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Image #1(top left): artwork by Chelsea Ryoko Wong, image courtesy of 100 Days Action.
Image #2 (top right): artwork, Jiā yóu, by Jeniffer K Wofford, image courtesy of 100 Days Action, photo credit to Mariah Tiffany
Image #3 (bottom left): artwork< by Christine Wong Yap, Hope for Chinatown, image courtesy of 100 Days Action.
Image #4 (bottom right): artwork by Jocelyn Tsaih, image courtesy of 100 Days Action.
Presented by the Chinese Culture Center in collaboration with 100 Days Action, "Add Oil, Chinatown!" is 2-part artist sharing on public art and its role in Chinatown San Francisco as we explore: What’s the role of art during a time of crisis? How can artists participate in neighborhood recovery?
Art is fundamental to building healthy communities and empowering community voices. At the early stage of COVID-19 pandemic, 100 Days Action initiated “Art for Essential Workers” to energize neighborhoods and show gratitude to front line workers through an opportunity to create and showcase artwork on boarded up storefronts across the city at no cost to impacted businesses. Through100 Days Action alongside Chinatown Visitor Information Center, Chelsea Wong, Christine Wong Yap, Jocelyn Tsaih, and Jenifer K Wofford presented a series of thoughtful and beautiful artwork in San Francisco Chinatown.
Our speakers’ community-based practices are multi-faceted: from 100 Day Action’s city-wide public art action, Wong Yap’s ongoing social engagement project “Art, Culture, and Belonging in San Francisco Chinatown,” Wofford’s large-scale murals paying homage Asian American artists, Wong’s murals and paintings inspired by diverse social spaces, to Tsaih’s ongoing “Save our Chinatowns” initiatives. In this live-streamed panel discussion featuring the artists and collective, we will unpack the process behind each artist’s work as they relate to concepts of public spaces, community resiliency, and neighborhood identity.
加油 (“gāyáu”) or “Add Oil” is a Cantonese expression used to show support or encouragement. Join us in saying, “Add Oil, Chinatown!” Visit: cccsf.us/covid-19-resources for ways to support Chinatown or join us every weekend until 9/20 at “Chinatown Walkway Sundays” to support local businesses.
PART 1 | CHELSEA WONG X JENIFER K WOFFORD
Thursday, August 20th 5PM
PART 2 | CHRISTINE WONG YAP X JOCELYN TSAIH
Saturday, August 29th 11AM
ABOUT OUR HOST:
The mission of the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (CCC) is dedicated to elevating underserved communities and giving voice to equality through education and contemporary art.
Founded in 1965, CCC emerged from the Civil Rights Movement to be the art and culture anchor for San Francisco’s Chinatown and the Asian American community in the city at-large. From its base in Chinatown, CCC creates spaces for contemporary artistic expressions, education, and creative engagement that build healthy communities and advance a plurality of Chinese diasporic voices.
Moderator: Hoi Leung is the curator at the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. She is the creative lead on the center's art exhibitions and “Museum Without Walls” initiatives. Hoi manages 41 Ross, an art space engaging with Chinatown's everyday culture.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
100 Days Action is a Bay Area artist collective that produces creative resistance projects to build community at the intersection of art, activism, and social engagement. Formed immediately after the 2016 presidential election in response to Trump’s 100-Day Plan, the collective collaborates with local and national artists on exhibitions, performances, protests, and group actions that stand against bigotry, xenophobia, racism, sexism, and the destruction of the environment. 100 Days Action presents interactive projects, installations and events that prompt civic engagement and ask visitors to directly embody and envision the future they want to see.
Chelsea Ryoko Wong is a painter and muralist whose vibrant figure compositions reflect the diversity and style of her home in San Francisco. Through the use of watercolor technique, Wong creates busy scenes of people drawing from real-life events and her imagination. Evoking a sense of curiosity and wonder, Wong’s heavily stylized and idyllic paintings encourage acceptance, joy and openness to the world we live in.
Wong began her studies at Parsons School of Design (New York, NY), and finished at California College of the Arts with a B.A. in Printmaking in 2010. She is the first recipient of the Hamaguchi Emerging Artists Fellowship award at Kala in Berkeley, CA (2010) and has recently completed a mural for the FB AIR Program in San Francisco, CA (2019).
Christine Wong Yap is a project-based artist who often uses printmaking, drawing, and social practice to explore psychological well being. She has participated in over a dozen residencies and studio programs. A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives and works primarily in Queens, NY while returning frequently to the Bay Area for family and art projects.
Currently, her artwork thanking essential workers appears on billboards in Times Square, on bus shelters, and newsstands in NYC, Boston, and Chicago. She is also currently the lead artist in Art, Culture, and Belonging in San Francisco Chinatown.
Jenifer K Wofford is a San Francisco artist and educator whose work plays with notions of hybridity, authenticity, and global culture, often with a humorous bent. She is also one-third of the Filipina-American artist trio Mail Order Brides/M.O.B.. Wofford’s projects have been presented locally at the Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Minnesota Street Project, and further afield at DePaul Museum in Chicago, Silverlens in Manila, and Osage in Hong Kong. Wofford received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from UC Berkeley.
Jocelyn Tsaih is a Taiwan-born, Shanghai-raised artist currently based in Oakland, California. Her work is a reflection on identity, human nature, and the intangible aspects of life. The recurring theme throughout her work involves an amorphous figure that’s meant to embody the spirit of beings as a whole. Faceless and ambiguous, the figures she illustrates acknowledge the universal thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are shared by us all.
Tsaih was featured on Hypebeast's Pen and Paper, April edition, in which she shared her creative journey and her project Save Our Chinatowns, a campaign to raise support for merchants, seniors, and residents of San Francisco and Oakland Chinatowns amid the COVID-19 crisis.
Thanks to the support by Community Challenge Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, San Francisco Foundation,Grants for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, Wells Fargo Foundation, Fleishhacker Foundation, California Humanities and National Endowment for the Humanities CARES Relief, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, San Francisco Arts & Artists Relief Fund, Zellerbach Family Foundation, and CCC Contemporaries.