Art Salon Chinatown Presents
A Vision of Justice:
Tyrus Wong & The Cultural Continuum of New Chinatown
In Los Angeles’s New Chinatown, in a lovingly restored blue building that flanks Central Plaza, a watercolor painting by Tyrus Wong, entitled Confucius as a Justice, hangs majestically in a beautiful office away from public view. The Chinese Historical Society of Southern California invited curator Sonia Mak of Art Salon Chinatown to organize an online virtual exhibition about this important artwork that has never been exhibited.
February 8 – April 4, 2020
Art Salon Chinatown is pleased to present LOADED: Iconographies of Asian America, an exhibition inspired by the wealth of connections and contexts that problematize any simple definition of “Asian America” as a lexicon of representation. If we can accept this identifier at its most supple and capacious, as Margo Machida has suggested, then perhaps we can constructively think of “Asian American” as a descriptor that is uncomfortably and, at the same time, beautifully loaded in its geographies, affirmations, negations, possibilities, and ambiguities.
LOADED highlights the multivalent positionality of Asian American artists, first, by offering a glimpse into the range of perspectives and modes of address through which they articulate their ideas and, second, by providing a platform for their wide-ranging iconographies to be seen and considered together. This small sampling of works is meant to implicate a vast spectrum of ideas, interests, and ways of thinking in contemporary Asian American art practice.
The Nearness of You: Reflections on Nature
November 9, 2019 – January 11, 2020
Featured artists:
Carole Kim, Cathy Lu, and Victoria Tao.
September 7 – November 2, 2019
Singing in the Dark: A Meditation on Migrationis an exhibition reflecting on migratory displacement, refuge, and, ultimately, belonging. The exhibition brings together a group of artists who explore this rich yet difficult personal terrain via memory, family, and community. They offer first- and second- generation perspectives on immigration or refuge, inflected with individual approaches to navigating identity formation in their respective practices. As multicultural, diasporic artists working in a country whose current leadership champions racism and xenophobia and punishes refugees, the ongoing enterprise of untangling there/here and then/now is overlaid with the work of channeling power to resist an urgent and disturbing present.
May 11 – July 3, 2019
Art Salon Chinatown is proud to present Made in Asian America, a group exhibition featuring work by contemporary Asian American artists. This exhibition and the related programs will showcase a broad range of artistic engagement, practice, and inquiry across Los Angeles’ richly varied Asian American creative community.
February 2 – March 17, 2019
An exhibition celebrating the New Lunar Year of the Earth Pig/Boar. Over 20 artists have created celebratory interpretations of the Boar or Pig in various mediums. Join us as we welcome the start of this year, filled with the promise of harmony, success, peace, and prosperity!
December 15, 2018 – January 28, 2019
Hushidar Mortezaie, more commonly known as Hushi, is an Iranian American fashion designer, visual artist, and activist based in Los Angeles. As Mortezaie’s California Silk Road boldly attests: his creative practice is deeply rooted in a boundless pride for his queer, Muslim identity, Persian heritage, and experience as an American immigrant.
November 3 – December 10, 2018
The sixth edition of Art Salon Chinatown exhibitions will transform Realm (partially!) into Kristina Wong’s Campaign Headquarters. featuring Los Angeles artist Kristina Wong.
Admission to this interactive performance is FREE to the public.
September 22 – October 29, 2018
As a seasoned artist with a career forged in the fresh legacies of the feminist and civil rights movements in Los Angeles, much of May Sun’s work reflects a deep and methodical preoccupation with history and culture.
August 4- September 17, 2018
Kris Chau is a Los Angeles-based visual artist and clothing designer from Hawaii. As Chinese refugees from Vietnam, her parents could not pinpoint the source of their daughter’s creative talent nor explain her insatiable curiosity.
June 9 – July 30, 2018
Milton Quon is a native of Los Angeles, born in 1913. As the eldest of eight children and the only son of the Ng Quan Ying family, he grew up near and worked at his father’s produce business in Market Chinatown, where the Los Angeles Produce Market is located in downtown.
March 17 – April 22, 2018
Sandra Low is currently working on a series she calls Cheesy Paintings. A dizzying melange of patterns and textures push and pull against one another in Cranes’ Idyll, the signature piece for the inaugural Art Salon Chinatown. Awash in a palette that evokes the flavor of a middle-class family restaurant’s cheap vintage, the deft brushwork in a broad array of mannered effects show off Low’s undeniable gift as a painter.
February 17 – March 11, 2018
The exhibition that started Art Salon Chinatown!