大大膽 Da Da Daam
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Updated: 38 minutes ago
大大膽 Da Da Daam
April 16 - 19, 2026 | San Francisco Art Fair
Fort Mason Festival Pavilion, 2 Marina Boulevard
San Francisco, CA 94123
A Special Presentation by the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco and Edge on the Square at the 2026 San Francisco Art Fair powered by Chinatown’s audacity and courage.
大大膽 (Da Da Daam) means bold, audacious, courage in Cantonese. It celebrates risk-taking, playful experimentation, and fearless imagination. This spirit animates both Chinatown and the artists in this exhibition.
America has often been disappointing to immigrants and diasporic communities. Still, we imagine otherwise. As the country continues to wrestle with who belongs, we turn to Asian diasporic artists whose work moves between remembrance and play. In moments of rupture, they build meaning from loss, humor, absurdity, and uncertainty.
We are proud to feature Bijun Liang, Leland Wong, and Yumei Hou, long-rooted in San Francisco Chinatown, alongside artists Alice Wu, Connie Zheng, Dixon Ngai, Justin Wong, and Tung Pang Lam, who have developed key parts of their practice in the neighborhood through exhibitions, residencies, public programs, and sustained relationships. Chinatown has long been a lab where artists test ideas, challenge constraints, and return to refine their work in dialogue with community and place.
To us, Chinatown is alive with beauty, where resistance and freedom are inseparable. It is a place that continues to imagine, to take risks, and to create possibilities. Perhaps Chinatown, or places like it in your own community, can offer a way forward during these unsettling times.
About the Artists
Alice Wu Alice Wu is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and arts worker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing on a former career in fashion, her practice explores themes of performance in everyday life, self-presentation, and reinvention after loss. As co-founder of Feral Childe (2002-2015), an experimental clothing line that exhibited and retailed worldwide, Alice was at the forefront of an early wave of independent, sustainability-minded fashion designers. Her sculptural work has been shown at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, MAK Center/Schindler House, Southern Exposure, and Exit Art, among others. Alice earned an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and serves as a creative business coach for artists and entrepreneurs.
Bijun Liang Bijun Liang is a Chinese-American artist based in San Francisco whose practice encompasses interactive installations and public art. Using a unique blend of playfulness, humor, and crowdsourcing, Liang puts the voices of the community at the forefront of her work. Her projects invite participation and center shared experience as both medium and subject. Recent exhibitions include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Chinatown Media and Arts Collaborative, and the Chinese Culture Center.
Connie Zheng Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer, experimental filmmaker, and scholar of environmental and land-based art practices based in Berkeley, California. She works with maps, seeds, food, environmental histories, speculative fiction, field recordings, and hand-drawn animation. Her projects navigate diasporic memory, the geopolitics of labor, and possibilities for collective imagining amidst ongoing ecological transformations. Her work is held at Kadist and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, has been featured in Artforum, e-flux, Hyperallergic, and Phaidon Press, and she was a 2023 YBCA 100 awardee.
Dixon Ngai Dixon Ngai is an artist and designer whose diverse body of work encompasses objects, painting, and spatial design. Deeply engaged in the history of Chinese export porcelain, he investigates the intricate connections between Hong Kong's porcelain trade and the stories of Chinese immigrants. Through his ongoing "Flowers in the Wave" series, he explores the dynamic elements of wind and water in a contemporary context. Based between Hong Kong and the San Francisco Bay Area, Dixon draws direct inspiration from Chinatown's vibrant porcelain shops.
Hou Yumei Hou Yumei is a celebrated sculptor and master of the ancient Chinese art of paper cutting, dedicated to learning, perfecting, and passing on the form across China and the United States. Inspired by Chinese folklore, legends, and mythical creatures interwoven with her own vivid imagination, each piece is meticulously and spontaneously cut without prior sketching or outlining, revealing an extraordinary level of detail and precision. In 2010, she was awarded a public art commission by the San Francisco Arts Commission for a large-scale installation at the Rose Pak Central Subway Station. In 2022, she received the Visionary Artist Award from the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco.
Justin Wong Justin Wong is a London-based comics artist whose diverse background has led him to reconsider the role graphic art can play across different contexts. He began his career as a political cartoonist, gaining public recognition in 2007 for Gei Gei Gaak Gaak, a daily column in Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao. He is the author of several graphic novels including Lonely Planet, Hello World, That City, and New Hong Kong, published across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and France. From 2008 to 2021 he taught at Hong Kong Baptist University, and in 2022 founded Skip Class, an online art education platform.
Leland Wong Born and raised in San Francisco's Chinatown, Leland Wong is best known for his hand-screen printed posters, illustrations, and photographs depicting the Asian American experience, combining traditional Chinese and East Asian iconography with American themes and settings. His father operated Fueng Wah Company, a Grant Avenue curio shop, where Leland grew up surrounded by art and community. Increasingly conscious of social problems in Chinatown, he became deeply involved with organizations including Kearny Street Workshop and Japantown Arts and Media. Active as an artist for over five decades, thirteen of his works are held in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Tung Pang Lam Hong Kong-born artist Tung Pang Lam traverses painting, site-specific installation, sound, and video, recombining traditional iconography and vernacular elements into allegorical landscapes of collective memory, longing, and loss. His playful practice arises from a curious imagination that innovates with a myriad of found objects and images, engaging themes of fleeting nostalgia and the overlapping realities of city-state identity. Lam came of age during drastic social changes surrounding Hong Kong's decolonisation, and that negotiation between past and present remains central to his work. His work is collected by LACMA, M+, the Asian Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and Kadist Art Foundation, among others.
About Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco
For 60 years, the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (CCC) has uplifted Chinatown through the arts as both a vibrant neighborhood and a powerful metaphor for the immigrant experience. Founded in 1965 amid the civil rights movement, CCC emerged as a bold response to racism, displacement, and gentrification. From a hard-won cultural space, it has evolved into a dynamic hub that shifts narratives, supports innovative art, and advances social justice.
CCC amplifies marginalized voices, reclaims public space, and strengthens community through exhibitions, festivals, and educational programs. Signature initiatives include C.H.A.T. Chinatown History Art Tours, the XianRui Artist Series, and the 41 Ross Artist-in-Residence program. With locations on Kearny Street, Ross Alley, and the newly acquired 667 Grant Ave, CCC continues to champion immigrant and LGBTQIA2S+ rights.
Learn more about Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco: cccsf.us | @CCCSanFrancisco
About Edge on the Square
Located at the heart of San Francisco Chinatown and the first project envisioned by Chinatown Media & Arts Collaborative (CMAC), Edge on the Square is a year-round contemporary art hub for activists, artists, designers, educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, and technologists. Cultivating an inventive and collaborative model for contemporary art experimentation and visitor experience, our programs will harness the energy and excitement of art and media to expand the neighborhood’s dynamic artistic and cultural diversity, as well as our understanding of our collective history and the full spectrum of American pluralism. We believe that the transformative power of art is critical to strengthening communities and catalyzing positive social change.
Learn more about Edge on the Square: edgeonthesquare.org | @edgeonthesquare
