A short walk from the Canal Street subway station in lower Manhattan stands the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). Inside, you will find its permanent collection of artifacts from Asian American history and the temporary exhibit on magazines in Asian culture, appropriately named Magazine Fever. This “fever” culminated as a form of activism in Asian culture for many Asian Americans, reflecting their identities in media, representing multiculturalism and demonstrating their political empowerment.
The MOCA divided the exhibit into different periodicals of Asian American magazines, including AsianWeek, AsiAM and YOLK. It also included a center table where museum-goers could flip through different editions of the featured magazines. On the wall displays, each magazine was accompanied by the years in which it ran, a brief overview of how the brand began and the type of Asian American representation that it focused on.
The first magazine on display was Gidra, a college newspaper started at UCLA in 1969 by a group of Japanese American students. Although the magazine originally started as a school newspaper, it was shortly changed to an off-campus publication since the university wanted control over what type of information was published. The students who started Gidra did not want the university to have authority over what stories could be published since the main focus of the magazine was to emphasize anti-capitalism and anti-racist movements. This was one of the first publications that established the alignment of Asian American magazines to these movements.
The exhibit continued to highlight other magazines or “zines” and their relationships to the social and political environments of their time. Many of the first magazines on display focused on the representation of Asian Americans in politics. The AsianWeek magazine, for example, wrote primarily about local and national elections, immigration news and events happening in Asian countries that would not normally be discussed in mainstream newspapers. Around the room, the magazines transitioned to focus on social issues facing Asian Americans as well.
Included in this exhibit was an article done by the magazine Hyphen that discussed Asian representation in pornography and the different sexual stereotypes that follow Asian men versus Asian women. The article features an Asian male adult film actor known as Hung and his journey of representing Asian men in the straight category of pornography, typically dominated by white males. Although there is an acknowledgment of how Asian women are sexualized in American culture, there is little regard for how sexual stereotypes impact Asian males. This is where magazines for and about Asian Americans can help fill the gap left by mainstream news by discussing and breaking stereotypes. By talking about the social implications of grouping people this way, these magazines help challenge misconceptions, highlight diverse experiences and foster a deeper understanding of Asian American identities.
As the magazines shift between political and social representations of Asian American communities, it is fascinating to see how this structure is mirrored in other forms of media and reinvented in modern times. The historical role of zines in Asian American activism and self-expression helps explain their recent resurgence in popularity, especially with how divided the current political and social environment is. Over the last couple of years, zines have continued to be used as an art form that expresses individuality. However, how we understand zines today may be slightly different than how they were used in the ’80s and ’90s regarding Asian American culture. The structure remains mostly the same: a self-published pamphlet or book that shares ideas of our community and selves, but the modern structure tends to mirror collages rather than magazines.
Even though I’ve never made a zine, many of my friends have taken up this hobby for their exploration of their identities, including how they relate to social and political issues. Art has always been a pinnacle of expression, but the modern usage of zines makes it easier to take this journey without outside pressure since the goal is not necessarily to publish them anymore. While they can be and still are published, they can also solely be creations shared with friends or kept private.
Zines can also be published locally, such as in the Barnard College Zine Library. The collection at Barnard is fully made up of student works that use art and collages to comment on a range of issues, including gender, protests, discrimination and mental health. Personally, I find that publishing zines in school papers or sharing them with smaller groups expands the meaning behind these collages since they will then highlight local issues that often go unrecognized in mainstream news. This gives visibility to stories that rarely receive widespread attention but are just as important.
The modern-day use of zines continues the legacy of Asian American magazines by providing a space for personal experiences and voices that would otherwise go unheard. Publications like AsianWeek and Gidra tackled political and social issues that were absent from mainstream media. Modern zines, although they vary in style and topics, carry this tradition by using art to shed light on local and underrepresented narratives. The MOCA exhibit preserves this artistic history to represent the importance of zines in Asian American culture and also draws the question of how zines can offer space for activism and expression.
