Asian American Arts Centre

09/04/2023

Atoem Elem Wh Skil Em Me (Chief Eagle). Salish or Kootenai. Western Montana. ca. 1904-1906. Photo by Edward H. Boos. Source - Denver Public Library."Grandma how do you deal with pain?"
"With your hands, dear. When you do it with your mind, the pain hardens even more."
“With your hands, grandma?"
"Yes, yes. Our hands are the antennas of our Soul. When you move them by sewing, cooking, painting, touching the earth or sinking them into the earth, they send signals of caring to the deepest part of you and your Soul calms down. This way she doesn't have to send pain anymore to show it.
"Are hands really that important?"
"Yes my girl. Think of babies: they get to know the world thanks to their touch.
When you look at the hands of older people, they tell more about their lives than any other part of the body.
Everything that is made by hand, so it is said, is made with the heart because it really is like this: hands and heart are connected.
Think of lovers: When their hands touch, they love each other in the most sublime way."
"My hands grandma... how long since I used them like that!"
"Move them my love, start creating with them and everything in you will move.
The pain will not pass away. But it will be the best masterpiece. And it won't hurt as much anymore, because you managed to embroider your Essence.”

09/03/2023

Jazz on the streets of Maplewood

09/03/2023

09/03/2023

Neighborhood music in Maplewood

08/27/2023

For the latest episode of “Interpretations,” Artforum contributing editor Joan Kee proposes an art history with Afro Asia at its center. Less a place than a ...

08/21/2023

Can Memory Ever Be Eternal?
The Eternal Memory draws parallels between a Chilean couple’s struggle with Alzheimer’s and their country’s broader struggle to maintain its history. And it is an epic love story that transcends time and memory. Winner of the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema

The Eternal Memory draws parallels between a Chilean couple’s struggle with Alzheimer’s and their country’s broader struggle to maintain its history.

08/12/2023

Looking for a Lady With Fangs and a Moustache AUG 05, 2023
https://tricycle.org/filmclub/lady-with-fangs-and-a-moustache/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=f0dbe8d05d-Newsletter_23_08_12+subs&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-f0dbe8d05d-307593945
Director: Khyentse Norbu The modern world is highly scientific, analytical, and linear, but that isn’t truly the nature of reality. Transport yourself to a mystical dimension of life where things are not always what they seem. … a moustache, and perhaps a third eye. If she is a dakini—the embodiment of feminine energy in Tibetan Buddhism—she will be able to save his life. Lively, suspenseful, and complex, this film offers an artistic interpretation of embracing religious heritage. “Through its atmosphere and techniques, I hope this film will transport audiences to a profound, mystical, and yet very real and accessible dimension of life with which our modern world is sadly and rapidly losing touch,” Streaming free till Sept 1

This mystical drama follows an entrepreneur's frantic journey to be spared his death by finding an elusive lady with fangs.

08/09/2023

In the works of the late Korean artist, Kang Seok Ho, there is no narrative, no relational reference point, but rather a never-ending now.

08/09/2023

Asian American Arts Alliance supports the work of New York City's Asian American artists. Since 1983.

08/07/2023

Through painstakingly rendered and expressive drawings, the nonbinary comic artist processes some of their life’s darkest moments and hardest truths.

08/04/2023

Trương Cong Tung’s art is a meditation on the complex interdependent variables that constitute a diasporic experience, one that offers no easy or concrete answers.

07/18/2023

07/18/2023

Gathering of Asianish exhibition at Five Myles in Bklyn
Amy Lee Sanford performance:
Break Pot Reconstruct Pot on July 15

06/19/2023

In backyards, buffets, and barbecues across California, Indo artists and organizers are attempting to record, preserve, and further California Indo culture.

06/01/2023

Optimism

I remain cautiously optimistic. I think if we can move beyond the anxiety and dread and despair, there is a promise of something shifting not just culturally, but spiritually, too. I feel that potential in the air, or maybe a sort of subterranean undertow of concern and connectivity, a radical and collective move towards a more empathetic and enhanced existence.
It does seem possible — even against the criminal incompetence of our governments, the planet’s ailing health, the divisiveness that exists everywhere, the shocking lack of mercy and forgiveness, where so many people seem to harbour such an irreparable animosity towards the world and each other — even still, I have hope. Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity. We can seize this opportunity, or we can squander it and let it pass us by. I hope it is the former. I feel there is a readiness for that, despite what we are led to believe. ~Nick Cave

(Book: Faith, Hope and Carnage https://amzn.to/3q9XIUN)

05/07/2023

A Tension in Paint Befitting Our Times- in Hyperallergic
Maia Ruth Lee wants viewers to make associations as well as recognize the unstable world in which she and many others live. the exhibition Maia Ruth Lee: The skin of the earth is seamless at Tina Kim Gallery (April 6–May 6, 2023), By wrapping sculptural objects from her Bo***ge Baggage series in unprimed canvas, and then securing them with cord, Lee starts with an ungainly and unforgiving three-dimensional surface. In contrast to the canonical readings of Po***ck and the Minimalist response to his work, Lee is not interested in being literal. She wants viewers to make associations as well as recognize the unstable world in which she and many others live, Lee’s parents went to Nepal to compile a Korean-Sherpa dictionary. Since Sherpa is an oral Tibetic language, the task took many years. As the film plays, we read excerpts of letters the artist wrote to her friends in 2020 and 2022, during the pandemic, mostly about the ideas of “home” and “place.”
..conveyor belts, but their removal from the context changes them; they become limbless corpses, lost objects, soft vessels containing the stuff of one’s life, reminders of upheaval, migration, deportation, imprisonment, and even torture. Piles of baggage stir up all kinds of associations, reminding us that forced migrations have been one legacy of the modern era.

Although it is not immediately apparent, the sculptures are central to Lee’s painting process: she wraps the bundles in unprimed canvas, fastens it with cords, and rubs ink into its uneven surface. Next, she cuts the cords and unfolds and stretches the canvas; she does not know what the painting will look like until it is stretched. .... reminded of the pliage paintings that the French-Hungarian artist Simon Hantaï began making in 1960. His technique was to fold the canvas into various configurations and apply paint to the exposed areas. Writing about Hantaï in 2006, Carter Ratcliff was precise in his estimation:

[Hantaï] is one of the very few artists, European or American, who responded to Jackson Po***ck’s poured paintings in a genuinely original manner. Po***ck invented a new way to paint and Hantaï did the same. both artists share an interest in destabilizing the figure-ground relationship, albeit for different reasons.

04/23/2023

[Note: I don’t correct Tennessee Williams. The party at which Tennessee met Picasso did not take place in NYC. Still, an interesting take.] "I wrote to Picasso once: I did not receive a reply. I saw Picasso at a party or an opening or something crowded and awful in New York. I spoke to him. I repeated what I had written in my letter: How do we do it? What do we do when the images and the words do not come forth? How do we survive? How do we remain artists? He looked at me with those glorious eyes, snapped back that shiny, bald head and told me that we are not artists; we do not concern ourselves with 'art.' We are workmen, day laborers--who happen to work with paints and clay and actors, and curtains part on occasion to display what we do. Tell the truth, he said. As you know it. Art may happen; it may not. We are not owed its presence. His point was made." Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom/New Orleans/1982/

04/18/2023

04/18/2023

04/18/2023

Help stop the demolition of The Tombs before its too late! Notices have gone out to your neighbors about the start of demolition of 124-125 White Street to make way for the planned Mega Jail. This, despite irrefutable evidence that demolition of these structures poses significant danger and risk to the community. I just signed a letter to City Hall calling for an immediate pause to the demolition so that a feasibility study can be done and alternative options, such as adaptive reuse - a safer, less costly, greener and faster option – can be considered. Join me by clicking on this link - stop-chinatown-jail.glitch.me - to sign the letter and help reach its goal of sending 1,000 signed letters by Friday, April 21.

04/04/2023

Bellingham

04/03/2023

U of Washington campus

04/01/2023

The front page of The New York Times for March 31, 2023. https://nyti.ms/40ve4V8

04/01/2023

Swarm of Monarch Butterflies
(Farfalle Monarca)

03/23/2023

Tishan Hsu's second solo exhibition with Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, is now on view during Hong Kong Art Week.

03/23/2023

Tishan Hsu’s Art Preceded Internet Aesthetics by Decades. Now, His Prescient Work Is Finally Getting Its Due AAAC exhibited Tishan 1985
A digitally native generation has become captivated by the New York artist, who is in his 70s.
Louise Benson, March 22, 2023

Tishan Hsu's second solo exhibition with Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, is now on view during Hong Kong Art Week.

03/23/2023

We have been dangerously siloed for far too long by colonial constructs of race, nation, and time that separate, divide, and deny us our very being.

03/14/2023

In Ito’s art we glimpse something we cannot comprehend. A sense of longing and mystery, isolation and solitude fill the paintings.

03/10/2023

https://secure.givelively.org/donate/create-in-chinatown-inc/protect-the-future-of-the-asian-american-arts-centre-collection

Protect the future of the Asian American Arts Centre's collection, Chinatown's pioneering collection of Asian American art! **Give Lively is a platform similar to GoFu...

03/10/2023

NEW WEBSITE LAUNCH https://sunday-paintings.screen-door.net/
Congratulations to Byron Kim on the launch of the first comprehensive online database of Kim's Sunday Paintings series. This website archives the ongoing body of work the artist initiated in January 2001. Every week, Kim produces a small, square painting of the sky at that time, and inscribes a journal entry on the completed painting. The journal entries — often meditations on painting, teaching, parenting, love, friendship, and current events — are marked with the time, date, and location of each painting. The series contains well over 1,000 paintings and continues to steadily grow.

If she looks past the TV, my mom sees the sky out her kitchen window. What does the sky look like through all that smoke? I see the sky out my studio window. Is it the same sky?

02/27/2023

Nobuko Miyamoto spoke at her book reading at Think Chinatown on One Pike St. Not Yo' Butterfly am reading, so much I didnt know.

02/27/2023

New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original
Storefront for Art and Architecture
Exhibition by Canal Street Research Association featuring works by Ming Fay https://www.instagram.com/p/CpInsyOLCKU/
Join us next Wednesday March 1st for the opening. The show will run through May 27th.
Participating in a 1988 exhibit "Public Art in Chinatown" that aimed to change NYC Chinatown’s image, Ming created a public art proposal for the triangle at Canal Street and Baxter Street called “Monumental Fruits.” The original exhibition took place at the Asian American Arts Centre and aimed to influence the city and its officials to use contemporary public artwork by Asian Americans in Chinatown. Ming wrote: “The traffic triangle between Canal, Baxter and Walker Streets is a true crossroad of multi-ethnic gathering. The area is known for its street market of fresh produce and fruits. In Chinese culture, orange is a symbol of good luck, peach for longevity and pears for prosperity.”

02/26/2023

David Attenborough Fans
3d ·
Living root bridges are a form of tree shaping common in the southern part of the Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya. They are handmade from the aerial roots of Rubber Fig Trees. This is one near Nongsohphan Village.

Read more:

The entwined roots of Indian rubber trees form bridges that—unlike steel structures—grow more durable with time. The emerald hills of Meghalaya state—a steep, sodden, rumpled, and stream-slashed portion of India’s remote and picturesque northeastern panhandle—can be excruciatingly difficul...

02/19/2023

We're closing out West of Paradise this Sunday with some very special music performances! 🎶✨

Be blown away by a series of performances celebrating Asian / Asian-American heritage by artist Angela Han and presented by composers from the Realms of Courage series, Theresa Calpotura and Julie Zhu. Register to attend: https://westofparadiseclose.eventbrite.com/?aff=Facebook

Julie Zhu's work is conceptual and polydisciplinary, operating on an expansive definition of algorithm and sound architecture—from just intonation software to constructing a box to house a percussionist to traditional orchestration—and has been performed by the JACK quartet, EXAUDI, Ensemble Linea, Quasar, Wu Wei and Marco Fusi, among others. Zhu is currently based in San Francisco where she is a doctoral candidate in music composition at Stanford University.

Theresa Calpotura has performed in venues across the US and the Philippines as a soloist and with her group, The Blue Hours. She teaches guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and studies Maguindanaon kutiyapi with master G**o Karatuan Kalanduyan. In 2022, she received the San Francisco Artist Grant from the SF Arts Commission to write and record Musikang Halo-Halo, a multi-part work that pulls from her 100-year-old grandmother’s life, Filipinx mythology, and her own mixed heritage.

Photo credit: Matthew Washburn

02/17/2023

FAR–NEAR is a curated cross-cultural book series broadening perspectives of Asia through image, idea, person and history.

02/15/2023

After decades of underground organizing for cultural expression and political agency, establishment funding is flooding the neighborhood. But with millions tied to the city’s borough-based jails plan, is the bankroll worth the price?