Chinatown Art Brigade

In 2015, artists Tomie Arai, ManSee Kong and Betty Yu formed the Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB), a cultural collective that recognizes the power of art to advance social justice. As cultural workers and media makers, our projects are rooted in activism and movement-building work. Chinatown Art Brigade is a project-driven collective that began working in collaboration with the Chinatown Tenants Union of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, a grassroots organization that organizes low-income pan-Asian communities around tenant rights, fighting evictions and community empowerment. Our work is driven by the fundamental belief that collaboration with and accountability to communities that are directly impacted by racial, social and economic inequities must be central to our creative process.

Many thanks to the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation's Art & Social Justice initiative for Public Art, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Creative Engagement program, Asian Women Giving Circle, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Asian Arts Initiative, Culture Push, Fourth Arts Block, the Laundromat Project, and many others for supporting our various projects.

For more, visit @chinatownartbrigade and the Chinatown Art Brigade website.

2015

At the suggestion of River 瑩瑩 Dandelion and the Chinatown Tenants Union at CAAAV, Tomie Arai, Betty Yu, and myself started to meet with CTU to brainstorm a collaborative public project that would amplify tenant stories and housing issues in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

2016

After a series of meetings and conversations, our first project as Chinatown Art Brigade was born. HERE TO STAY was a yearlong community-based public art project in collaboration with Chinatown Tenants Union of CAAAV and The Illuminator that featured a series of large-scale outdoor mobile projections addressing issues of gentrification, displacement and community resilience in Manhattan's Chinatown. Multilingual visuals based on oral histories, walking tours, community mapping, and photographs created in community-led workshops were projected onto buildings and public landmarks throughout Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

Photos: Louis Chan, KahEan Chang

2017

We held our second projection event in Chinatown during the Spring, and later that Fall, organized two days of actions to call out a racist art-washing gallery installation at James Cohan gallery on Grand Street, Chinatown.

Photos: Louis Chan

Members of the brigade updated our pledge to hold galleries accountable, calling attention to the 100+ galleries that have appeared throughout Chinatown over the past decade. Gallery map as of 2016 was designed by Liz Moy.

2018

To kick off the Lunar New Year, Tomie Arai and I were invited to edit the 6th issue of Culture Push’s push/pull online journal, a bilingual issue titled Chinatown/Connex, with contributions from Huiying B. Chan, Diane Wong and Mei Lum, Alina Shen, Emily Mock, Gòngmíng Collective for Language Justice, and the Chinatown Art Brigade.

Chinatown/Connex gif by Liz Moy

Thanks to Tomie Arai and the Asian Arts Initiative, Chinatown Art Brigade was invited to Philadelphia to work with Asian Americans United, VietLead, and national youth organizers from Grassroots Asians Rising on a series of workshops and public projections over the course of eight months in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Projection messages called attention to present-day immigration policies and condemned family separations.

Photos by Asian Americans United, Tomie Arai, Asian Arts Initiative (Jino Lee, Phil Cho, Ashley Lê).