The social body is separable as individual bodies. Individual bodies aggregate as the social body. Bodies—your body, my body, our bodies—often inform symbols, hence the embodied aspects of theory, the coding of bodies in narrative film, and the activated bodies in art and performance. Does the personal/social scheme track the private/public scheme? Perhaps, and, as Alex Paik shows in this bundle of mini-essays, particularly when it comes to the racial coding of bodies, the individual markers of the social.

– Dan S. Wang

Racialized identity has always been the site of collapse between the public and the private. The history of Asian Americans’ legal, political, and social belonging in the United States and our dynamic positioning between the forces of white supremacy and anti-Blackness has been central to my continually evolving sense of self—even before I recognized it. The conditions and public policies used to justify U.S. military intervention, which created the Korean diaspora in the United States, are entangled with my family’s migration and my birth.

Public policies and representation, both in Asia and in the United States, are intimately braided into my embodied personal history. My journey to understand my own Asian American identity is a complex combination of discovering myself amid internalized public perception, navigating the blurring between mimicry and authenticity, and absorbing the influence of friendships and environment. The oft-quoted maxim “the personal is political” is a way of describing how public policy and oppressive systems are embodied in our persons. Still, I am less interested in this passive way of thinking about identity and more in the complex ways in which these “outside” forces become fused with our own processes of identity formation, coloring how we think about ourselves and move through the world. What follows are short essays that examine the complicated tensions and contradictions within different diasporic Asian identity formations, as told through theory, film, and art.



In “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Sara Ahmed describes how whiteness enables white bodies to pass through structures and spaces with little to no friction. On the other hand, racialized bodies typically encounter snags or stops, making the body itself a site of “social stress.” To illustrate this point, she recounts two instances of being stopped in New York:

“I arrive in New York, clutching my British passport. I hand it over. He looks at me, and then looks at my passport. I know what questions will follow. ‘Where are you from?’ My passport indicates my place of birth. ‘Britain,’ I say. I feel like adding, ‘Can’t you read. I was born in Salford,’ but I stop myself. He looks down at my passport, not at me. ‘Where is your father from?’ It was the same last time I arrived in New York. It is the question I get asked now, which seems to locate what is suspect not in my body, but as that which has been passed down the family line, almost like a bad inheritance. ‘Pakistan,’ I say, slowly. ‘Do you have a Pakistani passport.’ No, I say.

“Eventually, he lets me through. The name ‘Ahmed,’ a Muslim name, slows me down. It blocks my passage, even if only temporarily. I get stuck, and then move on. When I fly out of New York later that week, I am held up again. This time it is a friendlier encounter. I find out I am now on the ‘no fly list,’ and they have to ring to get permission to let me through. It takes time, of course. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘my mother is on it too.’ I feel some strange comradeship with his mother. I know what he is saying: he means ‘anyone’ could be on this list, almost as if to say ‘even my mother,’ whose innocence of course would be beyond doubt. I know it’s a way of saying, ‘it’s not about you. Don’t take it personally.’ It isn’t about me of course. And yet it involves me. My name names me after all. It might not be personal, but nor is it about ‘anyone.’ It is my name that slows me down.”

There is a triple or even quadruple consciousness at play here, with Ahmed noticing how various identity markers and public policies (non-whiteness, gender, surname, Islamophobia, nationality) slow her progress through the airport. These anecdotes reveal not only how racialized bodies encounter friction as they move through whiteness. In this case, whiteness is the entire structure of airport security that unevenly targets Black and brown bodies, codified through training, propaganda, and media representation, and expressed through the largely POC airport security staff in New York City’s airports. In a talk at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018, the artist Lorraine O’Grady said that in the future, white supremacy would no longer need white people. The future is already here.

These anecdotes also reveal how Ahmed herself adapts her speech—and polices her anger—as a result of repeated snags like being stopped at the airport (“I feel like adding ‘can’t you read. I was born in Salford,’ 

” [emphasis mine]). Ahmed sees both the apparatus that slows her, and understands herself as a body-that-is-slowed.

In the early 1920s the Supreme Court handed down two decisions regarding whether or not Asians in the United States could be considered eligible for naturalization—roughly a decade before 1932, when Ryan Coogler’s film 

 (1923). In their respective cases, Japanese American Ozawa and Indian American Thind argued that they should be considered white and thus eligible for citizenship (perhaps a sign of their own internalized anti-Blackness). Both were denied their claims, despite being long-term, assimilated residents. In Ozawa’s case, the Supreme Court rejected his claim by arguing that white meant Caucasian, which Ozawa was not. Using this logic, Thind asserted that he was, in fact, Caucasian and thus eligible for naturalization. The Supreme Court instead contradicted its previous argument to deny his claim, saying that although Thind indeed could be considered Caucasian, whiteness should “be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man.” As a result of this case, up to fifty Indian Americans had their citizenship revoked.

It was with those judgments in mind—decisions that legitimated the codification of racialized bodies—that I viewed the Chow family in 

, Ryan Coogler’s film about supernatural goings-on in Depression-era Mississippi. It tells the story of the Smokestack twins, who have returned to their hometown to open up a juke joint, and follows them throughout the day as they prepare for the grand opening that evening. One of their first stops is to a grocery store, run by the Chows. The Chow family can seemingly move without being stopped between white and Black communities, running grocery stores on both the white and Black sides of the street. In one scene, their daughter Lisa crosses the street to fetch her mother, and it is implied that the family can code-switch fluently between the two sides. The Chinese American Chow family perhaps even feels a sense of belonging in these two communities.

In my headcanon, Bo and Grace Chow, living in the Jim Crow era, are keenly aware of these two recent Supreme Court decisions. I wonder how this and other interactions in the community tip the scales in two crucial decisions the couple makes in the film, the events of which go as follows: After a murder unceremoniously ends the party in the juke joint that evening, the Chow family decides to leave. Grace implores her husband to go get the car, saying they should get back home to their daughter. Unbeknownst to her, this sends her husband outside where vampires quickly capture and “turn” him.

As the night progresses, the remaining survivors (including Grace) learn that vampires cannot enter a building unless they are explicitly invited. The vampires home in on the various emotional vulnerabilities of the remaining survivors, attempting to trick them into inviting them in. When the head vampire sexually taunts Grace in Chinese and threatens her daughter, Grace reaches a breaking point and invites them in to force a confrontation rather than waiting until dawn, dooming most of the survivors. As someone who is still processing the loss of her husband (who stands before her as one of the vampires), and who fears losing her daughter, Grace’s decision is understandable, and I am not here to vilify her decision. However, that she is Chinese American (and given Coogler’s engagement with racial dynamics throughout his work) adds another layer of complexity to her story. I can’t help but imagine that an internalized awareness of the legally racialized standing of Asians in America, in addition to the desperate personal desire to save her daughter after losing her husband, informs her decision on some level.

In addition to how Asian bodies have been controlled, or even stopped, via legislation and social disenfranchisement here in the United States, we must also recognize how the last century of U.S. imperialism and intervention in Asia is the root cause of many Asian American diasporic communities. Artist TJ Shin explores this idea through 

, a public sound installation commissioned by Clockshop.

 2025. Commissioned by Clockshop. Photo by Gina Clyne, courtesy of the artist and Clockshop.

The artist asked participants to mimic the calls of endangered bird species that migrate through the East Asian–Australasian Flyway. Each subsequent round of participants would listen to the previous round’s birdcalls, then mimic them, and so on. A 30-foot-tall air-raid siren projects a composition of these imitated bird calls on the hour throughout the day. Only the first round had access to the original birdsongs, and this exploration of how culture evolves across successive generations, with increasing distance from the original, speaks to the complicated feelings diasporic communities often have when navigating cultural authenticity (see: the tendency among diasporic artists to explore and integrate traditional and folk practices from the motherland).

During the opening, the artist read a performance/lecture titled “This performance lecture is titled ‘This copy is not the original, so it’s false.’” It examines this phrase through five different frameworks twice, demonstrating how even the repetition of a simple phrase and a circular return to previous frameworks creates new iterations and expressions of itself. In other words, even an exact copy deviates from the original. What Shin’s work does so well is reveal the entanglement of received ideas of authenticity, mimicry, and cultural purity. This work refuses to celebrate or romanticize the original and posits the copy as an evolution rather than a degradation.

TJ Shin performing "This performance lecture is titled 'This copy is not the original, so it’s false,'" at 

2025. Commissioned by Clockshop. Photo by Gina Clyne, courtesy of the artist and Clockshop.

Considering this work brought up a series of questions: What is culture besides behaviors and codes that we have collectively decided to copy? How far back do we need to go to find the original? How much or how little do we embrace the imperfections of our copies that we pass on? What is the allowable deviance before it is no longer a copy? Who decides such things?

When does a copy become an individual subject, and how do we know what it is copying? Is personal identity just a series of copies and mimicries? If parts of our identity are copies or mimicry, does that make it somehow less authentic?

Mimicry and repetition simultaneously uphold the authenticity of the “original” while ossifying it, making it fragile and brittle.

Since 1988, Los Angeles’ Koreatown Plaza has served as an epicenter for diasporic Koreans, where new and old immigrants alike come to hear their native language spoken and soothe their homesickness with Korean food. To return to Ahmed’s essay, it is a constructed space, a portal, where one’s body can move through smoothly without being stopped. It is also, of course, a simulacrum, an imperfect copy of Korea frozen in time.

, 2025. Performers: Woohee Cho, Coffee Kang, Kai-Luen Liang, and gamin. Photo by Gina Clyne, courtesy of the artist and LAND.

Woohee Cho’s recent public performance in Koreatown Plaza, 

, is based on interviews he conducted with two of his artist friends, recounting their struggles with language, homesickness, and housing precarity. While live-translating the video interviews from Korean into English, Cho and artist Coffee Kang, using household items left behind by former roommates, performed various gestures and movements related to migration and movement. All of this was accompanied by a largely improvised musical score performed by artists Kai-Luen Liang and gamin using a combination of traditional Korean instruments, electric guitar, and vocalizations, which reverberated throughout the three-story atrium.

As the performance unfolded, it slowly leaked out into the rest of the plaza, beginning with the artists circling the glass elevator shaft, which served as a projection screen, and eventually with Cho running up and down the stairs, yelling from the balconies. The audience itself was also porous, with curious shoppers pausing to watch.

Throughout the performance, I watched my youngest daughter hold hands and play with my friend’s daughter. My oldest daughter and her friend caught glimpses of the performance, and I of them, while shopping for K-pop collectibles. After eating dinner in the all-Asian food court, we picked up a few items from H Mart on the way out. My family and I, too, were now part of this process of communal home creation, a complex mixture of mimicry and authenticity, sound and flavor, a collapse of the public and private perceptions of ourselves and our community.

Alex Paik is an artist, writer, and community builder based in Los Angeles. He is Founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces, and serves on the Steering Committee at GYOPO, a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals.

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Alex Paik

What is culture besides behaviors and codes that we have collectively decided to copy? How far back do we need to go to find the original? How much or how little do we embrace the imperfections of our copies that we pass on? What is the allowable deviance before it is no longer a copy? Who decides such things?

No Privacy, No Public

On Bodies and Copies, Seeing and Being

 is A Blade of Grass’s outlet to collaborate with practitioners and learn through their perspectives. While we understand that our communities have long been in a state of crisis, the inauguration of the current political administration accelerated these crises with a strategy to overwhelm constituents. With the ground shifting rapidly throughout the first half of 2025, our conversation with artist and writer Dan S. Wang reminded us that moments like this are not new to communities and elders who have long engaged political struggle.

As guest editor of this year’s issue of 

, Dan brings a rich history of organizing with artist collaborators and collectives and contributing to social movements throughout the Midwest and beyond. Dan has produced work with artist groups Compass, Madison Mutual Drift, and Red76, and he was a founding member of Chicago experimental space Mess Hall. Dan’s recent residency and exhibition 

 at Dartmouth College explored political memory, revolutionary strategy, and leftist failure. In 2022, Dan co-edited with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker the book 

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic

, a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artist portfolios that—in their words—“offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.”

 contributions that will continue to unfold throughout the rest of the year.

At the quarter mark of the 21st century, more than two decades after the Patriot Act and now at the dawn of ubiquitous AI, privacy is nothing but a bad joke and our encrypted browsers won’t save us.

Which is not to say that the public sphere is healthy. In the United States, between Clintonian neoliberalism and Trump’s crony capitalism, everything “public” has been heavily degraded, disfigured, shut down, or shut out. Most public services are on life support. Public sector workers are the go-to punching bag for conservatives. Public education has one defender for every hundred critics. Public lands will be sold to real estate vultures for a song if the Republicans get their way. And public expression? Forget it. Circulation is so uneven and attention so fleeting that any given public gesture, message, or display might as well be private—in which case, refer to the bad joke above.

Over a three-part rolling release, this year’s edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. By addressing this condition directly and obliquely, the hope is that the conversations, essays, process notes, and other contributions amount to a genealogy of “private” and “public” while grappling with a world in which it is no longer possible to hide, and yet in which the spaces of mutual visibility and common communication continue to fracture and shrink.

The wish is to create forms of social engagement untethered to the outdated dichotomy, but that can realistically contend with inherited systems and distributions of power that were built on those presumptions of public versus private. If this edition of 

makes strides toward that end it will have been a success, all the more so as a project completed under a totalitarian regime on the ascent. It must be said, the events of 2025 and beyond—today, yesterday, any day you are reading this—temper our plans and expectations. Whatever adjustments we make as the year unfolds will stand as a record of this time. Progress is the hope, survival the goal.

This editorial platform was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to A Blade of Grass in 2024. 

 is guest edited by Dan S. Wang with support from ABoG Program Directors Allie Linn and Lee Heinemann with Executive Director Lu Zhang. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

Dan S. Wang

Over a three-part rolling release, this edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. 

No Privacy, No Public 

We’re born alone, we die alone. Or do we? Some people expire in the arms of a spouse, of a child, unseen by all but a precious few. Other people die far from loved ones, far from anybody at all—but on screen, visible to the whole world. Death, the primordial mystery, fuel from time immemorial for religions and faith, the one thing all humans have in common with one another, has only gotten weirder in the 21st century. Death work artist Anders Zanichkowsky ruminates on the public/private dichotomy in relation to the universal event horizon in our age of mass loneliness, mass violence, and mass media.

Do it slowly and
having received fair warning.

Ideally, control the room.

Ideally, live your life such that you can choose the people who will care for you and choose the place they do this in, such as at home and with your children. (Preferably, have a home. Preferably, have children.)

Or: Live the life of a hearty shut-in! A stalwart pariah! Some other salt-of-the-earth spinster type!

Avoid fame or even broad name recognition, including accidental viral internet attention through a well-intentioned, tech-savvy grandnephew. The town square owns your life once you are done with it along with a license for unearned familiarity, but some can’t wait so some retreat is necessary.

Lie. Outright and by omission, as needed. You will find the ethical distinction here as thin and useful as it ever was. Lie to friends and family, to co-workers, your barber. About your body, your blood, how your day is going, your plans for the new year. Tell yourself whatever you need to about the cost of privacy, the calculus of protection.

Tell yourself whatever in general. You cannot fuck up the dying part, not even lost in a labyrinth of denial and deception, or by revoking your DNR in a final attempt to sabotage your heirs.

Rest assured, the body knows how to die. It’s other people, to our credit, who do not always know to leave well enough alone.

Manage others’ expectations as best you can. Then, give up.

This one is much harder. You probably can’t but if you can, choose it carefully.

First, accept that you will die an unnatural or unexpected death. The cause, if not famine, will arrive suddenly, even if it should, as with famine, drag out the dying.

Prepare yourself that it will almost certainly be violent, shocking to you or those who witness it, or both.

You will need witnesses. These should include strangers. If this is not possible, die somewhere that strangers might have been and might still be the ones to find you.

A death in public must leave a wake of compounding questions that will confound the conscience of the living forever.

Die on a photographed death march.
Die in the era of livestreams and eSIMs.
Die on camera, or on the phone with ambulance drivers, or later on a screen in Venice to a 

twenty three minute-long standing ovation

. (Do not expect the producers to join a cultural boycott against your killers.)

Have enemies, whether you wish to or not. Preferably, live your life in such a way that you choose the people who want you dead, and the reason. Be the reason. And be okay with this reason, if not those people.

Or: Ablaze yourself with fire. Die of AIDS and forget burial. Drop your body on the steps of the FDA, the White House, the door of the church that didn’t hear you ringing for the shelter.

Rest assured that even if you die a political death in private, you can still have a public and visibly 

. For this it is best to have a will, but maybe leave the details vague. Perhaps just “Do something formal and aesthetic” after Tim Bailey

 , leaving grace room for your loved ones to balk at their orders to defile your dearly beloved body. If you can, give a thought to your outfit. Perhaps a gallows day triumph like Mary, Queen of Scots, going red to her God in the blood of his martyrs.

Very few would choose a public death, fearing it would not be dignified. Very few will compromise this dignity for any other goal. In the face of such ignominy, you might seek comfort in Islam, which rewards with paradise a shahid (badly translated as martyr) who is killed by the same evil to which they bore a final, holy witness.

Accept the fact that unless you are yourself the cause, you will have no say in the cause whatsoever. Indeed, your abject vulnerability to circumstance will almost certainly be rooted inextricably with the public thing that kills you.

Pause here and determine what you deem in 

. An English gallows, yes. Also the highway, a river. Your office? Your prison cell? Notice with indoor places it gets harder to say. Notice how exposure to the elements becomes a factor in your place of death corresponding to your exposure to such elements in life.

Here is a useful exercise:

Is a hospital 


What is the difference between a curtain drawn around a bed and a door you cannot reach?

Consider a cancer ward high above the fray and consider the emergency room, street level. Consider the emergency room for a patient with a doctor and a bed of their own somewhere, versus one whose unhoused life is the emergency.

Do we call it a public death for an unhoused man whose living and dying are better known to the staff of the emergency room than any of his unreachable next of kin?

Are strangers always

 using that man’s death as an exemplary case study of how Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe’s

 theories of biopolitical forces reduced him to a state of “bare life” as he was pushed through the cracks of an extractive, for-profit health care industry that provided him no meaningful healthcare in life until, when he was unconscious and unlikely to resuscitate, they hooked him up to the most technologically advanced life-preserving treatment on earth, only to feel so morally conflicted and medically pessimistic that days later they outsourced the decision of his death to a vote?

Does the intervention of these nurses, doctors, and members of an ethics board make his death somehow more public, render him more “bare,” in the dubious privacy of the ICU and a HIPAA-compliant academic paper, than if he had expired beneath the undeniably public overpass where he lived?


Be prepared: These are the sort of questions
a public death must burst open
like a spiral uncoiling from a spring.

And finally: Forgive me. You cannot really die in public. Your real dying, true dying—the unharnessing of your consciousness and flesh—is sited in the void to which none of the living can be privy. And forgive me, again: This cloud of solitude is not quite privacy, either.

I am sorry. I cannot be sorry. We all die
exposed and held
in the palm of a mystery, veiled
from each other as from ourselves.

Anders Zanichkowsky

Be prepared: These are the sort of questions a public death must burst open like a spiral uncoiled from a spring.