It might surprise you to learn that Asian artists created little of that art, and the works have seldom told the stories of the local community that has lived there for over a century.

In other words, much of the earlier artwork in Chinatown’s public spaces has ironically left Asian American identities and experiences invisible, said Abby Chen, a curator at the Asian Art Museum. That’s largely because the commissioning process included little, if any, outreach to Asian artists. 

“We were never part of that,” Chen said. “We were never invited to begin with.”

After decades of community advocacy, local groups have increased opportunities for Asian Americans to create public art. And now the city’s Arts Commission and the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco are expanding that effort by building a catalogue of Asian artists, many of whom might otherwise go unseen, to create future works. 

Artists of any experience level can apply online by Sept. 11 to be entered in the Chinatown Artist Registry. Chinese artists who are not fluent in English can email the Chinese Culture Center for help applying.

The initiative is also part of a larger push, begun during the pandemic, to enliven Chinatown through new museums and art spaces, as well as outdoor performances and other events like the night market and the recent Hungry Ghost Festival. Local groups are trying to draw more tourists and citywide residents — especially Asian Americans who might not see themselves represented in typical Chinatown artwork.

“If you’re someone who’s growing up in Chinatown, who has maybe never actually been in Asia or been in China, you would actually [have] a deep sense of alienation or maybe identity crisis,” said Hoi Leung, deputy director of the Chinese Culture Center.

Chinatown has long been a hub for incredible Chinese American artists, including the eminent 20th-century painter Chang Dai-Chien and Tyrus Wong, the artist behind Disney’s “Bambi.” More than 1,000 Asian American artists were active in the neighborhood between 1850 and the 1970s “but we know little of them,” said community historian David Lei.

Often they were unable to break into the professional art scene because they lacked access to typical pathways, Chen said. Many did not attend art schools in this country or have contacts in galleries, and they might have barely spoken English.

Few got commissions to work on public art projects because qualifying processes were “intimidating and complicated,” Chen said. The opportunities were generally publicized in English, so Chinese artists may not have heard about them in the first place and struggled to complete applications within short submission timetables.  

By the time judges sat down to choose artists for projects, “We often felt that it was already too late and there were no artists in the pool who could represent us,” Leung said.

That nearly happened in 2008, when many feared that the commission for the public art project at the Chinatown-Rose Pak Muni station would not go to a community artist. In an unprecedented move, Chen, then working at the Chinese Culture Center, and others at local groups pushed to extend the application period, to buy enough time to find someone with ties to the area. Chen reached out to various artists performing and exhibiting their artworks in the neighborhood and helped them translate their applications. 

The strategy worked, and a significant number of Asian American artists became finalists. The San Francisco Arts Commission selected Yumei Hou, a sculptor and traditional paper-cutting artist who lived in a single-room occupancy hotel in Chinatown. Today, a permanent steel fabrication of Hou’s design is displayed at the station, nodding to the Chinese tradition of celebrating the Lunar New Year by decorating homes with paper cuts.

The successful effort inspired the creation of today’s registry, which will retain artist information like their past works and how to contact them. 

Artists can apply to be in the Chinatown Artist Registry regardless of where they live or whether they have previous experience creating public art. Applicants must articulate their connection with Chinatown. People can email art@cccsf.us for help applying.

“This is your chance to introduce yourself and your work to the Arts Commission,” Leung said. The Chinese Culture Center is trying to encourage artists to come forward by spreading the word through bilingual media, other Asian American groups and word of mouth.

Members of the Arts Commission and art professionals will place the best applicants in the registry, to choose from when they need artists for public art projects in Chinatown and elsewhere. Three projects are planned at Portsmouth Square, Chinatown Public Health Center and Chinatown Him Mark Lai Branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

The post Asian Americans Have Made Little of Chinatown’s Art. A New Tool Could Change That appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

In her exhibition at San Francisco’s Institute of Contemporary Art, artist Suchitra Mattai explores her own immigration story and those of her ancestors.

When people leave their home countries, Mattai said, they can carry only so many physical possessions. That makes their memories all the more precious as ties to their past lives. In recalling them, their identities clarify and are reinforced, but they can also shift, thanks to the fragility and malleability of the mind.

Those are the concepts that Mattai aims to capture in her art installation, “memory palace,” part or her larger exhibition, “she walked in reverse and found their songs,” her latest in a line of work that examines colonialism. Visitors can view Mattai’s installation for free through Sept. 15 at the museum, located at 901 Minnesota St., in the Dogpatch neighborhood.

The installation reflects the impermanence of memory, with recognizable as well as abstract, dreamlike elements: furniture that might be found in a living room, large balls of twisted colorful textiles, and videos of the Atlantic Ocean that Mattai shot on a trip tracing her ancestors’ journey. They were indentured laborers forced to travel from India to Guyana, South America, to work on sugar plantations.

“I wanted it to be the domestic space that then became inhabited with these strange sculptures and creatures, because the space of memory is ephemeral,” she said. “It’s always changing. It’s transformative, and that interior space allows for all of this to happen, so it’s a space of fantasy or myth.”

Reporter Emily Wilson interviewed artist Suchitra Mattai on her podcast, “Art is Awesome,” which airs on KSFP 102.5 FM and streams at KSFP.fm Fridays at 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. Click the audio player above to listen.

The name “memory palace” refers to a mnemonic device by which someone imagines a location and places objects or information there, then revisits it later to recall those things. Mattai heard about the technique when getting her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing at the University of Pennsylvania, and it intrigued her.

The exhibition is a sort of maximalist explosion of color. All the art pieces are fabric, from two-dimensional works that resemble paintings to a recreation of the house where she was born.

Called “Pappy’s house,” it represents the home as a single repository for remembrances, as a counterpoint to “memory palace,” which depicts the assemblage of things and thoughts that inhabit a living space. “Pappy’s house” is an ode to where her grandparents lived and where the family gather, often for important events like weddings.

“My earliest memories are in that house,” she said. “There’s something about capturing those stories and memories that helps define oneself, so I think making it or a version of it is a way to find something out about oneself.”

“Pappy’s house” is made of used saris, the ornate colorful garments that Indian women traditionally wrap around themselves, as a nod to her ancestors’ roots. It is “woven of memories of India,” she said. Like many houses in Georgetown, Guyana’s capital and chief seaport, this one stood on stilts to avoid flooding, and Mattai’s rendition almost seems to levitate above the ground.

Weaving a floating house of saris is no easy undertaking, and that made it fitting for the Institute of Contemporary Art, which is “dedicated to experimenting in public,” according to its website. Director Ali Gass encourages artists to try something they’ve always wanted to do, and that will push their craft to the next level. The ICA opened in October 2022 with a show by queer indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson, who removed part of the floor to reveal the soil underneath as a way of honoring the land. And artist Patrick Martinez earlier this year had a sculptural installation that he called “a painting you could walk around.” Martinez is known for multimedia landscapes of Los Angeles using neon, spray paint and iron safety bars.

On the exhibition’s opening day, Mattai said she was thrilled by how it had turned out.

“I’m elated to see it all together and the way Ali’s curated it. I think that when you’re working on such a scale, you don’t know if it’s all going to work, right?” she said.

“We’re making the tapestries and wondering, ‘Are they all going to fit? Is [“Pappy’s house”] going to float in the way that I want?’ There are all these unknowns and things that are beyond your control,” she said. “Right now, I’m seeing the show as a whole for the first time and seeing all the parts feed into this idea of the “memory palace” and about the way memory functions in our creation of self, and I’m just so excited to see it all.”

The post Artist’s Show Weaves Together Memories and Immigration Stories appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The parade’s organizer, the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce, has announced the roster of floats and entertainers who will participate, including a 289-foot golden dragon that debuted in public on Lunar New Year’s Day, Feb. 10, for a Taoist “awakening” ceremony.

Typically, the dragon is replaced every six to eight years, said Harlan Wong, the parade director and a board member of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. The most recent dragon, purchased six years ago, suffered damage during last year’s parade, due to inclement weather.

While it could probably still be used, Wong said, organizers felt it was time to refresh the parade’s most iconic feature: “We want it to coincide with the year, to bring out a dragon in the Year of the Dragon.”

To celebrate the Year of Dragon, San Francisco’s Chinatown is hosting several art and cultural events as part of its Lunar New Year celebrations. These range from traditional activities, such as the flower market, to new initiatives like a pop-up store featuring Asian American artists at the Chinatown-Rose Pak Station, Muni’s newest Central Subway metro stop.

The passing of the golden dragon is the centerpiece of the annual procession. Following exquisite floats, costumed dancers and marching bands, a large team will maneuver the long, illuminated dragon down the parade route, concluding the Chinatown tradition for Lunar New Year.

The Chinese New Year Parade, the festival’s pinnacle event, is scheduled this Saturday. Until then, the new dragon is on display at Three Embarcadero Center.

Parade as a Public Expression

Chinese Americans have used parades to exhibit their culture and broadcast messages since the 1850s during California’s Gold Rush Era.

Chinese Americans participated in some of California’s earliest parades, including a San Francisco funeral procession for President Zachary Taylor in 1850.

Local newspapers first reported large dragon dance ensembles on San Francisco streets during Year of the Monkey celebrations in 1860. But the first well-documented parade in San Francisco’s Chinatown took place in 1887. It was organized by Yeong Wo Co., a district association that served immigrants coming from the same hometown in the Zhongshan area, Guangdong Province, near China’s southern coast. “We know that they imported a dragon and they had a customs problem,” said Lei. “They sued the government for lower duty and lost.”

David Lei said association members could have won their case but they didn’t have time to spare so they paid the import tax to meet their own August festival deadline.

Lei explained that the parade, dedicated to Hau Wong, a deity worshiped in Southern Canton, China, carried a significant message to the Chinese community beyond its religious implications. Parade participants associated Hau Wong with a loyal Song Dynasty general. Therefore, the celebration of this deity could symbolize a desire to restore Han Chinese rule.

For most non-Chinese spectators of the 1887 parade, the dragon procession and Chinese opera performances were the highlights. The parade drew high praise in local newspapers.

For decades, the Chinatown community organized parades for various causes, including elevating the neighborhood’s reputation, protesting discrimination and raising funds for charity, including for people in China whose lives were in turmoil during World War II.

Taking over the Narrative

When Chiou-Ling Yeh first researched the Chinese New Year Parade for her PhD dissertation 20 years ago, she was amazed. Originally from Taiwan, Yeh said parades are “more of an American tradition. In China, they don’t do a parade for the Chinese New Year.”

Hong Kong hosted its first Chinese New Year Parade in 1996, drawing upon the experience of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

The modern form of San Francisco’s Chinese New Year Parade took shape in 1953, when H.K. Wong, a Chinatown businessman and director of San Francisco’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce, decided to promote the Lunar New Year celebration to the rest of San Francisco.

Wong was the first reporter in Chinatown and served as marketing director for the renowned Empress of China restaurant. Frustrated by the way most local newspapers covered Chinatown, often focusing on gambling arrests, he opened up the previously private celebration, hoping to reverse the bad press.

In an interview featured in the book “Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown” (Stanford University Press), he said: “I thought this would be the appropriate time to invite our American friends to share in this happiness and to appreciate and learn things about Chinese.”

It was during the Cold War, when Communist China was perceived as an enemy. The parade served as more than just an ethnic festival. Featuring Chinese American veterans from World War II and the Korean War, it demonstrated Chinese Americans’ patriotism and loyalty to the United States, and their efforts to integrate into mainstream American society.

The parade has evolved. Its route weaves through more neighborhoods, and it has been promoted as a winter tourist attraction since 1963, when the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau signed on as a co-sponsor.

Local television stations began to broadcast the parade in 1988. It soon garnered national and international attention, attracting sponsors and drawing a wide audience.

Being featured on television significantly reshaped the narrative of Chinese Americans. “In the ’60s and ’70s, the only thing you read about Chinese Americans were tong wars, gang killings, and illegal contributions to politics, almost always negative,” Lei said. When the spotlight turned to the parade, organizers seized the chance to present their community in a different light: “We could explain our culture our way,” Lei said.

Evolving Message

Lei recalled that, as a teenager in 1964, he organized a group of friends to carry the golden dragon. Athletes from a martial arts school managed the head and tail, while his team helped carry the segmented body.

“We didn’t even really have to carry the dragon,” Lei said, laughing as he explained how spectators were happy to lend a hand. One person on their crew was designated to look for people in the crowd who wanted to participate. As the team carried the dragon through the streets, when one volunteer got tired, the crowd-spotting coordinator would find a replacement.

Serendipitous moments like that were lost when the parade transitioned into a televised event, Lei said. But new opportunities emerged and the parade evolved to carry new meaning.

“The parade here actually touched upon many issues, in the larger U.S. society and also within the Chinese American society, and also reflecting the issues within the Asian American community,” said Yeh, who later published her dissertation as a book, “Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown” (University of California Press).

While the parade served as a civic engagement tool for Chinatown, over the years it adapted to reflect broader societal changes, including efforts to advance civil rights, women’s and LGBTQ rights.

Organizers of the Chinese New Year Parade also supported other local communities’ parades, including San Francisco’s world-famous Pride Parade. In 1994, the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance became the first gay rights group to join Chinatown’s iconic parade, and it received enthusiastic support.

Parades continue as a means for communities to convey messages. Following mass shootings in Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park, a new public art project was unveiled at last year’s parade to bring together Chinese and Latina immigrant women designers.

For Lei, the Year of Dragon symbolizes the power of diversity, which he believes is highly reflective of America. In Chinese culture, the dragon is the most powerful mythological creature, with the best part of every animal, from claws of eagle to the body of a snake, he said. “When you absorb the depths of different cultures, you become the most powerful,” Lei said.

The post New Parade Dragon Carries on Local Legacy Dating Back Nearly 175 Years appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

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“Genderation” will screen exclusively in-person on June 20 at the Roxie Theater as part of Frameline.

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“No Straight Lines” screens at the Frameline film festival, digitally June 17–27 and in-person at the Castro Theater on Sunday, June 27.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post In ‘No Straight Lines,’ We Meet Groundbreaking Queer Comic Artists appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Return of the Roxie: SF Nonprofit Cinema Cautiously Reopens appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“The End of the Golden Gate” includes writing from notable locals like W. Kamau Bell, Margaret Cho and Michelle Tea. Book launches will be hosted by Litquake on May 26 and the Commonwealth Club on May 27. Kamiya and writer and artist John Law joined “Civic” to talk about gentrification, rents and the message newcomers often hear — that San Francisco peaked just before their arrival.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post In ‘The End of the Golden Gate,’ Writers Share Reflections on a San Francisco in Flux appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The Legacy Film Festival on Aging runs virtually May 24-31.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen daily at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on 102.5 FM in San Francisco, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Legacy Film Festival Delves Into the Triumphs and Challenges of Aging appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Director and co-producer Richard Lui, a news anchor at MSNBC and NBC News, talked with “Civic” about why and how young people are stepping in to do this work and what it means to be a caregiver. 

“Sky Blossom” will screen at CAAMFest on May 18 at 6 p.m. It will also air on MSNBC May 29 and 30, and will reach a theater in every state on May 26. 

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Documentary ‘Sky Blossom’ Highlights Young Caregivers appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.