Soft Power
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Coined by political scientist Joseph Nye in the late-1980s, the term “soft power” came to define an American foreign policy that emphasized cultural, institutional, and ideological persuasion over military might. In a 1990 article in Foreign Policy, Nye wrote: “If a state can make its power seem legitimate in the eyes of others, it will encounter less resistance to its wishes. If its culture and ideology are attractive, others will more willingly follow.” Curated by Eungie Joo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), “Soft Power,” featuring 20 artists based in 12 different countries, untethered the concept from American doctrine, examining how art can exert cultural and sociopolitical influence across contexts.

Many of the artists used their platforms to make visible the invisible. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s installation The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019) illuminated the little-known history of the tirailleurs sénégalais, West African colonial soldiers sent by France to fight anticolonial uprisings in Indochina in the 1940s and ’50s. After they were demobilized, many soldiers returned to West Africa with Vietnamese wives and children. The four-channel video imagines the fraught secrets and stories that might be shared or occluded between Senegalese-Vietnamese progeny and their forebears, untangling complex racial and postcolonial identities in Senegal today.