Since October, Chong has been holding free workshops teaching bookmaking and Chinese calligraphy, inviting participants to create intentional spaces towards exploring how representation in text, print, and books is significant to queer and minority communities.The Through Queer Lenses panel is a part of Vincent Chong’s Storefront Residency. The panel asks queer artists with Asian heritage how they make work in light of both orientalism and traditional culture, in order to celebrate QTPOC lives, narratives, and stories.

The panelists featured are:

Wo Chan is a queer poet and drag performer living in Brooklyn. They make art about friendship, family, (im)migration, gender, and emotions. Wo has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. As a standing member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney, MOMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum. Wo was born in Macau, China, and is currently an MFA Candidate in Poetry at NYU. Check them out @theillustriouspearl.

Rin Kimi is a femme mixed Korean-American nonbinary/trans queer hydra based in Richmond Virginia. Their work primarily focused on apotheosis, the dematerialization of the body, personal mythologies, and the creation and upheaval of demi-gods and the chimeric. This work takes the form of performance art, publication work, sculptural installation, writing, and photography under the working title of "graphic designer." To address them use: them, him, Rin, or nothing

Ka Man is an artist and educator. She received an MFA from Yale University, and a BA from Bard College. She has exhibited her work at the Lianzhou Foto Festival in Guangdong, China; Para Site in Hong Kong, the WMA Masters Exhibition, Transition, in Hong Kong, and Videotage's Both Sides Now III. U.S. based exhibitions include the Museum of Chinese in America in New York, the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the Palm Springs Art Museum, Cornell University, Alfred University, Capricious, and the Eighth Veil in Los Angeles. She has mounted solo shows at Aperture in New York, Lumenvisum in Hong Kong, the Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, PA and the New York Public Library. She is the recipient of the 2014-2015 Robert Giard Fellowship, a 2017-2018 Research Award from Yale University Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and the 2018 Aperture Portfolio Prize. She was chosen as a 2019 Artist Residence at Light Work in Syracuse, NY. In 2018 she co-curated Daybreak: New Affirmations in Queer Photography at the Leslie-Lohman Museum with Matt Jensen. She is currently full-time faculty at Parsons The New School. Her monograph, narrow distances was published by Candor Arts in July 2018.

We have a suggested donation of $5-15 that goes towards an honorarium for panelists and our artist in residence. NOTE: We will not be selling tickets at the door - please RSVP here.
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ABOUT BOOKS, TEXTS & FORGOTTEN NARRATIVES W.O.W. Project's third 店面 artist in residence, Vincent Chong, is a queer, mixed-race Chinese American artist. Vincent is interested in representation through art on paper and how we can use these materials to express the complexities of our identities - queerness, transnationalism, etc. On one hand these workshops will introduce participants to the traditional tools and strategies used to study Chinese calligraphy. On the other, they will function as spaces of discussion about how we carry traditions as young people -- how we acknowledge and imagine the narratives of those erased through history, and how we establish agency and ownership within these traditions.ABOUT VINCENT Vincent Ge-Ming Lia Chong (莊志明) is a queer mixed race Chinese American artist and printmaker. The Chinese side of his family has roots in Chinatown via the Daipang (大鵬) peninsula, and the Italian and English side of his family has roots in Binghamton, NY and outside of London, UK. He has studied Chinese calligraphy and stone seal engraving for about three years now, and he works as a printmaker in NYC. Vincent’s everyday art practice consists of calligraphy studies, watercolor painting, seal carving, etching, and bookmaking.ABOUT the 店面 Residency: Lunar New Year is a time when community members celebrate the welcoming of a prosperous and lucky new year. Storefronts (店面 in Chinese, pronounced diàn miàn in Mandarin and dinmin in Cantonese) hang red banners with new year’s wishes, Chinese lanterns light up the streets, and families gather to watch lion dancers perform. As the oldest operating store in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Wing on Wo & Co. is a center for community gathering that aims to pay tribute to the rich history of its community. This is a collaboration with China Residencies. Learn more here: https://www.wingonwoand.co/artist-residency/