join Me.

This project is an interactive shrine in reference to Guanyin with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes. By crowdsourcing from the people of Chinatown, a mass of “helping hands” surround an inflatable center sculpture to create Fäcępåłm. Presented by CCC. Each hand is a blown up glove animated through drawn-on eyes and messages. The sculpture stands upright and each hand glows a warm light. Materials will be provided so that visitors can also add to the sculpture by drawing eyes onto the gloves and bestowing the hand with a purpose.

Chinese culture has deep roots in Buddhism and superstition. Storefronts showcase beckoning cats and small money trees that call forth good luck and fortune. Spiritual beings and great figures are believed to be the guardians that keep us safe and away from evil. Guanyin, known as the bodhisattva of compassion, is often prayed to during times of challenges and dangers. Guanyin, short for Guanshiyin, translates to "Observing the Sounds (or Cries) of the World". Buddhist legends say that Guanyin made an oath to worry about all beings until they are free from suffering, and in their journey to help, their hands began to be torn apart. Guanyin was then given thousands of hands so that anyone who asked could receive help. Each of the thousand hands are given eyes – which allowed Guanyin to observe all that happens in the world. This bodhisattva appears not only in the image of a woman (or originally, a man), but has many faces and can be transformed to the appearance desired by whoever sees them.

As we currently live into our third year of COVID-19, Fäcępåłm – a figure created through a gathering of blowup rubber hands – acts as reference to the latex gloves that became common uniform, the “breath” that now invokes fear of illness, as well as a personification of Chinatown helping itself during times of crisis. Many individuals in Chinatown have found mental empowerment through prayers, while equally many found ways to look out for their neighbors and friends. Each person was a “helping hand” for one another.

Bijun Liang is an interactive media and installation artist from Chinatown San Francisco. Bijun reimagines the everyday to recognize the hidden "!" moments that are often ignored or forgotten.

Summer Mei Ling Lee’s Chinatown Immemorial gathers together a group of Asian American cultural practitioners across several disciplines, including musicians, ritual-keepers and visual artists, to perform acts of light, hope and joy for Chinatown spaces that have suffered through the last two years. In a procession across Chinatown locations, the group of practitioners will perform rituals and rites that are based in historical cultural practices in light of contemporary art strategies to meet the needs of the Chinatown neighborhood for celebration, remembrance, and veneration. Perhaps, as a result, a new annual cultural practice is inaugurated, one that continues to highlight the resilience and vitality of an indescribably unique neighborhood.

Performers include: With Gao Shifu of the Lotus Taoism Institute , Li Ka Sing 李家聲, Lion DanceME, Jordan Goheen, Stephan Xie, CYC Youth and other performers. Li Ka Sing 李家聲 will sing a traditional Chinese song (acapella) about victory to co-start the procession at 800 Grant.

Summer Mei Ling Lee graduated from Stanford University in 1997 and received her MFA in painting and sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011. Recent exhibitions include re:home for Art + Action at Minnesota Street Project, UNTITLED, Art SF Monuments, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, SCOPE Miami Beach (Art Basel), Berliner Liste, Italian Institute of Culture, San Francisco Arts Commission, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Woman-Made Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Fei Contemporary Art Center (Shanghai). Her recent public art installation Liminal Space/Crossings, funded by the NEA, was a finalist for the Robert E. Gard Award and the subject of a documentary film screened at CAAMfest 2018. Recently, she and collaborator Laura Boles Faw were finalists for a major public art project for the Penn Data Sciences Building in Philadelphia. Lee was recently interviewed and featured in Hyperallergic magazine for her installation Requiem which pays homage to Hong Kong’s Tung Wah Hospital’s role in the repatriation of Chinese immigrant bones to China. Lee’s research of the bone boxes in Hong Kong and Taishan is featured in a documentary film, Requiem. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPF) and the He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen, China.

Born in 1995 in Toisan, Canton, raised in Shenzhen, and currently living in Oakland, CA, Gabby Wen is an electroacoustic music composer and improviser, working with synthesizers, electronics, guqin, field recordings, and miscellaneous instruments and objects to create captivating auditory experiences and narratives. Their works include solo and collaborative live improvisation performances and fixed-media electroacoustic compositions, fueled by spontaneity and uncertainty, reflecting introspective experiences and their relationship to their upbringing, memories, desires, impulses, and surroundings.

Founded in 2012, LionDanceME incorporates a mix of traditional and modern lion and dragon dance. Today LionDanceME has become a youth empowerment program that is taking the art of Lion & Dragon Dance to a whole new level, building talent, team work, and leadership skills while becoming a key contributor & advocate for the San Francisco community. They have been performing locally in San Francisco, all across the United States, and internationally. They are also known for their appearance on America’s Got Talent! Please welcome LionDanceME!

Artist and Video Documentation

Jordan Goheen is a recent alumnus from UCLA where he studied World Arts and Cultures and Philosophy. He is currently based in the Bay Area, splitting his time between San Francisco and Fremont. With his Caucasian father from small-town Missouri and his Asian mother a first-generation Taiwanese immigrant, he is markedly mixed-raced and bicultural. Through poetry, anthropology, and film, Jordan explores themes of urban environments, rhythm, identity construction (particularly in diasporic, mixed, and indigenous communities), history, and race.

Stephen Xie is a Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco, California. Xie graduated from UCLA majoring in Design Media Arts. His parents are both Cantonese immigrants who came to America with minimal savings. Unable to speak English, his father was a secretary at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, a Chinatown community organization, for many years. Organizations such as these strive to preserve Chinese identity within its own ethnic enclave, and his exposure to them instilled in him an appreciation for understanding their tradition. Xie finds himself ultimately drawn back to the Chinese American community, the core of my mixed-heritage identity and at the doorsteps of these longtime Chinatown community organizations that continue to represent and unify the Chinese American community.

Borrowing the same title, the work is inspired by a classic Chinese essay Peach Blossom Spring (桃花源記) written by scholar and poet Taoyuan Ming. It narrates a chance discovery of an ethereal utopia where the people exist in harmony with nature and each other, separated from political and social upheavals for generations. Peach Blossom Spring was written in 421 CE during a time of political instability and national disunity, expressing a collective longing for peace, happiness, and prosperity.

Pixelated and obscured, the visual pattern in the work is derived from a short excerpt from the essay that describes the paradisal scene. Experimenting with the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, Zhao works with approximately 2,000 plexiglass squares and 8,000 jump rings to create a 5x4 feet installation that examines the physical experience of perception and its connection to memory, place, culture, and personal experience. The ambiguous visual information suggests the ethereal quality of idealism while insinuating our current social and political upheavals. From the Covid pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, Asian hate crimes, to the Afghanistan crisis, the definition of home, safety, and human connection has been challenged and redefined in many ways. As a woman of color and first-generation immigrant, Zhao often meditates on the meaning of home and questions the idea of belonging and understanding. The pixelation also has a particular resonance with our digital-heavy existence, the Bay Area’s strong connection to the tech industry and its impact on local communities. Living in a world where we look at, consume, and interact with pixels constantly, Zao often questions how this type of existence influences our perception of reality and shapes our behavior and relationship.

There will be an additional part of the installation that the visitors can engage with. Zhao will print out a black and white grid on paper labeling each square with text that indicates a color. The printed paper will be placed behind a sheet of transparent vinyl. There will be prepared color stickers that visitors can place on the vinyl sheet based on the text instructions with an option to write down their wishes or messages on the sticker. As the stickers fill in the grid, the Chinese character 永 (meaning: forever, always, perpetual) will gradually reveal in a pixelated aesthetics. This interactive piece highlights the collective effort of the community.

Original text and English translation of the excerpt from Peach Blossom Spring:

土地平曠,屋舍儼然。有良田、美池、桑、竹之屬,阡陌交通,雞犬相聞。

其中往來種作,男女衣著,悉如外人;黃髮、垂髫,並怡然自樂。

The land is flat and vast with neatly arranged residences. There were fertile fields crisscrossed with trails, accompanied by beautiful ponds, mulberry trees, bamboo grove, and the sound of fowls and dogs. People were seeding and planting in the field. Men and women are dressed in the same manner as people who lived outside. The white-haired elders and tufted children all seemed joyful and contented.

Haoyun Erin Zhao 趙皓芸 is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, CA, working in printmaking, painting, sculpture, and installation. Rooted in her study of Eastern and Western Philosophy, Zhao’s work explores the intangibility of perception through the physicality of her materials. Paying particular attention to the interaction of light, color and form, Zhao uses transparency and abstraction to mimic the ethereal and elusive nature of human consciousness. Through her practice, the artist continues to experience and explore the connections between physical objects and non-physical mediums (e.g., light, emotion, consciousness, etc.). Zhao was also commissioned by IBM to create an installation that explores the relationship between art and blockchain technology to promote sustainability.

Zhao is the recipient of Facebook Open Arts/Artist in Residence, Edition/Basel Printmaking Residency (Basel, Switzerland), Kala Art Institute Artist in Residence (Berkeley, U.S.), Mission Gráfica Printmaking Residency (San Francisco, U.S.), In Cahoots Residency (Petaluma, U.S.), Hearts in San Francisco Project, Thousand-Island Lake Art Project (Zhejiang, China), and more. The artist’s work has been published in various magazines and exhibited in museums, art fairs, and galleries such as de Young Museum, Art Santa Fe Contemporary Art Fair, International Print Center New York, Galerie Kuchling Berlin, Root Division SF, Sanchez Art Center, Glass Rice Gallery, 111 Minna Gallery, and The Compound Gallery Oakland. Her work is in the collections of IBM, Facebook, Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, Guizhou Minzu University (China), Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (NYC), Kala Art Institute, and numerous private collections.

Website: www.erinzhao.com

Instagram: @ErinZhaoArt