For my third intervention, I came full circle from my first post in this class, focusing on issues for Asian Americans, especially in Chinatown. As a large part of my family history and my childhood, causes concerning Chinatown are always on my mind and discussed by my family. I chose to make a website both because I was inspired by Welcome to Chinatown’s website since the fall of 2020 and because it’s what I want to be doing in the future. My project focuses on the proposed mega jail and the impact such a large project would have on a community that is already strained.
The website I published is fully public and accessible to all. The flyers on the website are all downloadable for people to share and put up wherever they like, and all include a QR code that links back to my website. I find that in our digital age, the best way to make something public is to give others a way to spread it. In the Interventionists, there's a line in the Trespassing Relevance section that comes to mind: “You can’t be a revolutionary today without a television set - it’s as important as a gun! Every guerilla must know how to use the terrain of culture he is trying to destroy.” There’s a section on the website to send messages to my email to hear from the community. On the about page, I wrote a little about myself as an artist and a link to my portfolio, on the same platform as this website. Designing websites and graphics is something I hope to do professionally, and other artists in this field like Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya really inspired me to focus on creating art with a social meaning. She was also the inspiration for my first selfie post for this class, based on a mural here in Jersey City.
This cause was first brought to my attention by my aunt and mom, who grew up in Chinatown. They sent me a link to the news page on Welcome to Chinatown’s website, which I was already familiar with, and which is included on the Resources page of my website. There, I found information on the cause and the Change.org petition. I signed and shared it with my friends. For this project, I dove deeper into what exactly building a mega jail in Chinatown meant. I had passed the old jail many times walking from the Canal street station to my grandmother’s apartment. It’s hard to imagine any other communities in Manhattan being excited about a jail being built in their neighborhood, but I’m pretty sure this sort of thing would never work in the Upper East Side. It really brings to light the way our systems view both minority communities and incarcerated people.
Besides Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, I was also inspired by Kimberly Drew’s story in This is What I Know About Art, where her art history professor makes it clear he believes art to be a subject for white people only. It’s only recently that I’ve come across more Asian artists, especially current ones who are concerned with Asian American causes. In the Nomads chapter of The Interventionists, Krysztof Wodiczko mentions his take on activist art, saying “I focus more on the experience of the participants, my ‘co-artists,’ in each project. They are the initial, most important, ‘viewers,’ and the primary subjects in my instrumentation projects…”. I also wanted to create something that allowed people to be part of the experience. That is why I made the posters downloadable instead of only posting them myself, which was my original plan.
Resources:
https://data.cccnewyork.org/data/map/66/median-incomes#66/39/6/107/62/a/a
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/cchr/community/stop-asian-hate.page#isbioc
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ztwqwwjymky6373/phingbodhipakkiya_recentwork_humanrights.pdf?dl=0
https://www.welcometochinatown.com/news/stop-the-jail
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