Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West

Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West considers mid-20th-century abstraction through its Asian-American practitioners, with a special focus on Hawai‘i artists. It is the first museum exhibition to bring artists of the New York School together with Asian-American artists who studied and worked in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, examining the influence of Asian intellectual and artistic traditions on artists long revered as uniquely American.

The exhibition presents major works by American masters such as Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, alongside those by Asian-American artists such as Ruth Asawa, Saburo Hasegawa, Isamu Noguchi, and Hawai‘i art icons like Satoru Abe, Isami Doi, Tadashi Sato, and Tetsuo Ochikubo, among others. With more than 45 paintings, drawings, and sculptures, the exhibition examines the ways in which Eastern traditions from Chinese and Japanese calligraphy to Zen Buddhism helped advance Abstract Expressionism’s aesthetic agenda—its understated lyricism, its compositional balance, its subtle awareness of place—regardless of the artist.