Please join us on Thursday, February 8, 2024 at 6:30pm for our event curated and hosted by Alvin Eng, Asian American Night: Celebrating U+ME - Painting, Poetry, and Artistic Dialogue in Chinatown. Asian American artists will reflect on the dialogue in painting and poetry by Milton Resnick and Matthew Wong in the current exhibition U+ME: Paintings and Poetry by Milton Resnick and Matthew Wong, as well as celebrate intergenerational, interdisciplinary collaboration in Chinatown. We hope you can join us for this closing week, pre-Lunar New Year event.
Featuring
YUCHEN CHANG
BING LEE
LANIE LEE
STEFANI MAR
HELEN OJI
SIYAN WONG
Curated and Hosted by Alvin Eng
Artist/Panelists
CHANG YUCHEN works in an interdisciplinary manner — writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (see Use Value) and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. By constantly entering and exiting each medium, she strolls against the category of things, the labor division among people. She is currently in residence in the Artist Studio Program at Smack Mellon.
BING LEE is founding member of Godzilla -Asian American Arts Network, Epoxy Art Group and Tomato Grey. His public art installations include the Canal Street (NYC) and Kowloon Tong (Hong Kong) subway stations among others. He initiated the ongoing project "Pictodiary" in 1983 and has committed to making iconographic journal daily as his significant portrayal of work.
LANIE LEE is a Chinese American artist, born and raised in the Bronx. She received a Pollock-Krasner grant and had artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Alpha Hills paper making in Japan, and Mass MOCA. She has been in numerous exhibits, including P.S. 1 and the Basement Workshop. In 2022-23, her solo exhibition “Passages Through Time,” was on view at the New York Public Library’s Hudson Park branch. https://lanie212.wixsite.com/arts
STEFANI MAR, artist/designer, explores materials and forms to examine current and perennial obsessions. Born in Seattle, WA, attended art school (CCAC), graduated from UC Berkeley. Living/working in NYC since 1980, artworks include drawing, painting, sculpture, installations shown in galleries, museums and in public spaces. Design works include clothing, textiles and costumes––including a long-term association with Ping Chong & Company.
HELEN OJI is a sansei (3rd generation Japanese American) who is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Her work blends Asian, American and European visual traditions and explores the synergy of gesture, paint, color, and shape. After earning her MA degree in Art (Painting) in California, she moved to New York City in 1976 where she currently lives and works.
SIYAN WONG sees the power of portraiture to share the human experiences. A self-taught painter, an immigrant, and a workers' rights lawyer, her experiences inform her artistic vision. Her solo exhibition in Fall of 2023, “Lives of Three Canners: New York’s Chinese Elderly Immigrants,” was on view at the 456 Gallery in Manhattan. Her art is fiscally sponsored by NYFA and publicly funded. Learn more at www.siyanwong.com
Bing Lee, Stefani Mar and Helen Oji currently have work on view in the group exhibition, “GODZILLA:
Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network,” at the Eric Firestone Gallery thru March 16, 2024.
Curator/Host
ALVIN ENG is a native NYC playwright, memoirist, performer and educator. His memoir, OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN, was published by Fordham University Press. THREE TREES, the first of Eng’s Portrait Plays series of historical dramas about artists, was published by No Passport Press. He is currently developing a solo acoustic punk raconteur performance piece, HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN. Honors include Fulbright Specialist and NYSCA/NYFA Fellowships, LMCC grants. Eng’s works have been seen Off-Broadway, as well as in Paris, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China. www.alvineng.com