“Unsettling ‘The Asian’: Queering Museum Coloniality through Tactical ArtIntervention” takes a practice-as-research approach to examining how Asian American
community-based tactical art intervention can transform racial discourse and the systems that
produce it. Through two case studies that target blockbuster exhibitions at a public museum, I
demonstrate how unsanctioned hybrid public and online cultural praxis can exploit the cultural
capital of the institution to activate a collective, participatory, and networked process of
discursive co-production, community empowerment and healing, and critical public pedagogy to
effect political and epistemological impacts that reach far beyond the structure of the institution
itself. With Memoirs of a Sansei Geisha, I argue for an Asian American form of culture jamming
that articulates a contemporary Asian American political subjectivity by applying culture
jamming tactics to contest the Orientalist racialization authorized and perpetrated by respected
civic institutions such as the museum. Lord It’s the Samurai dramatically expands the scope and
impact of this form of community-based cultural insurgency through a diversity of tactics that
effectively construct a “museum without walls” to prefigure what a culturally democratic
museum practice could look like.