Past
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.
LOADED: Iconographies of Asian America
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
Opening Saturday November 9, 2019 from 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Featured artists:
Carole Kim, Cathy Lu, and Victoria Tao.
September 7 – November 2, 2019
Singing in the Dark: A Meditation on Migration is 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.
