And time is telling
Only how long it takes
Layer after layer
As our beauty unfolds
Until our captor we'll hold
In peril
A grain
A tiny grain of sand

— “Yellow Pearl” by Chris Kando Iijima and Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto

During the shutdown of 2020, Edward Cheng roamed the streets of Chinatown with his camera. Businesses were closed. Work had dried up. There was nothing else to do. On these treks he ran into people he knew. He saw the same friends, acquaintances, and community members time and again. Eventually he asked to photograph them.

TINY GRAINS is at once local and universal. While the photographs capture one particular neighborhood (and in some cases one particular cross street) during one particular, unprecedented time, the stories they tell go beyond. They are stories of community and tradition. Joy in the face of adversity. Striving toward the future in an uncertain present.

The exhibition also honors the past. In 1972, Basement Workshop created Yellow Pearl, a collective work built around Chris Iijima, Nobuko Miyamoto, and Charlie Chin's song book for the Asian American activist movement. TINY GRAINS is an homage to those early, groundbreaking days of that movement and the seminal pioneers who are still active today.

Chinatown has long been plagued by injustice, underrepresentation, and xenophobia. The pandemic only heightened these issues. Even as the neighborhood returns to “normalcy,” Cheng still feels their weight. Each photograph he takes lightens that weight. Each shopkeeper and grocery shopper. Each artist and activist. Each person coming together with others to share a drink or a meal, a laugh or a cry. To listen to stories and play music. To dance in the streets. Each person a grain of sand.

TINY GRAINS is on view through Jan. 12, 2025.

About the artist

A lifelong New Yorker, Edward Cheng is a freelance computer programmer and seasoned globetrotting backpacker. As a photographer, he works on long-term projects documenting the Asian American experience in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, Día de los Muertos in Mexico, and Christian Holy Weeks and Easters around the world.

Cheng is a teaching assistant and fixture at the International Center of Photography, where he regularly assists darkroom masters Steve Anchell, Brian Young, and Chuck Kelton. He regularly exhibits in Manhattan's Chinatown, including at Think!Chinatown, Souls of New York, and at the Pearl River Mart Gallery.

He takes his mezcal oaxaqueno neat, his coffee black, and his bed at three.