Teaching Wall & Panther Meadows and Dangerous Worlds: Contemporary Readings of Asian American Landscapes

Transpacific Asian American Art Histories Working Group | Fall 2025

Panther Meadows and Dangerous Worlds brings together works on paper by Asian American artists that explore different perceptions of the natural world. The title references both Panther Meadows, the storied California site near Mt. Shasta that inspired Isho’s sketches, and the surreal terrain of Rina Banerjee’s print. Drawn from BAMPFA’s collection, the exhibition is organized in collaboration with the UC Berkeley–Stanford Transpacific/Asian American Art Histories Working Group, a collective of graduate students dedicated to cross-disciplinary research at the intersection of literature, film and media, art history, cultural studies, and diaspora studies.

The works gathered here include direct observation of local landscapes, translations of embodied experiences, meditations on how nature marks history and memory, and intersections between spiritual and natural worlds. Often informed by their backgrounds in the sciences and their connections to the Bay Area, these artists deploy a wide range of techniques and materials to probe psychic, social, and political dimensions of “landscape.” Landscape here is not simply a visual genre emphasizing images of untouched wilderness; it is also a conceptual, perceptual, and emotional space fundamentally shaped by intersections of diasporic and local histories.

Placing these works in dialogue for the first time, Panther Meadows and Dangerous Worldsasks, How do Asian artists in diaspora engage with place and space—and what histories, premonitions, and invocations lie beneath the surface of the land?