What is the “it” in the exhibition title How Asian Is It? The show’s organizer, New York-based curator and critic Lilly Wei, identifies the subject with admirable precision in her catalogue essay. Her survey, at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, through July 11, presents works by 12 abstract painters, all of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean heritage, all born between 1928 and 1955, and all resident at one time or another in the U.S. Although those parameters might seem arbitrary or overly restrictive at first, they make perfect historical sense. After WWII, experimental artists from those countries vigorously embraced Western Modernism, while the traditional cultures that inflect their avant-garde practices have had a subtle but puissant influence on our own—in literature, fashion, cuisine, film, music, philosophy, and, yes, the fine arts.

Wei’s interest lies primarily in how these transcultural explorers were received and what that history tells us about globalism and ourselves. She traces, decade by decade, how East Asian nonrepresentational painters went from being deemed “too Asian” (and thus merely imitative) in the 1950s, when heroic Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme, to now being regarded as “not Asian enough” to satisfy advocates of the current identity-art regimen.

Distributed over two floors, the 16 paintings can be formally divided into three groups: those that feature a form-and-ground composition in which objects or structures are evoked, though not recognizably depicted; those that are essentially fields of color; and those that hover in between. In the first category, Kim Uchiyama’s multicolored post-and-lintel composition Apadana (2024) directly alludes to the ca. 500 BCE imperial reception hall of the Persian palace in Susa—an influence on Greek, Renaissance, and even modern architecture. Her painting exemplifies a “will to clarity” that helped the artist—who was born in Iowa of mixed Japanese, Scotch, and German ancestry and who studied art history in Florence before moving to New York—to overcome an initial sense of difference and exclusion.

More amorphous are the hard-edged egg shapes and striations of The Presence of Absence (2024) by Shirley Kaneda, born to a Korean family in Tokyo, who arrived in the U.S. at age 19 in 1970. The work’s aqua-keyed palette feels distinctly Western, but its perceptual flatness and elusive signification bespeak a strong East Asian legacy. Island and Piano (1980), by Japanese-born Kikuo Saito, centers on a distinctly bordered area of stains and drips set amid an expanse of actively brushed mustard-hued acrylic. Saito emigrated to New York at age 26 and worked as an assistant to Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons, while learning to produce his own large abstractions that are often integrated into stage sets for dance or drama.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like not to be Asian American,” says Charles Yuen, a longtime New Yorker from a Chinese family in Honolulu. In his Touring Xanadu (2025), two small horizontal figures drift amid swirling patterns and a color grid floating before broad areas of orange and yellow—evidence of Yuen’s fascination with flattened space in both Eastern and Western work and what he calls the “nonlinear narrative structures in Asian art.”

Twisting linear forms, chakra points, and billowing nets dominate four small paintings from Emily Cheng’s “A Force Like Gravity” series (2022). Born in New York to Chinese parents from the Philippines, Cheng has developed a belief in spiritual energy flow, implicit in her compositional dynamics, that echoes the intuitiveness not only of mid-20^th-century action painters like Mark Tobey and Franz Kline but of ancient Hindu, Daoist, and Buddhist sages.

Conceptually halfway between the show’s subject-ground pictures and its more-or-less monochrome paintings, lie three works that balance elements of both. Korea’s Il Lee, ensconced in New York since 1977, offers the richly blue BL-2403 (2024), whose dense ballpoint pen strokes—the artist’s signature technique—seem to center on a horizon line, vaguely suggesting bushes reflected in water. The Asian ink painting tradition is thus at once honored and updated. Similarly, Chinese calligraphy is transformed into bold illegibility by the slashing brushstrokes of Walasse Ting, who fled Mao’s People’s Republic of China for the freedom of Hong Kong, Paris, Stockholm, and New York. A cloud-like explosion of white on deep-space black, Barbara Takenaga’s Hovenweep (2016) references, by title, a national park in Utah that preserves the remnants of six 13^th-century indigenous villages. If the painting implies a critique of Western aggression in Asia and America, all ire is left quietly inferential by the Nebraska-born Japanese artist.

Of the three semi-monochrome paintings, David Diao’s Grandsweep (1970) is the most subdued, proffering a large, minimally modulated, queasy yellow-green canvas of the high modernist type he has produced throughout his career, except for an interlude in which he artfully documented the property his family lost during revolutionary China’s socialist purification campaigns. Arriving in the U.S. at age 12, the artist became so thoroughly assimilated that he could scarcely communicate with later Chinese exiles and visitors.

Two small thickly layered works by the ethnically Chinese Richard Tsao, Sizzling Hot Moon (1998) and Sci-Fi (2004), evince his characteristic method of layering mixtures of marble dust and pigment onto a support to attain the churned surfaces and radiant colors (here predominantly orange and red) that recall the visual complexity—skyscrapers and ancient temples; Thai, Malay, and Islamic styles; royal trappings and traffic jams; night markets and gargantuan shopping malls—of his natal Thailand, which he departed in 1976 at age 22.

Shen Chen—who since 1988 has divided his time between the U.S. and his birthplace, Shanghai—is known for his ethereal, meticulously executed canvases, shimmering like light itself as they transition chromatically from top to bottom. His Untitled No. 322238-13 (2013), blending a crack-of-sunshine summit with a cool white base, reminds us that spiritual seekers in Asia tend to regard the Void, whether inner or outer, as a blissful state—in stark contrast to the black Nothingness that so often terrifies Western thinkers like Pascal and Sartre, and artists like Ad Reinhardt and Clyfford Still.

Overall, one could question whether How Asian Is It? pays adequate due to abstract painting movements within the countries these artists left behind. An occasional word about Korea’s Dansaekhwa, Japan’s Mono-ha, or China’s Experimental Ink might have enriched Wei’s text and the onsite viewing experience. But that minor lapse is more than offset by the curator’s clear-sighted restraint—especially her eschewal of the theory, so wishfully prevalent today, that artistic modernism would somehow have arisen (or actually did arise) naturally from conditions within non-Western cultures, even if Pollack, de Kooning, Rothko, Stella, et al. had never touched brush to canvas.

So, three cheers here not only for an elegant selection and installation, but also for Wei’s art historical precision, her celebration of globalist mélange, and her critical level-headedness. This show attests that curatorial common sense, though rare of late, is truly universal. Such human commonality used to be considered a good thing and will be again—if we survive the world’s current resurgence of ethnic tribalism.

How Asian Is It?, curated by Lilly Wei, is on view at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, February 13-July 11, 2026.

Richard Vine is the former managing editor of Art in America and author of such books as Liu Shiming: Sculpting Empathy (2026), New China, New Art (2008),  Odd Nerdrum: Paintings, Sketches, and Drawings (2001), and the artworld crime novel SoHo Sins (2016).