Xueli Wang’s article “The Possibility of Home” (Aperture, 2023) examines Asian American photographers whose work eschews historical flash points to linger instead over the long stretches of ordinary life in between—offering visions of the familiar and familial, daily routines and domestic interiors, quotidian intimacies and private yearnings. Photographers of interest include Jarod Lew, Frank Mancao, Tosh Matsumoto, and Irene Poon. In her article, Wang writes about their attention to interior spaces and inner states as well as the artists’ interior positioning in the communities they photograph. The article is an inquiry into how these photographs work against existing tendencies to define Asian America by moments of public trauma, and into the particular relationships between photographer and subject—the insider’s gaze—that constitute distinctly Asian American ways of seeing.
Xueli Wang is a writer and researcher interested in art and film from Asia and its diasporas. A PhD candidate in History of Art and Film and Media Studies at Yale University, Wang is presently writing a dissertation about disappearance and off-screen spaces in the work of Maggie Cheung. She was the 2021–22 MRC Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she contributed research and writing for the upcoming exhibition An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers. Her words have been featured in Artforum, Art in America, the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.