Godzilla: Asian American Art Network
Founded in 1990 by Ken Chu, Bing Lee, and Margo Machida, New York, NY
From the Basement to Godzilla: The Legacy of Asian American Activism, 1998
Video, color, sound
111 min.
Courtesy Godzilla: Asian American Art Network and Instep Production archive

The founding members of Godzilla viewed their work as part of a legacy of pan-Asian community art activism that extended back to the 1960s. On the occasion of the Urban Encounters exhibition at the New Museum in 1998, which featured six activist art collectives in New York City, Godzilla produced a timeline that mapped its roots to the West Coast’s Asian American movement of the late 1960s, and more directly to the Basement Workshop, founded in 1970 in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Urban Encounters featured collectives that shaped the trajectory of activist art in the Lower East Side. Godzilla’s installation appeared alongside the Guerrilla Girls, ABC No Rio, REPOhistory, Bullet Space, and World War III.

In response to the sociopolitical and racial changes in the United States, predecessors of Godzilla such as Basement and the Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco, took inspiration from Third World internationalism, the Black Power movement, the Chicano movement, and the anti-war, labor, and feminist movements, linking political struggle with art production to serve their communities.

The video interviews, conducted with key participants, serve as an oral history that connects Godzilla’s efforts to the activism of the Basement Workshop, considered the first pan-Asian arts and political organization on the East Coast. These conversations provide a unique insight into the long arc and continual evolution of the Asian American Art Movement.

Interviews (in order of appearance)
Alex Chin, Lillian Ling, Liz Yung, Teddy Yoshikami, Nina Kuo, and Larry Hama (all)
Arlan Huang, Eleanor Yung, and Rocky Chin
Fay Chiang and Athena Robles
Lillian Cho and Tomie Arai
Athena Robles and Arlan Huang
Robert Lee and Skowmon Hastanan
Janice Pono and Helen Oji
John Allen, Carol Sun, and Charles Yuen
Edwin Tangonan Ramoran and Ken Chu
Rina Banerjee and Margo Machida
Lydia Yee, Ming Fay, and Bing Lee “Epoxy”
Amy Sadao, Barbara Hunt, and Eugene Tsai
Maureen Wong and Sanda Zan OO (both)
Michi Itami, Skowmon Hastanan, and Carol Sun
Todd Ayoung and Maureen Wong