An Evening of Interdisciplinary Artist Presentations and a Panel Discussion / Town Hall Conversation

Curated and Hosted by Alvin Eng
Panel Discussion moderated by Joanna C. Lee
This is a free event, please RSVP by emailing: sage@churchstreetschool.org

In this year, the 25th Anniversary year of the “Hong Kong Handover” from Great Britain back to China, NYC Chinese American artists will gather to explore Hong Kong’s relationship with and impact on NYC’s Chinese American community through images, words and music. The goal is to create a space to share and process personal experience as well as the historic precedents that planted the seeds of anti-Asian American laws and biases that have been festering in this country since Asians first arrived.

Presentation Descriptions
Playwright/memoirist Alvin Eng will read a passage from his memoir, OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN (My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond) and perform excerpts from his acoustic punk raconteur work, HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN (or How I Kicked Punk). Both the chapter and performance excerpts explore the profound impact of The Opium Wars on NYC’s Chinese American community as well as the 1970s “heroin chic” punk/counterculture in which he grew up. This exploration is through the dual prisms of William S. Burroughs’ character, “Johnny Yen”––immortalized in the Iggy Pop & David Bowie song, “Lust For Life”––and his own Grandfather’s opium overdose in NYC’s Chinatown.

Novelist/Essayist Xu Xi 許素細, a Hong Kong native and longtime HK chronicler, will read excerpts from two recent essays published on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary Year of the Hong Kong Handover: “Democracy” and “Forever This Hong Kong.”

Painter Nina Kuo and video artist Lorin Roser re-contextualize classic Chinese/Hong Kong imagery to create contemporary commentaries on the state of Hong Kong-NYC relations.

Sammy Yuen is an illustrator, graphic designer and AAPI activist. He is currently merging his passions in Drawn Together, Stories of Resilience and Renewal in NYC’s Chinatown, an exhibition on display at the Pearl River Mart Gallery thru Dec. 28. From that exhibit, Yuen will show and discuss “Lin Ze Xu Statue and Memorial Arch”––a portrait of the Chinese scholar and official known for sparking the First Opium War in 1839 by seizing and dumping British Opium into the Guangzhou Harbor.

Participating via video are the Pulitzer Prize-winning composing team of Chen Yi and Zhou Long. They will pre-record a video preface to a video excerpt of their symphony, Humen, 1839, about the “Destroying Opium Campaign” in Humen, Guangdong in 1839 that led to the start of the First Opium War between the British and Chinese Empires. They will then join all of the artists via zoom to participate in a Panel Discussion.

For artist bios & more info, please see Facebook Event Page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/850271543006452

A Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement event.