What to make of Gen X in 2025? Millennials and Gen Zs seem to view its contributions to culture and politics with admiration and skepticism — where curiosity for mixtapes meets mixed feelings. Perhaps nature’s law will compel those younger generations to banish Xers into the slur-laden wasteland of Boomerville. Any day now. Statistics showing that Gen Xers voted for Trump in higher numbers than all other age demographics in 2024 only increases its peril. So, if a reckoning is coming for Gen X’s credibility and cool, how much more can we possibly ask of Kurt Cobain?
But here’s an addendum — Magazine Fever: Gen X Asian American Periodicals, on view at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). The exhibition spans several decades of periodicals but primarily focuses on ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s Asian American–focused magazines, such as Jade, Rice, East Wind, Yolk, Giant Robot, and many others, all demonstrating how DIY-spirited coalitions asserted their voices into the culture. Not all of the publications here classify as Gen X, but with the ’90s “reaching fever pitch — culturally, politically, and socially,” according to the wall text, this era too serves as a coming of age for Asian American culture and periodicals. It’s a fascinating stroll through American media history. But were these magazines designed to break through to a non-Asian audience? Or were they meant to illuminate, uplift, and provide forums for the community itself? Almost certainly both, but I think, more practically, the latter.
While considering this question of audience, I appreciated the exhibition’s inclusion of a before-and-after to this X era of magazines. The opening display houses “Asian American Movement” periodicals from the late ’60s to the ’70s, such as Coming Together, Gidra, and Asian Americans for Action, all of which embody the political, anti-colonial, radical, and community-focused values that defined this movement. And a companion exhibition proposes a legacy of sorts, with “three new directions for magazine making today” — Hotam, 4N, te magazine — whose highbrow content and aesthetics are palatable to any cosmopolitan-minded reader for whom notions of Asianness in the culture are as visible — or invisible — as ever. ❖
Magazine Fever: Gen X Asian American Periodicals
The Museum of Chinese in America
215 Centre Street
Through August 31
Jason Tomme is an NYC-based artist and co-founder of Black Ball Projects, and has written about things like lawn mowing in his self-published book Groundskeeper, and about Robert Irwin for the Chinati Foundation newsletter.