Happy Family Night Market - Curator
For the second year of Happy Family Night Market, NYC's first and only pan-Asian cultural and culinary festival, I curated and organized a public art show, commissioning new work from some artists and curating old work from others: Somnath Bhatt, KT Pe Benito & Minh Bui, Lexy Ho-Tai, Abeera Kamran, Alison Kuo, Nic Annette Miller, Natalia Nakazawa, and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.
Things I thought about: What makes Asian art Asian? And what makes public art public? What are the effects of using archetypal imagery and recognizably Asian symbols in artwork in order to easily achieve relatability or approachability? Can Asian artists reclaim these symbols and recover from "white gaze" art made within the diaspora?
I invited visual artists to explore these concepts through site-specific and participatory artworks.