Christopher K. Ho is a speculative artist based in New York, Hong Kong, and Telluride, Colorado. His practice encompasses making, organizing, writing, and teaching. He is known for materially exquisite objects that draw from learned material about, and lived encounters with, power and otherness in an unevenly decolonized, increasingly networked world. Based between Cambridge, MA and New York City, NY Daisy Nam is an independent curator and programmer. Her areas of focus and research include feminist practices across mediums of performance, film/video, sculpture and installation. With over 15 years of experience in arts institutions, she was most recently the assistant director at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University from 2015-19 organizing exhibitions, public programs and publications.

"This refreshingly original anthology offers a remarkable window into the everyday spaces where art, biography, and cultural marginality provoke and enrich one another." --Arjun Appadurai, Max Weber Global Professor, Bard Graduate Center

"There is something metamorphic about the letter form, and this capacious book shows how the epistolary address can mutate into seemingly any genre. What is marvelous about this rangy collection--whose selections include discursive essays, Instagram screenshots, filial love letters addressed towards the future and the past, poems, crossword puzzles, and more--is how it is so emphatically a heterogeneity, just like the impossible polyglot of Asian America itself." --Ken Chen, former Executive Director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop

"Greatly complicating and enriching the category 'Asian American, ' these missives contribute enormously to urgent ongoing discussions around race in the US.I saw myself reflected as never before in these letters." --Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum

"Resonating with all who have faced discounting stereotypes and discrimination, and providing insight for those who haven't, Best! is a powerful call for solidarity and action." --Lauren Long, Asia Art Pacific

"I may not identify as Asian American, but I think what you are telling me is that it might not matter. In short: your existence makes me, and I imagine many others, feel more seen." --Ysabelle Cheung, Frieze

"The authors [in Best!] allowed themselves to play host to contradictions: underdog status can offer delight when we stick it to the man; our embarrassments and shame make us recognizable to each other." --Danielle Wu, Art in America

"A gorgeous display of the diversity of lived experiences of art workers who fall imperfectly under the "Asian American" identifier. . . . Offering these as letters lets the writers think as expansively as they want, dropping hints that can turn into possibilities, that can fire our neural networks into new and exciting configurations." --Kerry Cardoza, Chicago Review of Books

Publisher: Paper Monument

Pub date: 2021-02-24

Length: 348 pages