Scholars and curators are beginning to focus on long-overlooked Asian American artists, acknowledging their importance in the narrative of American art. 

SAN FRANCISCO — She was an Asian American woman, a lesbian and a community activist. Bernice Bing, whose intense abstract expressionist paintings fused Eastern and Western techniques, had a lot going against her in the eyes of museum curators. For decades, she and her peers were almost invisible.

Nearly a quarter century after her death in 1998, Bing is being celebrated by the Asian Art Museum, which, like other museums in her lifetime, excluded most Asian Americans artists.

The exhibition “Into View: Bernice Bing” is showing her paintings, drawings and journal excerpts from the late ’50s to the mid-90s in a small, powerful exhibition signifying an ongoing major correctional shift by the institution.

“This demonstrates the museum’s investment in underrecognized Asian American artists,” said Abby Chen, who in 2018 was appointed the museum’s first head of the department for contemporary art. ‌ Chen, who is Asian American, is the curator of the Bing exhibition, which is on view through May 2023.

Not until 2014, 48 years after its founding, did the Asian Art Museum begin solo exhibitions by Asian American artists. They were sometimes included in group shows, “but not widely,” said Zac Rose, a museum spokesman.

Chen said that until about 15 years ago at the museum there was an “old-fashioned, colonial gaze” of art objects imbued with “fetishization and exotification of Asians.”

The Asian Art Museum was founded by Avery Brundage, a Caucasian sports administrator, whose collection of historical East and South Asian art was the focal point of the museum since its inception in 1966. (Asian American artists have long argued that the museum presented Asian art from a mostly white perspective, and a bust of its founding patron was removed in June 2020.)

“Very few Asian American artists have been included in the retelling of 20th century art in this country,” said Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and formerly director of the Asia Society Museum.