This dissertation analyzes a selection of photomontages by contemporary artists Tomie Arai (b. 1949-), Yong Soon Min (b. 1953-), and Ann Le (b. 1981-) that reimagine 20th-century U.S. wars and militarism in the Asia Pacific Arena. These artists use forms of collage to look back on the Cold War and to disrupt U.S. Cold War historical narratives of U.S. rescue and liberation of Asia. Using feminist epistemological approaches, they reveal diasporic memories of survival, resistance, and futurity. Their artworks reinterpret and reclaim public and private photographs through the artistic strategy of photomontage, which entails the juxtaposition and reconfiguration of photographic materials. I argue that Arai’s, Min’s, and Le’s artworks serve as alternative sites of remembrance that critique the Japanese American incarceration during World War II and U.S. militarism in Asia during the Cold War, Korean War, and the Vietnam War. In this project, I offer the concept of “ethical memory works” to describe how such Asian diasporic cultural productions engage in the complex politics of memory and the ethics of care - for the past, one’s community, and other communities. I suggest ethical memory works are defined by ethical remembering, speculative storytelling, and feminist acts of care.

Almost sixty years after Duchamp completed Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) in 1912, Japanese American artists, Yayoi Kusama and Shigeko Kubota implicitly and explicitly appropriated Duchamp’s work in Traveling Life (1963) and Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976). Several decades after Kusama and Kubota completed their works, a Japanese-Samoan artist based in New Zealand, Shigeyuki Kihara, explicitly appropriated Duchamp’s Nude as well in Maui Descending a Staircase II (After Duchamp) (2015). The lengthy time span between these works and their striking visual parallels suggest that there is still something suggestive in Duchamp’s nude, especially to artists who have been marginalized from the art world because of their gender and ethnicity. I argue that these artists reworked Duchamp’s nude to provide feminist and postcolonial critiques of the artistic category of the nude.