Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts

“This refreshingly original anthology offers a remarkable window into the everyday spaces where art, biography, and cultural marginality provoke and enrich one another.” —Arjun Appadurai, Max Weber Global Professor, Bard Graduate Center

This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experiences of Asian-American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. The form of the letter offers readers intimate insights into the complexities of Asian American experiences, moving beyond the model-minority myth.

Chronicling everyday lives, dreams, rage, family histories, and cultural politics, these letters ignite new ways of being, and modes of creating, at a moment of racial reckoning.

Christopher K. Ho (b. 1974, Hong Kong) is an artist based in New York, Hong Kong, and Telluride, Colorado. His practice encompasses making, organizing, writing, and teaching. He is known for materially exquisite objects that draw from learned material about, and lived encounters with, power and otherness in an unevenly decolonized, increasingly networked world.

Daisy Nam is the Zlot family director and chief curator of the Wattis Institute Contemporary Arts at California College of the Arts. She is based in San Francisco, USA.