Scenes from LA DowntownI know that today, the opening day of my exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery especially, should be a day that I concentrate on the show, the art and nothing else.
That said, there is that other part of me, the writer who is interested in social change that pushes through the abstraction and visceral emotion that inspires me to photograph, even when coming from my subconscious. (I published three award winning books after all - well at least two "award-winning" - that relate to social change although except for the third, my book for youth on civic & political activism, relating in the most subtle way). So it is in this connected age where I find myself this morning, googling my project name, FINDING CHINATOWN, and where the links, the raison d'etre, the "why?" I am so often asked, are bubbling up.
The first: a terrific website that I just found through the searches and one that did a short but rather perceptive post on my exhibition. The Provisions Library/Arts for Social Change. Here is the link to the review however the site itself looks fascinating and their perspective underlies a lot of my work.
The second: a July 11 article from METRO FOCUS, WNET's (New York) blog, "Finding Chinatown Through Oral Histories" a project created by the Asian American Writer's Workshop called “Open City: Blogging Urban Change,” a multimedia website that showcases personal accounts of life and neighborhood transformation in New York’s Chinatowns.
The articles, also done in collaboration with MOCA (Museum of the Chinese in America, NYC), are fascinating and revealing. I also love the following comment by Lena Sze, the organizer for Open City, for it states as well what I strongly believe: That if for no other reason (although I think there are many other reasons) what we see in the Chinatowns or for that matter many other enclaves or countries, as Americans and as global citizens, is not disconnected from we who may not be from that specific community and thus the only way that we can go forward is to be aware, considerate, interested and interactive with each other and join together for change rather than isolate or push away for destruction.
"... the organizers of Open City believe that firsthand testaments of people living in gentrifying Chinatowns are more powerful than the statistics. 'I think that even if you aren’t specifically Asian American or interested in Chinatowns, what’s happening in Manhattan Chinatown, as well as Flushing Chinatown and Sunset Park, in their own very different ways, is an example, is kind of a window on to what is happening to the New York metropolitan region as a whole.” Lena Sze
Hmmm... now that I've written this, it seems like the perfect post on this, FINDING CHINATOWN's opening day.
Wonderful work.
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