Discover a new take on Asian American cultures.
See, hear, create, and connect. Together, celebrate the rich cultural fabric of Boston Chinatown through free creative activities for all.
In 2020, join in our new format as we uplift the neighborhood while ensuring health and safety for all. Throughout September, enjoy unique events and pop-up happenings through virtual and physical platforms, allowing for social distancing and leisurely enjoyment. This event is a part of the We Love Boston Chinatown resiliency campaign, a partnership with community organizations, businesses, and residents that is working together to uplift the community and support local businesses.
Map of Sites
Installations at Storefront Sites
Create your own self-paced tour with our map of sites.
Participating Sites:
Pao Arts Center: 99 Albany St., Boston, MA 02111
Wang YMCA of Chinatown: 8 Oak St., Boston, MA 02116
Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center: 38 Ash Street, Boston, MA 02111
APM coffee : 99 Kneeland St, Boston, MA 02111
Liuyishou Hotpot Boston: 702 Washington St, Boston, MA 02111
Dumpling Cafe: 695 Washington St, Boston, MA 02111
Bubor Cha Cha: 45 Beach St, Boston, MA 02111
Tbaar Chinatown: 32 Kneeland St, Boston, MA 02111
Schedule of Events:
Saturday, September 5 - Monday, September 7
Artists at Work
Watch the storefronts of Chinatown comes alive as artists add their creative flair to the neighborhood.
Residence Lab Installations
Enjoy public artworks by Residence Lab artists Krina and Maria in collaboration with Chinatown residents Angela, Dianyvet, Po Chun, and Sylvia. Take a trip down memories and stories embedded in Chinatown by visiting 8 Hudson St where you’ll find a mural or pause at the Kneeland St and Harrison Ave intersection to view a window installation that addresses pedestrian safety.
September 7 – September 27
Installations at Storefront Sites
Create your own self-paced tour with our map.
Thursday, September 24
Take Out Thursday with music by Trio Gaia | 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm **
Music at Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park on The Greenway with support from Greenway Conservancy
Musical Performance under Lantern Stories | 6:00 pm - 7:30pm
Join cellist Sam Ou and calligrapher Mike Mei under the glow of artist Yu-Wen Wu’s light-based installation Lantern Stories at Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park on The Greenway. Meet Yu-Wen Wu and celebrate her vision. Enjoy a night of music, community stories, and public art on one of the last evenings of Experience Chinatown 2020. Supported by the Greenway Conservancy.
29 Oak Street Projections | 8:00 pm - 9:00pm
Final nigh of text, still, and moving image artwork by local artists projected on the brick rowhouse wall of 29 Oak Street organized by Chinatown Land Trust.
Saturday, September 26 | 11:00 am - 2:00 pm
Music at Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park on The Greenway with support from Greenway Conservancy
Violin Viiv | 11:00 am
Marko De Peralta | 12:00 noon
Aznjujube featuring Jeff La | 1:00 pm
** Performances will follow Commonwealth of Massachusetts guidelines. Please remember to wear your masks and stay physically distant. Hand sanitizer stations will be available, and if crowds begin to form performances may be temporarily paused.
Past Events
Thursday, September 10
Take Out Thursday with music by Violin Viiv | 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm**
Music at Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park on The Greenway with support from Greenway Conservancy
29 Oak Street Projections | 8:00 pm - 9:00pm (Cancelled due to rain)
Three nights of text, still, and moving image artwork by local artists projected on the brick rowhouse wall of 29 Oak Street organized by Chinatown Land Trust.
Night one will focus on Chinatown history.
Saturday, September 12 - Sunday, September 13
We Love Boston Chinatown Virtual Run/Walk
Run or walk a 5k or 1 mile to show your love for Chinatown. Click here for details and to register.
Thursday, September 17 | 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm
Take Out Thursday with music by Shaw Pong Liu | 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm**
With Special Guest Calligrapher Mike Mei
Music and visual art performance at Auntie Kay & Uncle Frank Chin Park on The Greenway with support from Greenway Conservancy
29 Oak Street Projections | 8:00 pm - 9:00pm
Three nights of text, still, and moving image artwork by local artists projected on the brick rowhouse wall of 29 Oak Street organized by Chinatown Land Trust.
Night two will focus on artist films.
Participating Artists
Aznjujube featuring Jeff La
Inspired by the nostalgia of the early 2000's AZN era, aznjujube is an experimental-pop project that incorporates live-looping, mandolin riffs, mountain noises, and lo-fi hip hop beats. Jeff La is a virtuosic dulcimerist who has been performing in the Boston Chinatown and surrounding areas since the 90s.
Crystal Bi Wegner and Lily Xie
Crystal Bi Wegner is an artist and educator. She teaches sound art & recording and visual art in Boston Public Schools at Margarita Muñiz Academy. She is the co-founder of Moon Eaters collective, a printed media platform for API queer narratives and Caras de Maria, an oral history project documenting experiences after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Crystal is passionate about accessibility in arts education for Boston Public School students and using art as a tool to design a more equitable society.
Lily Xie is a Chinese-American artist and educator whose socially engaged work explores radical imagination, reimagined histories, and other routes to collective resilience. Lily shares strategies adapted from her drawing and bookmaking practices as tools for community empowerment and justice. Lily is the co-founder of Moon Eaters, a Boston-based collective of queer Asian-American artists.
Cameron Chin
Cameron Chin finds her imagination to be untamable and her inner monologue nosy, which makes creating and translating her thoughts into physical existence a very comforting process. In her work, Cameron Chin is deeply inspired by the landscapes of nature, culture, and identity that both walk and cross her path. Visual art is so nuanced, and its enjoyment cannot be spread thin. Cameron Chin loves it.
Marko De Peralta
Marko De Peralta is a keyboardist/pianist, performer, and music educator in the Greater Boston area. Incredibly versatile, he plays music of all genres - from classical music to more contemporary forms of art and pop music, such as jazz, funk, rock, R’n’B, blues, and his personal favorite, Motown hits! Marko hopes to get his listeners’ hips moving and heads nodding with light, easy-listening arrangements of songs like “Don’t Know Why” by Norah Jones, and groovy covers of songs by Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, D’Angelo and more.
Maria Fong is an artist from Berkeley, California. Maria works in hand drawn and stop motion animation, drawing, performance art, and bookmaking. She is dedicated to making work that tells silenced stories and fosters interaction between people. Her collaborative artworks explore racialized and politicized spaces, community building, and expansive Asian American identities.
Wendy Han
Wendy is currently a sophomore at Simmons University. She is a Boston-based artist, who’s projects are centered around issues that the Chinatown community faces. She focuses on digital design, but has also worked with watercolor, acrylic painting, photography, and videography. Wendy has worked at Castle Square Tenants Organization, where she created vector drawings, videos, and podcasts to raised awareness of social injustices happening around us. She is very passionate about the Boston neighborhoods and issues within each community.
Melody (Yu-Hsuan) Hsu is a multidisciplinary creator from Taiwan. Melody is soulfully inspired by both her cross-cultural identity and her background in visual arts. Having designed for plays like “Abortion Road Trip,” which was nominated for the 38EVVYs award for Outstanding Scenic Design, she has also been invited to design a collection of short films, including music videos like “Get Out of My Head” by Four Years Strong, recently premiered on Billboard.
Payal Kumar (they/them) is a diasporic dreamer working towards inclusive solidarity and liberation based on Wampanoag territory. As a multimedia artist, doula, medical advocate, and futurism fanatic, they invoke the power of interdisciplinary movement-building to construct tender new possibilities of being beyond borders and capital. Their visual work is rooted in the Desi folk art of their ancestral villages and traditional Americana tattoos to construct new in-between spaces exploring mental illness, queer intimacy, and traumas around embodiment.
Praised for his "impassioned performance" (Boston Globe) and playing "with remarkable ease and clarity, while maintaining a graceful—if vociferous—line that fit well into the narrative" (The Boston Musical Intelligencer), cellist Sam Ou enjoys an active musical life in the Greater Boston area. A recipient of the Rosemary Scales Prize for best cello concerto performance at the Kingsville International Young Performers Competition, Mr. Ou has performed at several prestigious summer venues including Tanglewood, Sarasota, Musicorda, Santa Fe, and La Jolla music festivals. He gave the world premiere performance of Larry Bell’s Cello Concerto entitled The Triumph of Lightness with the Boston Civic Symphony at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall (NEC). Symphonically, he occasionally plays in the Boston Pops, Boston Ballet, and Boston Lyric Opera Orchestras.
Photo credit: RobertTorresPhotography.com
Violinist and composer Shaw Pong Liu engages diverse communities through multidisciplinary collaborations, creative music and social dialogue. Her project Code Listen, which she started as City of Boston Artist-in-Residence in 2016, uses songwriting and performances to support healing and dialogue around violence, racism, and police practices, in collaboration with the Boston Police Department, teen artists, family members surviving homicide and local musicians.
Photo credit: Roberto Mighty
Krina Patel is a Boston based artist and educator. Krina designs and implements a number of socially relevant arts projects that engage local communities. During the winter of 2019, Krina traveled to different neighborhoods and community organizations including BCYF to gather and record winter memories. The Winter Memories project was a winning proposal for the call from the city of Boston Mayor’s office of New Urban Mechanics.
Formed in 2018, Trio Gaia is dedicated to offering audiences dynamic, personally relevant experiences inside and outside the concert hall. Selected as a 2019-2020 Honors Ensemble at the New England Conservatory, the trio has also been recognized for sharing classical chamber music in the community, receiving both the 2018-19 and 2019-20 Ensemble Fellowship from New England Conservatory’s Community Performances & Partnerships initiative. During the summer of 2019, Trio Gaia was invited to Carnegie Hall’s Audience Engagement Intensive, offered in collaboration with Ensemble Connect, which helped the trio reach audiences across New York City with accessible, interactive performances for elementary school students and seniors alike.
Vivian Luo throws pop-up performances of pop, EDM and hip hop mixes & mashups in Boston public spaces. A classically trained contemporary violinist/DJ known as “violinviiv,” she also brings her high energy spirited performances to local weddings, hotel openings, corporate and private clients who appreciate her raw energy and unique spin on mainstream hits.
Sophie Wang
Sophia Wang was born and raised in Queens, NY. She currently studies computer science and art at Brandeis University. Sophia is passionate about using creativity and problem-solving skills to create impactful and accessible work. She has experience in graphic product design, printmaking, and photography. When she is not coding or creating art, she enjoys hanging out with her grandparents and/or eating pineapple buns.
Yu-Wen Wu is an artist living and working in Boston. Born in Taipei Taiwan, Wu’s subjectivity as an immigrant is central to her artwork. Arriving at an early age, her experiences have shaped her work in areas of migration--examining issues of displacement, arrival, assimilation and the shape of identity in a new country. Human migration and climate change are the defining issues of Wu’s work. At the crossroads of art, science, politics and cultural issues, her wide range of projects include large-scale drawings, site-specific video installations, community engaged practices and public art.
Yi Bin Liang is a bookbinder, illustrator and fabricator from Singapore, working in Watertown, Massachusetts. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration in 2017, and received a Diploma in Bookbinding from the North Bennet Street School in 2019.
Daphne Xu is a Chinese-Canadian artist and filmmaker exploring the politics and poetics of place, and diasporic affect through photography, film, video installation, and printed matter. Her creative practice engages observations of the everyday, and lived experiences of contested landscapes, primarily in contemporary Chinese contexts. In 2016, she co-founded Sponge Gourd Collective, an art and research collective, whose publications and video installations have been circulated and exhibited internationally.
Helen Yung
The child of Hong Kong immigrants, Helen grew up mostly just south of Boston, spending many a Sunday afternoon in Boston Chinatown after church having good food with friends. She's experienced first-hand (and seen second hand, as an ancient history nerd) how art connects communities across ages, cultures, and beliefs. She currently lives in Quincy and New York.
This event is made possible by our sponsors:
Become a Sponsor: Click here or contact Jean Quintal for more information.
