it means to be Asian in America today. The term “Asian-American” itself was coined in 1968 by Bay Area students and activists in part to foster camaraderie between ethnicities and reject the derogatory term “Oriental.” This concept of the Oriental as a fantasy constructed to maintain power dynamics was explored deeply in Edward Said’s seminal 1978 text Orientalism. Said noted that Orientalism is “willed human work.” Edward Said was a Palestinian-American writer whose work makes up some of the foundational texts of current Asian-American studies.In nonfiction book Willful Subjects, author Sara Ahmed also considers this willfulness, and how instead of being a locale for penalization, difference can be a source of resilience.

Willful Dialects exhibition continues this line of questioning, contextualizing the relationship between our wills and language’s ability to activate. The artists and artworks in this exhibition arguably specify their own dialects and dialectics of expression. Willful Dialects ponders these elastic potentialities of identity as a home where one can shape visual and auditory languages and thus experience.

Willful Dialects exhibition poster design: Chen Luo