Projections give artists an outlet to confront antiAsian hatred.
Artists battle racism, motivate onlookers by projecting images on sides of buildings
Christy Chan was at a loss after March’s massage parlor shootings in Atlanta, where eight people, including six Asian American women, were senselessly slain.
The Oakland artist said she watched as the media fell short in its response, and the pain from the shooting was compounded by the violence against Asian people she had seen throughout the pandemic in the Bay Area and across the country.
But as an artist who has spent years working in public art and projections, Chan found an artistic outlet to express her feelings about the incident and the antiAsian prejudice she has experienced. She created the Dear America Project, a series of projected images created by Asian American artists that began showing up on the sides of buildings in Oakland last month.
The project, designed to address antiAsian hate and racism, was something Chan had been thinking about long before the Atlanta shooting. The horrific incident, however, gave her a new sense of urgency.
“The news media told the story from the point of view of the murderer, and in that, they perpetuated stereotypes of Asian women,” Chan said. “If white supremacy and sexualized misogyny was a virus, the news was simply mutating that virus.”
Chan, who works in projections and film production, has a long background in community organizing and has created art addressing white supremacy for 15 years. She often uses art to process her experiences as an Asian American, from her Southern upbringing in Virginia to the microaggressions she encounters living in the Bay Area.
When she began working on the project in earnest, she drove around the Bay Area looking for possible spaces to display the projections. Most important, Chan said, she did not want to use any sites that required permission. The subjects of the projections, which range from four to 15 stories tall, include the roots of violence against Asian Americans and calls for solidarity among people of color.
“The size is not a coincidence, because they are about the right to take up space,” Chan said.
Chan’s contribution to Dear America is a projection of the phrase “White supremacy is the original cancel culture.” It is a response to what she termed the gaslighting she has experienced as an Asian American, where wanting human rights for all has been seen as radical.
As her vision for the project took shape, she reached out to other Asian American artists to take part.
When Chan first contacted Mel Chin, a North Carolina conceptual artist with decades of experience, he already knew the direction he wanted to go. Chin had spent the past year working with friends and fellow artists to create the best possible Chinese translation of the phrase “Black lives matter.” The Chinese version, which loosely reads as “Black lives are a matter of life and death,” is displayed in his projection above the words “Better together” in English.
“I wanted to express solidarity from a Chinese American perspective,” Chin said. “White supremacy has always been about pitting people of color against each other.”
Chan also asked Cathy Lu, a fellow Bay Area artist, to contribute to the project. Lu, who is trained in ceramics, had little experience in graphic art but knew she wanted to make something striking.
“The purpose of the project is to grab people’s attention,” Lu said.
Lu’s projection features three bright yellow fists and a blue background with red Chinese characters that loosely translate to “We are all one family.”
The project has already grabbed the attention of onlookers who serendipitously encountered the presentation in downtown Oakland last month.
“I’m a Chinese American, and over the last year or so, the malignant racism has been alarming,” said Joanne Shen, an Oakland resident who saw the projections in Oakland with her son. “So having an artist like Christy speak out so forcefully and eloquently with an antiracist message has been so powerful.”
Shen likened finding the projections to being on a “treasure hunt,” which she said bettered the experience.
So far, four presentations of Dear America have appeared at previously undisclosed locations throughout downtown Oakland and at Mills College. The most recent went up on Thursday. Chan has two more presentations of the Dear America Project planned, in San Jose and at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga.
The Montalvo Arts Center is a particularly symbolic location, Chan said, as it was once the home of James Phelan, a threeterm San Francisco mayor and California senator who was an active supporter of restricting Chinese and Japanese immigration to the United States.
The experience of creating and executing the Dear America Project has been extremely cathartic after a year of feeling powerless, Chan said.
“As an Asian woman during this epidemic of antiAsian violence, it does mean a lot to me to be able to stand outside at night and project,” she said.