Godzilla founders—artists Bing Lee and Ken Chu, along with art historian Margo Machida—wanted to negotiate the visibility and representation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the art world. Godzilla functioned as a support structure and source of collective action. 

As stated in Godzilla’s 1991 mission statement: “Godzilla is a New York-based group of Asian American visual artists and art professionals whose goal is to establish a dynamic forum that will foster information exchange, mutual support, documentation and networking among our expanding numbers across the United States.”

The original Godzilla movie was made in 1954 and reflects the devastation of atomic bombs launched at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The monster Godzilla rose from nuclear waste and its reptilian skin was intended to resemble keloid scars present on survivors of the atomic bombings. This “anarchistic lizard,” as described by art historian Alice Yang, encapsulated the group’s simultaneous irreverence and serious reckoning with exclusionary policies and lack of representation in the art world.

Godzilla sought to resist the homogenous category of “Asian American” while also creating connections between Asian Americans of different backgrounds. The group’s first collective action was a letter to Whitney director David Ross protesting the lack of Asian American representation in the museum’s 1991 biennial. Copied on the letter were several other museum professionals. Their message had an impact; they successfully established an ongoing dialogue influencing diversity in museum exhibitions and staff, and the 1993 Biennial was notably focused on identity.

The roster of artists in the current exhibition is drawn from those who showed in historically significant Godzilla-organized exhibitions. The 1991 exhibition at Art in General, “Dismantling Invisibility: Asian and Pacific Islander Artists Respond to the AIDS Crisis,” curated by Ken Chu, included work that explored AIDS invisibility within the Asian American community. “The New World Order III: The Curio Shop,” organized by Skowmon Hastanan at Artists Space, appropriated the idea of a Chinatown curio shop in order to confront the mainstream exoticization of Asian Americans and display the myriad cultural differences within the monolithic label Asian American. Godzilla members continued to collaborate until their final exhibition “Why Asia” in 2001 which included a series of banners hung on Canal Street lamp posts.