In Yowshien Kuo’s depictions of the Wild West, Asian cowboys run amok. In Faces of Death (2018), for example, an Asian man dressed like the Marlboro Man in a red flannel shirt, tan cowboy hat, and leather chaps grips a small deer by its antlers. At his feet, lush vegetation blooms while barren terrain lays behind him as if awaiting to flourish under the cowboy’s touch. The abandoned fire in the background dispels the American myth of discovery, attesting to the existing presence of Indigenous peoples.
