NYC Chinatown Museum reopens with exhibit on anti-Asian racism

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A New York City museum dedicated to telling Chinese-American history reopens to the public with an exhibit on Asian Americans and racism he organized in part during the pandemic and a wave of incidents of anti-Asian prejudice across the country

By DEEPTI HAJELA Associated Press

July 15, 2021, 3:56 a.m.

4 minutes to read

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NEW YORK – A New York City museum dedicated to telling Chinese-American history marked its reopening to the public on Wednesday, with an exhibit on Asian Americans and racism it organized in part thanks to submissions gathered during the pandemic and a wave of anti-Asian biases incident across the country.

The opening was long overdue for the Museum of Chinese in America, not only because of the pandemic closure of more than a year, but because of a fire that ravaged the space where its collection was located in January. 2020. Fortunately, most of the collection has been recovered.

Looking back, the question arose as to how we were going to survive, but we continued to pivot, ”said Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of the museum.

This included a lot of virtual programming, including the call for nominations which is part of Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism, ”which opened to the public on Thursday.

In the exhibit, the exterior walls are a kind of running history, a timeline showcasing the racism and bigotry that turned to Asians and Asian Americans throughout their generations in the United States.

They discuss the treatment of early Asian immigrant communities, the long history of stereotypes linking them to the disease, as well as more recent issues such as the treatment of communities in the Middle East and South Asia to the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

The pandemic’s anti-Asian bias is on display, with a timeline including senior government officials using anti-Asian slurs as names for the coronavirus and accusing China of its existence.

There is also a list of various attacks that claimed Asian victims, such as the spa business shootings in Georgia in March, where six women of Asian descent were among the eight people killed.

At the center of the exhibit are artifacts collected by the museum showing how Asian Americans have attempted to challenge prejudice over the past year, such as photographer Mike Keo’s series of images of Americans d Asian origin sharing their identity with the hashtag #IAMNOTAVIRUS.

Another piece is a collection of yellow whistles, which visitors are encouraged to take. Dr Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang founded the Yellow Whistle Project this year, offering the items as a safety measure in case help is needed and making them yellow in reference to how color has been militarized as a xenophobic insult against Asian Americans. .

It was important to include both history and material related to the pandemic, said Herb Tam, curator and director of exhibits at the museum.

We felt like even though the submissions since April 2020 were really wonderful… it wouldn’t have been enough, ”he said, and they wanted the exhibit to make people aware that it is not new, the way Asians were made to feel like foreigners, or the way we were the scapegoats for disease. “

The opening was not without controversy. Two artists who were scheduled to showcase their images of Chinatown in Oakland, Calif., Have removed their photos in recent days, following similar action by other artists in an exhibit the museum was believed to have hosted last year.

The artists, Colin Chin and Nicholas Liem, have withdrawn their work amid controversy over a contested municipal plan to build a new prison in Chinatown. Speaking of the overall project, the city said MOCA would get $ 35 million for its capital needs, which critics of the jail plan used to doom the museum.

The museum has been adamant that it does not support the prison, and Yao Massbach said it has been asking the city for investment funds for several years before the controversy.

Liem, speaking to The Associated Press in Seoul, South Korea, was not convinced. You can’t say you’re against something and still benefit financially from it, he said.

At the press conference for the new exhibit on Wednesday, protesters could clearly be heard from the street outside, sometimes right by the transparent windows at the front of the building.

Tam called the withdrawal of the artists disheartening “and the controversy was fueled by misunderstandings.”

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