Picnic, Central Park, by Ching-Yao Chen from his I 
NY series (2009)
The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has removed a work featuring “redface”, a racist caricature of Native American culture, from a recently opened exhibition in Brooklyn, following complaints from a Native artist.
The photograph, Picnic, Central Park (2009), by the Taiwanese artist, Ching-Yao Chen, shows Chen wearing a headdress and buckskin with reddish-brown body paint, standing next to three seated women, all in costume and with their faces painted. The picture is part of the series I Love New York and was displayed in the multi-venue exhibition Urban Tribes, which explores diversity in the city. It is organised by the private non-profit Taiwanese American Arts Council.
After attending the shows opening in Brooklyn last week, the artist Jason Lujan, who is of Chiricahua Apache and Mexican heritage, emailed the organisers to voice his disappointment in seeing Chen employing redface in his work. The wearing of feathers and warpaint by non-Natives “perpetuates American Indian stereotypes, analogous to the wearing of Blackface,” he wrote. “Its bewildering to me how a curatorial team and a New York City-based organization could sign off on such a thing. Ive read the text describing the intent of the work — it is at best a poorly thought out excuse to lampoon Natives and at worst a direct insult to the Native American community here in New York… once again it must be said that wearing a headdress and warpaint is no more acceptable than dressing up in a sombrero, a yarmulke, or a hijab.” Lujan, who ended his email with “silence equals complicity”, is due to participate in the second installment of Urban Tribes this autumn.
Luchia Lee, the executive director of the Taiwanese American Arts Council, said that she believes Chens intention in the photograph has been misunderstood. In an email to Lujan, she said the Taiwanese artist empathised with the suffering of Native Americans. “In the course of this series,” she wrote, “he celebrated diversity by picturing many different groups identified by costume and [cuisine]. He is frequently using stereotypical icons to fight against divisive attitudes imposed by majorities or by authorities.” Lee noted that one of the women photographed in the Central Park ensemble was Tibetan and was wearing traditional robes. “When she watched her first movies in the US, she was surprised and upset to see Native Americans always portrayed negatively and that their appearance was very similar to her own,” Lee said. Other works
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