ADMISSION: 
Admission is free and open to current USC students only. Reservations required. 

RSVP

DESCRIPTION: 
In a workshop led by Beijing artist Rania Ho and Los Angeles artist and UC Irvine professor Simon Leung, USC students will create a digital exhibition visualizing immigration stories in Los Angeles. Joined by USC professor and curator Jenny Lin, and USC librarians Tang Li and Suzanne Noruschat, they will explore materials from the Special Collections of the USC Libraries and personal archives, and then select, present, and discuss photographs and other documents for inclusion in a digital exhibition to be published via the open-source platform Scalar.

In addition to special collections of the USC Libraries which include historic photographs of Lunar New Year celebrations and other events in L.A.’s old and new Chinatowns dating back to the 1920s, documentation of murals and public art projects representing Asian American histories across the city, and the papers of Chinese American novelist Ailing Zhang, materials will include the following:

- Black Panther Party Publications
- Buffalo Soldiers Photographs
- Floyd C. Covington Papers
- Latino/Chicano, Lowrider. and Gangbanger T-Shirt Art Collection
- Lowrider Magazine Collection
- Teen Angels Magazine Collection

Participants are encouraged to bring up to five objects from their personal archive/collection (photographs, correspondences, newspaper/magazine clippings, etc.) to help visualize intercultural L.A.!

No experience is necessary, and lunch will be provided. 

This workshop and a conversation with Rania Ho and Simon Leung at the USC Pacific Asia Museum are presented in conjunction with Another Beautiful Country, an exhibition exploring Chinese American and Asian American art and cross-cultural histories in Los Angeles and beyond, on view at the USC Pacific Asia Museum through April 2024. 

Bios: 

Rania Ho is a Beijing and San Francisco–based installation and performance artist whose works employ a wry, unexpected approach to everyday objects and situations as a means of interrogating broader social or cultural concerns. The internationally shown artist is also a co-founder of Arrow Factory, one of the longest-standing independently run alternative art spaces in Beijing, which operated in a small storefront from 2008 to 2019, and a co-founder of Wujin, a tiny café, bookshop, and creative platform in Beijing that has been running since 2013.  

Simon Leung is a multimedia artist and UC Irvine professor whose projects include a rethinking of AIDS and otherness using the figures of the pinprick and the glory hole, meditations on “the residual space of the American/Vietnam War,” a video essay on the site/non-site dialectic instigated by Robert Smithson’s reception of Edgar Allan Poe, and “squatting projects” in Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. Leung has participated in the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Luleå Summer Biennial, and the Guangzhou Triennial.  

Tang Li is the Head and Chinese Studies Librarian with the East Asian Library at USC. Her research areas include Chinese bibliographical and textual studies, Chinese book history, Chinese archives, and Chinese painting during the Ming and Qing periods. 

Jenny Lin directs the MA program in curatorial practices and the public sphere and is an associate professor of critical studies at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. As a scholar, writer, and curator, Lin explores relations between twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and design and social phenomena such as urbanization, globalization, and decolonization. She is writing a new book, Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists, and curating the related exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. 

Suzanne Noruschat is the Southern California Studies Specialist at the Special Collections of the USC Libraries, and has also served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles City Historical Society and been an associate producer for the Lost L.A. TV series. 

Related event: 
Another Beautiful Country: Chinese American Artists in Cross-Cultural Conversation 
Wednesday, April 3, 2024, at 6 p.m. 
USC Pacific Asia Museum 
For more info, click HERE. 

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Organized by Jenny Lin (Art and Design) and Tang Li (USC Libraries). Co-sponsored by the USC Roski School of Art and Design, the USC Libraries, and the USC Pacific Asia Museum.   

Photo (right): Old Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA
Photo (left): New Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA, 1939