Godzilla: Asian American Art Network

The collective known as Godzilla: Asian American Art Network was formed in 1990 to support the production of critical discourse around Asian American art and increase the visibility of Asian American artists, curators, and writers, who were negotiating a historically exclusionary society and art world. Founded by Ken Chu, Bing Lee, and Margo Machida, Godzilla produced exhibitions, publications, and community collaborations that sought to stimulate social change through art and advocacy.

Envisioning a lateral and porous network, Godzilla created a social space for diasporic Asian artists and art professionals. Godzilla considered anyone who attended their public meetings a voting member. Starting with a core of sixteen founders, the group’s membership of artists and art workers would reach over three hundred locally and two thousand nationwide by 1995. Its constituency included individuals from a wide range of Asian Pacific American communities, as well as different genders, ages, generations, classes, and sexuality.

For more than a decade, the diasporic group, having grown from a local organization into a nationwide network, confronted institutional racism, Western imperialism, anti-Asian violence, the AIDS crisis, and representations of Asian sexuality and gender, among other urgent issues.

The appropriation of Godzilla, “King of the Monsters,” as the group’s namesake and logo, underscored the artists’ uncontainable and irreverent qualities, as conjured by the mutant Japanese creature who rose from the nuclear ashes of World War II in a pop-film reckoning with the imperial histories of the East and West.

Through the involvement of different members and collaborations among them, Godzilla’s extended network included the feminist groups Guerrilla Girls, PESTS, Heresies Collective, Coast to Coast Women Artists of Color, and New York Asian Women’s Center; the community health and AIDS activism groups ACT UP, Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA), and Visual AIDS; Asian community support organizations such as GAPIMNY (f/k/a Gay Asian and Pacific Islander Men of New York), Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV), Project Reach, SEORO Korean Cultural Network, and Arkipelago; and arts organizations such as the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Asian American Arts Alliance, Godzilla’s fiscal sponsor. These strands of affiliation were reflected in early Godzilla-related actions and programming.