Author: DEEPTI HAJELA
Associated Press
New York (Associated Press)-A New York City museum dedicated to the history of Chinese Americans reopened to the public on July 14 with an exhibition on Asian Americans and racism, partly through the pandemic During the collection of submissions and anti-bias incidents in Asia across the country.
For the Chinese Museum of America, the opening is a long process, not only because the pandemic has been closed for more than a year, but also because a fire destroyed the space for its collection in January 2020. Fortunately, most of the collections were rescued.
In retrospect, one question was “how will we survive, but we have been transforming,” said museum curator Nancy Yao Maasbach.
This includes a lot of virtual programming, including enlistment as part of “Response: The Voice of Asian Americans Resist the Wave of Racism.”
In the exhibition, the outer wall is a continuous history, a timeline showing the racism and prejudice against Asians and Asian Americans of generations in the United States
They talked about the treatment of the earliest Asian immigrant communities, how the stereotypes linking them to disease have a long history, and recent issues such as the treatment of communities in the Middle East and South Asia after the September 11 attacks.
The pandemic’s anti-Asian bias is emerging, and the timeline includes senior government officials using anti-Asian slander as the name of the coronavirus and accusing China of its existence.
There is also a list of various assaults with Asian victims, such as the shooting at a spa in Georgia in March, where 6 of the 8 people were Asian women.
At the center of the exhibition are the items collected by the museum, showing how Asian Americans have struggled against prejudice in the past year, such as the series of photos of Asian Americans taken by photographer Mike Keo, which shared them through the (hash)IAMNOTAVIRUS tag identity of.
The other piece is a set of yellow whistles, which tourists are encouraged to carry. Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang founded the Yellow Whistle Project this year to provide these items as a security measure in case they need help to turn them yellow to show how this color has been weaponized as a xenophobic slander against Asian Americans .
Herb Tam, the museum’s curator and exhibition director, said it is important to include historical and pandemic-related materials.
“We feel that even the submissions since April 2020 are really great…but it’s not enough,” he said. They hope the exhibition “makes people realize that this is nothing new, and that the Asian lifestyle makes people feel good. Feeling unfamiliar, or a way we are treated as scapegoats for disease.”
The opening ceremony was not without controversy. The two artists who were scheduled to show photos of Chinatown in Oakland, California, have taken down their photos in recent days, after other artists had taken similar actions in an exhibition that the museum was supposed to hold last year.
Artists Colin Chin and Nicholas Liem withdrew their work due to a dispute over a controversial urban plan to establish a new prison facility in Chinatown. When talking about the entire project, the city stated that MOCA will receive $35 million for its capital needs. Critics of the prison plan have used these funds to condemn the museum.
The museum has always insisted that it does not support the prison, and Yaomasbach said that it had been asking the city government for funding a few years before the dispute.
Liem didn’t believe it when interviewed by The Associated Press in Seoul, South Korea.
“You can’t say that you oppose something and get financial benefits from it at the same time,” he said.
At the press conference of the new exhibition, the voices of protesters can be clearly heard from the street outside, sometimes right next to the transparent window in front of the building.
Tan called the artist’s withdrawal “frustrating” and the controversy was triggered by “mischaracterization.”
