NYC Chinatown museum reopens with anti-Asian racism exhibit

NEW YORK — A New York City museum dedicated to telling Chinese American history marked its reopening to the public on Wednesday, with an exhibit on Asian Americans and racism that it curated partially through submissions gathered during the pandemic and a surge of anti-Asian bias incidents around the country.

That included a lot of virtual programming, including the call for submissions that became part of “Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism,” opening to the public on Thursday.

They touch on the treatment of the earliest Asian immigrant communities, how stereotypes connecting them and disease have a long history, to more recent issues like the treatment of Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in the wake of the Sept.

In the center of the show are items collected by the museum showing how Asian Americans have tried to push back against bias in the past year, like photographer Mike Keo’s series of images of Asian Americans sharing their identities with the hashtag, #IAMNOTAVIRUS.

Two artists who had been slated to have their images of Chinatown in Oakland, California, in the show pulled their photos in recent days, following a similar action from other artists in a show the museum was supposed to have put on last year.

The museum has been adamant that it does not support the jail, and Yao Massbach said it had been asking the city for capital funds for several years before the controversy