Moderator:

Richard Fung

Commentators:

Todd Ayoung
Tom Finkelpearl
John Kuo Wei Tchen

Speakers:

People's Actual Voices÷Tomie Arai
Feeding Ancestral Ghosts÷ Mei-Ling Hom
Crossing the Lines÷Shishir Kurup
Art and Faxes, Bridges and Boundaries ÷ Bing Lee

The History Truck
Hyun Lee, CAAAV
Susan Quimpo, Arkipelago
Lynne Yamamoto, Godzilla

Moderator

Richard Fung was born in Trinidad in 1954. He attended school in Ireland and immigrated to Canada to study architecture at the University of Toronto. Since the mid-1980s, Fung has written and lectured extensively about the representation of race, and of gay men, in the cinema and video art. His videotapes include Orientations (1984), Chinese Characters (1986), The Way to My Father's VIllage (1988), and Safe Place, co-produced with Peter Steven (1989). In 1990, he completed three videotapes: My Mother's Place, Fighting Chance, and Steam Clean/Vapeurs Sans Peur (for the Gay Men's Health Crisis Safer Shorts Series).

Commentators

"Doing a Few Lines of Western Art History" Todd Ayoung, 1995

Todd Ayoung is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at Yale University, pursuing a graduate degree in sculpture. Ayoung's work was recently featured in the exhibition "Fermented," curated by Amy Sadao and Barbara Hunt, at Parsons School of Design.

E-mail Todd Ayoung

Tom Finkelpearl worked at The Institute for Contemporary Art (Project Studio One) from 1982 to 1990 as a curator and Director of the Clocktower Gallery. He became Director of the Percent for Art Program at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in 1990, where he worked on over 130 public art projects. In 1996, Finkelpearl became Executive Director of the Studio Program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

John Kuo Wei Tchen is a historian and cultural activist. He is the founding director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at New York University and co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in the Americas. His forthcoming book is New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism in the American Quest for Life, Liberty, and Luxuries, 1776-1882. In 1991, he was awarded the Charles Frankel Prize by the National Endowment for the Humanities for his work in public history.

E-mail John Kuo Wei Tchen

Artists
 
 

People's Actual Voices

Tomie Arai is a visual artist who was born and raised in New York. She has designed public works of art for the NEA, the NYC Percent for Art Program, and the NYC Board of Education. She is a recent recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Printmaking, a 1995 Visual Arts Grant, a 1994 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, and a 1997 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Visual Artists Residency.

Arai recently completed a residency at Miami-Dade Community College. She worked with high school students in "Little Havana" to create an art project based upon the personal histories of Chinese-Latino and Chinese-Carribean residents of South Florida. Araiâs goal was to ãdocument the amazing mix of cultures that exists in the Chinese-Caribbean community.ä Along with the students, Arai gathered family histories from residents of the Chinese-Latin and Chinese-Caribbean communities, including men and women of varying ages, professions and backgrounds. ãIt was the studentsâ interaction with the interviewers that was really the heart of the project·The interview process changed the way [a Haitian student who had never spoken to an Asian person before] looked at his community as well as at other Asians and at other students in school.ä ãChinese in the Americas: A Collaborative Oral History and Art Project," which consisted of scrolls with painted and appliquéd images and texts based on the interviews, was exhibited at Miami Dade Community College in early 1995.

Feeding Ancestral Ghosts

Mei-ling Hom is a Philadelphia artist working in installation, public art, artists's books, sculpture, and art collaborations with Asian American communities. Through her project entitled Picturing Asian America, she has gathered 5000 photographs describing the cultural self identity of Asian American communities in Philadelphia and San Francisco areas. She was the 1996 recipient of the NEA/Japan grant to study the festival floats of Japan as community generated sculptural forms.

"China Wedge" Mei-ling Hom, 1994.
Commissioned site installation for the
Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA.
20' x 9' x 40'.
Granite, 20,000 Chinese rice bowls, soup spoons, and tea cups.

E-mail Mei-ling Hom

Crossing the Lines

Shishir Kurup is an Indo-African-American Actor/Writer/Director/Composer whose one-man shows Assimilation, and EXILE: Ruminations on a Reluctant Martyr, have played from Los Angeles to New York to London. He is a member of Cornerstone Theater Company. He recently directed and composed songs for Candude; or the Optimistic Servant, a Cornerstone production. Kurup will soon be seen performing in Peter Sellar's production of Jean Genet's The Screens, also for Cornerstone, and he can bee seen on film in Trigger Effect, Coneheads, and the soon to be released Dill Scallion and City of Angels. Television credits include ER, Murder One, and the F.B.I. crime drama C-16. Kurup has also worked as the Director of the Asian American Theater Project in Los Angeles, an organization that produces plays dealing with immigration, racism, segregation and intra-ethnic social themes. Kurupâs performances relate to community and political issues, as well as working to establish a dialogue between the artistic and local communities.

ãCornerstone Theater Company,ä travels throughout rural America and settles in towns for several weeks to put on a play. The company auditions local residents, mostly non-professional actors, who then work collectively to adapt classic plays to meet specific issues and needs within the community. ãIt is about blurring the line between what [is] a professional performer and what is non-professional.ä It is also about playing with public and private spaces, transforming a ãbrewery, a broken-down whateverä into a public theater, ãtaking public spectacle and putting it into a private space; allowing the audience to cross into and out of the space of the play. Weâre trying to cut across these lines of what community is·literally crossing these huge lines between Watts and Santa Monica, malls and theaters."

Art and Faxes, Bridges and Boundaries

Bing Lee is an artist living in New York City. he makes drawings every night as an ongoing project compiling a pictodiary to reveal a personal myth as well as a journal of social issues. He is also committed to public art projects. He has worked on such projects in Townshend Harris High School, PS 81, and the Canal Street Subway Station in New York City, and in the Midway Express Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Lee is the recipient of several grants from sources including the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is currently a faculty member and director of the Chinese Art Students Program at the School of Visual Arts.

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Lee organized an exhibition after the Tiananmen Massacre. Each day, he received and posted a new fax from Beijing, China. ãWhen we talk about public art, weâre talking about bridges and boundaries. Now weâve entered the age of digital culture, and everything is electronic and digital·So this is a part of the show, about all the information we get right away, instantly, from Beijing. We have satellites, so where is the geographic boundary?ä

The History Truck

Hyun Lee was the Racial Justice Committee program coordinator for the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV). CAAAV organizes New York City Asian immigrant and working-class communities to fight for systemic change that enables self-determination, the right to determine the conditions of our own lives free from oppression. To that end, CAAAV combats racism, bias-related violence, police brutality, and economic injustice through its four program areas: the Racial Justice Committee, the Lease Drivers Coalition, the Youth Leadership Project, and the Women Workers Project. CAAAV also furthers its objectives through coalition building, community education, and resource development. As the only organization in NYC, and one of the first in the US, to organize Asian communities to fight anti-Asian violence, CAAAV is also unique in that its anti-racist agenda exposes racism as gendered and invariably tied to the economic exploitation of, and police brutality against, Asian immigrants. In addition, CAAAV has established itself as an effective training ground for new generations of Asian American activists and a site for strengthening the political development and organizing skills of experienced activists.

Susan Quimpo is an activist who works with Arkipelago, a group of artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers, musicians, dancers, students, professionals, and friends exploring their Filipino American heritage and culture through various arts-related projects and programs. Arkipelago's main goals include the promotion of art by Filipinos and Filipino Americans, building a more encompassing sense of community among Filipinos and Filipino Americans, and exploring political and social issues relevant to the community.

E-mail Arkipelago

Lynne Yamamoto is a visual artist who works with the Godzilla, a New York-based collective group of Asian/Pacific Islander American visual artists and curators dedicated to education and social change through art. With exhibitions, meetings, printed materials, and its website, Godzilla, seeks to increase the visibility and opportunities of its constituents, while helping to preserve their diverse cultural histories.

Arkipelago, CAAAV, and Godzilla collaborated on the "Word Gets Around" project. Lynne Yamamoto explained that the three groups created a ãhistory truck, a mobile vehicle, because one of the biggest challenges of our work is that we are talking about building a pan-Asian community which really doesnât exist yet.ä This ãhistory truckä was used to traverse both the cultural and geographic divides that served as obstacles to the formation of a Pan-Asian community. Project organizers sought to educate audiences and also to ãbe political without being propagandistic, to learn about different communities and to increase visibility for [their] organizations, to bring art experiences to audiences who do not usually go to art institutions in the cities·and to build solidarity and a good working relationship among the three participating groups.ä They brought the truck to different community events, such as the various ethnic festivals that occur in New York City, where they focused on the themes of the recent anti-immigrant backlash and anti-immigrant legislation ãbecause it was something that affected all the different Asian communities across the board.ä

At the same time, the truck provided an opportunity to generate discussions among the diverse communities residing in a given neighborhood. Yamamoto described how, while working on the mural in Flushing participants ãgot into a very interesting discussion about the history of racism in American unions, and also the history of immigrants being used as strike breakers. I never knew there were a lot of working-class, poor union folks, living in Flushing. So for me, I think, the project really is significant in generating discussions among people who walk by each other every day, but never really get to talk to each other.ä

Susan Quimpo added that the history truck helped spark important discussions within Asian communities as well, explaining that it often represented the only political message at Asian community festivals. Describing a parade marking Philippine Independence Day, she observed that ãthere was no reminder of the realities of immigrant life in the Philippines. Everything was just glossed over. There were floats, beauty queens, and horse-drawn carriages, and here was Arkipelago, bringing the only political message, saying that America was built on immigrant labor.ä In these contexts, participants discovered that many immigrants were scared of being perceived as political, which necessitated the development of new strategies to reach immigrant audiences. ãHow do we bridge generational gaps?  How do we reach not only American-born people and U.S. citizens, but also immigrants and non-citizens who are afraid even to carry flyers in the current anti-immigrant environment?"

Artists and Their Work:  Session I

Artists and Their Work:  Session II

Conversations:  Themes and ideas emerging from the conference

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