But the current show, titled “Ruth Asawa Through Line,” which was up until January 15th at the Whitney, offers us Asawa’s drawings, which was a steady activity of hers during the course of her career.  The drawings span a broad range of subjects; they can describe the layered, often vertically hierarchical concentric disk shapes that usually make up the sculptures. But they can also include a delicate figure drawing or a sensitive treatment of fruit. Given the Japanese background of Asawa, it would be easy to claim her work as Asian-addressed. But, in fact, the drawings are more international than that, even belonging to the Western tradition in some cases. When an Asian artist like Asawa, who began life in the States, makes art, inevitably the context in which she was raised asserts itself. Additionally, the artist’s work belongs to a period before the constant eclecticism and borrowing we know today. That means Asawa’s broad stylistic front resulted from the confluence of two very different cultures, brought together by the artist’s skill. Instead of resorting to a facile report on Asawa’s influences, it is better to read these works as independent statements; their unity is such that they evade all attempts to see them as multiple elemented.

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So it is impossible to read Asawa’s art, her drawings and sculptures, as deliberate hybrids, and leave it at that. The stylistic freedom offered artists since modernism began is remarkable, but it may blunt the art’s effectiveness if too many references come into play. The differences in subject matter we meet in this show tell us that Asawa was highly capable in her command of focus, so that she traveled easily across geographies and cultures. Still, she was surrounded by American artists and art, although her long stay in San Francisco, where a good number of Asians resided may also have influenced the artist. We can only look at the work itself, and what we find is a broad approach to ideas, as well as a fine line, likely influenced by the black pen-and-ink drawings central to Asian art. So the wide footing of Asawa’s interests starts to look like a precedent for America’s general cultural field, which encompasses  many backgrounds, especially within abstraction.

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If we look at this show with as unjaundiced an eye as possible, it becomes clear that Asawa’s Asian identity did not necessarily dominate her work. Not so long ago, we were at pains to differentiate one culture from the other, emphasizing foreign influences as separately given, even if they were to become important to artists who did not come from the background forming a particular style. Yet that insight has become a cliché, given the huge amount of international traveling and re-settling among artists for at least two generations now. While Asawa seems to have stayed mostly on the West Coast, she was able to parlay her Japanese identity into a sensitivity to line, no matter how various–and Occidental–the subjects of her art might be.

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When Asawa began branching out into several kinds of art, including geometric abstraction, studies of nature, pencil or ink drawings of people, and two-dimensional versions of her remarkable steel-wire sculpture, even today. Within and outside the art community it is now plausible, even expected, for artists to jump from one cultural realm to the next, we may appreciate the broad variety that results even as we worry that a loss of focus may result with so many influences taking place at once.