Sunny Xiang, Associate Professor of English, has been named a recipient of the 2025 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her forthcoming article “Asian American Art During the First Intifada.”
The grant, administered by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, supports writing about contemporary art with the goal of ensuring that criticism remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts.
Xiang’s research centers on the US military empire in Asia and the Pacific and considers how historical norms for perceiving race and gender have interacted with the sensory economy of colonial violence and militarized security. Her article will explore the legacy of Asian American artists who visited Palestine in 1989 and 1990 and contributed to the exhibition “Occupation and Resistance.” It will devote particular attention to John Takami Morita’s photo-etchings.
Xiang is the author of the book Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2020), which examines the visual and narrative crux of Oriental inscrutability in relation to U.S. cold war intelligence operations. Other academic projects include her current book, Chemical Apophenia: Air Conspiracies and Skin Connections in the Toxic Tropics, which explores how U.S. WWII military science in the Pacific generated new paradigms for detecting and combating toxicity in the air and on the skin.