Degentrification Archives
Artist Statement: Degentrification Archives is a Chinatown Art Brigade curated collection spanning our seven year history. The exhibition includes archival material, photographs, videos, placekeeping maps, large scale projections, as well as banners, posters and other direct action ephemera. The show also highlights our collaborations with local and national cultural groups, movements, and formations including CAAAV Chinatown Tenants Union, the W.O.W. Project, The Illuminator, Decolonize This Place/MTL+, Grassroots Asians Rising, Asian Americans United, Mi Casa No Es Su Casa (also known as Mi Casa Resiste), CID Coalition, Coast to Coast Chinatowns Against Displacement (C2C) and many others. Additionally, the exhibition highlights the racial justice, housing rights, and community organizing history of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, CAB’s partner organization. In the dedicated lab space, a timeline highlights CAAAV’s nearly 35-year history along with photographs, videos and related ephemera.
Location: Pace University Art Galleries, 41 Park Row, New York City
Date: February 10, 2023 through March 25, 2023
Location: Pace University Art Galleries, 41 Park Row, New York City
Date: February 10, 2023 through March 25, 2023
Archive as Memorial
Artist Statement: Archive as Memorial is an exhibition co-curated by Tomie Arai and Diane Wong, along with members of A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project, a volunteer team of Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural workers, oral historians, educators, caretakers, and activists who have worked collaboratively since lockdown in March of 2020 to document the COVID-19 pandemic and the myriad ways it has impacted Asian/Pacific/American communities in New York and beyond. Archive as Memorial reflects the A/P/A experience at the intersection of several historic events—an ongoing global health crisis, a transnational Movement for Black Lives, and a surge in anti-Asian violence that has led us to national conversations about community safety and memorialization during a time of immense trauma. Included in the exhibit are recorded interviews, shared stories, and artifacts documenting the themes of mutual aid, community care, economic impacts, interracial solidarities, disability politics, and experimentations in mourning, both for our futures and our pasts. While A/P/A communities are too often at the center of recent conversations as objects of anger, curiosity, or sympathy, our work intervenes to document stories within our communities in our own words—this is not just essential for our communities’ own process of recovery but for all of us to heal as we begin to rebuild a “post COVID-19” world. In refusing the capitalist imperative to move on, as well as our desire to create with and for one another, we offer an alternative interpretation of the archive as an embodied activist practice that deepens community connectedness.
Location: Storefront for Ideas, 127 Walker Street, New York City
Date: January 25, 2023 through March 25, 2023
Location: Storefront for Ideas, 127 Walker Street, New York City
Date: January 25, 2023 through March 25, 2023
Homeward Bound: Global Intimacies in Converging Chinatowns
Artist statement: As Chinese American scholars, organizers, and artists, we curated this exhibition centering narratives of home, community, and intergenerational resistance. Born, raised, and rooted in New York City, we continue to witness the rapid gentrification of our neighborhoods. We recognize the work that tenants, small businesses, elders, and community organizers have put into imagining different futures for our cities. The installation uses photographs, oral histories, and multimedia archives to highlight stories of migration, displacement, and everyday resilience in Chinatowns around the world. This exhibit is the first of its kind to honor, preserve, and build on the history and present day issues of Chinatowns through community-led and curated narratives from residents globally. Our work centers the radical intimacies of strangers and the possibilities of narrating diasporic movement, estrangement, and belonging. Our work draws from four years of ethnographic research and oral history interviews with the Chinese diaspora that spans nine countries and thirteen cities, including: New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Seattle, Lima, Havana, Johannesburg, Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, and Sydney. As Chinatowns around the world continue to change and the diaspora uprooted, it is imperative that oral histories also at risk of being displaced are preserved for future generations.
Location: Pearl River Mart, 391 Broadway, New York City
Date: November 10, 2018 through February 2, 2019
Location: Pearl River Mart, 391 Broadway, New York City
Date: November 10, 2018 through February 2, 2019
Location: Pao Arts Center, 99 Albany Street, Boston
Date: February 22, 2020 through September 1, 2020
Date: February 22, 2020 through September 1, 2020
