Visions & Voices: Visualizing Asian American L.A.: A Workshop on Digitally Exhibiting Art and Archival Materials

Visualizing Asian American L.A.: A Workshop on Digitally Exhibiting Art and Archival Materials  

DATE: Wednesday, April 3, 2024 at 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

LOCATION: Doheny Memorial Library (DML), Friends of the USC Libraries Lecture Hall, DML 240

TYPE :Workshop

GENRE: Art & design, Dei

ADMISSION: 
Admission is free and open to current USC students only. Reservations required. RSVP beginning Friday, March 1, at 9 a.m. 

DESCRIPTION: 
In a workshop led by Beijing artist Rania Ho and Los Angeles artist and UC Irvine professor Simon Leung, USC students will create a digital exhibition visualizing Asian American art, culture, and histories in Los Angeles. Joined by USC professor and curator Jenny Lin, USC professor and artist Patty Chang, and USC librarians Tang Li and Suzanne Noruschat, they will explore materials from personal archives and the Special Collections of the USC Libraries, which include historic photographs of Lunar New Year celebrations and other events in L.A.’s old and new Chinatowns dating back to the 1920s, documentation of murals and public art projects representing Asian American histories across the city, and the papers of Chinese American novelist Ailing Zhang. Students will select, present, and discuss photographs and other documents for inclusion in a digital exhibition to be published via the open-source platform Scalar.  

No experience is necessary, and lunch will be provided. 

This workshop and a conversation with Rania Ho, Simon Leung, and Patty Chang at the USC Pacific Asia Museum are presented in conjunction with Another Beautiful Country, an exhibition exploring Chinese American and Asian American art and cross-cultural histories in Los Angeles and beyond, on view at the USC Pacific Asia Museum from December 15, 2023, through April 7, 2024. 

Bios: 

Patty Chang is a USC Roski professor of art and a performance artist whose art utilizes her own body in feats of endurance, captured on film or in photographs, and whose surrealist films have been shown in film festivals around the world. Chang has exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Hamburg Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. Her work was featured in the Shanghai Biennial in the fall of 2016.  

Rania Ho is a Beijing and San Francisco–based installation and performance artist whose works employ a wry, unexpected approach to everyday objects and situations as a means of interrogating broader social or cultural concerns. The internationally shown artist is also a co-founder of Arrow Factory, one of the longest-standing independently run alternative art spaces in Beijing, which operated in a small storefront from 2008 to 2019, and a co-founder of Wujin, a tiny café, bookshop, and creative platform in Beijing that has been running since 2013.  

Simon Leung is a multimedia artist and UC Irvine professor whose projects include a rethinking of AIDS and otherness using the figures of the pinprick and the glory hole, meditations on “the residual space of the American/Vietnam War,” a video essay on the site/non-site dialectic instigated by Robert Smithson’s reception of Edgar Allan Poe, and “squatting projects” in Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. Leung has participated in the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Luleå Summer Biennial, and the Guangzhou Triennial.  

Tang Li is the Head and Chinese Studies Librarian with the East Asian Library at USC. Her research areas include Chinese bibliographical and textual studies, Chinese book history, Chinese archives, and Chinese painting during the Ming and Qing periods. 

Jenny Lin directs the MA program in curatorial practices and the public sphere and is an associate professor of critical studies at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. As a scholar, writer, and curator, Lin explores relations between twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and design and social phenomena such as urbanization, globalization, and decolonization. She is writing a new book, Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists, and curating the related exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. 

Suzanne Noruschat is the Southern California Studies Specialist at the Special Collections of the USC Libraries, and has also served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles City Historical Society and been an associate producer for the Lost L.A. TV series. 

Related event: 
Another Beautiful Country: Chinese American Artists in Cross-Cultural Conversation 
Wednesday, April 3, 2024, at 6 p.m. 
USC Pacific Asia Museum 
For more info, click HERE. 

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Organized by Jenny Lin (Art and Design) and Tang Li (USC Libraries). Co-sponsored by the USC Roski School of Art and Design, the USC Libraries, and the USC Pacific Asia Museum.   

Photo (right): Old Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA
Photo (left): New Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA, 1939