ADMISSION: 
Admission is free. Reservations required.

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DESCRIPTION: 
Celebrating Kaya Press’s 30 years of publishing award-winning, avant-garde, experimental, and expectation-busting Asian diasporic literature, Club Kaya is a collaborative, multi-genre, interactive performance and experience developed by artist-in-residence Alan Nakagawa. 

What happens when we think of the archive as a place of refuge? How can we engage with the histories of cultural production beyond what is expected? Guest collaborators including anti-colonial musician and artist Umi Hsu (Bitter Party), Emmy- and Peabody Award–winning filmmaker Elizabeth Ito (Adventure Time, City of Ghosts), experimental video artist Nisa Karnsomport, and filmmaker Shan Shaikh will join Nakagawa in engaging and instilling the publisher’s shared history and shared struggle: to make spaces to exist in the fullness of one’s own lived reality. 

Inspired by Kaya’s political organizing, queer agit-prop influences, and experimental feminist interventions, this one-night event explores the idea of archives as a mapping of dynamic, transformative, and necessarily collaborative relationships rather than a cataloging of static objects and artifacts, and will feature 68 original Micro Operas by Nakagawa—one for each book published since Kaya was founded in 1994. 

The Micro Operas are recorded soundtracks, music videos, vibratory sound experiments, and interactive music boxes with contributions by:
> Cirilo Domine, viola
> Alison De La Cruz, vocals
> Elizabeth Ito, vocals
> Pattie Lin, vocals
> Jean Park, vocals
> Patrick Shiroishi, saxophone, percussion
> Robin Sukhadia, tabla, harmonium, percussion

Live, interactive performances will include: 
> Micro Operas with Alan Nakagawa and Umi Hsu 
> Literary karaoke with Kaya Press authors Jenny Liou, Tran Truong, and Erin O’Brien
> Creative critical inteventions by USC faculty Adrienne Adams, Nam Do, Leah King, and Jonathan Leal
> And more!  

This event also marks the opening of Anatomy of a Publisher: 30 Years of Asian Pacific Diasporic Voices with Kaya Press, which will be on display at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries from February 12 through April 26, 2025. Featuring archival editorial notes, promotional posters, and original artwork, the exhibition will demystify the publishing process, explore the steps between manuscript and bound book, and invite visitors to participate in a publishing project of their own.

Bios:  

Adrienne Adams (they/them) is a PhD candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity. Their scholarship and event programming operates at the nexus of Black aesthetics, elemental and environmental media studies, and science/technology studies.

Alison De La Cruz  (she/he/they/siya/DeLa) is a senior artivist leader, facilitator, cultural organizer, multi-disciplinary theatre artist, educator, contemporary ritualist, and elder. DeLa is a collaborative leader with over twenty years of arts and cultural production, relationship and programmatic development, budgeting, staff, and project management experiences and skills.

Nam Do is a second-year PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. Their research engages Black Feminist critiques of ontometaphysics and psychoanalysis to examine the soundscape of the Black Radical Tradition. They are a classical and jazz vocalist, pianist, and composer. 

Philippine-born, American artist Cirilo Domine lives and works in Los Angeles.  He received his BA from UCLA and his MFA from UC Irvine. An artist working in the genres of drawing, installation, and mixed media, he received a Getty undergraduate grant and interned at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Venice, CA, where he was involved in all aspects of exhibition design. He is also curator, collaborator and activist and worked for the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center's Advocate Gallery.

Umi Hsu (they/them) was born in Taipei and moved to Virginia at age twelve. Hsu is a trans nonbinary sound artist, musician, and writer whose practice is driven by inquiries about sound and migratory communities. Working to create social change through sound, Hsu leads LA Listens, a community engagement project on the city’s changing sonic and social ecology, and mobile placemaking collective Movable Parts. They also perform and write songs about the melancholic postcolony in their L.A.–based ghost pop band Bitter Party.   

Elizabeth Ito has been working as a creator, writer, director, and storyboard artist in the animation industry since 2004. She has worked on TV, feature, and commercial projects. Elizabeth is also the creator of the award-winning short Welcome to My Life, the second-most-viewed short in Cartoon Network history, and received an Emmy for her directing work on Adventure Time. Her first series for Netflix, City of Ghosts, premiered in 2021 and won a Peabody Award, and two Emmys for directing and best animated children’s show in 2022. She also directed a music video for The Linda Lindas.   

Nisa Karnsomport is a Los Angeles–based video artist, interdisciplinary designer, and software developer. Her work explores real-time and interactive processes between audio and video, often overlapping experimental media practices with new technology.   

Leah King is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Los Angeles. She creates art installations, audio immersions, and interactive works celebrating Black joy, queer stories, and family histories with a futurist lens. She is an MFA candidate at the USC Roski School of Art and design.

Jonathan Leal is a Latino scholar, educator, and multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Originally from the Rio Grande Valley, the South Texas region located at the border of the United States and Mexico, Leal creates literary, musical, and integrative arts projects focused on creative resistances to bordered life. Leal is the author of Dreams in Double Time and is an assistant professor of English at USC. 

Pattie Lin is a genre-less, non-conforming artist and healer from the suburbs of Maryland. A multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, athlete, and performer, Pattie uses both art and physical movement as pathways towards growth and rehabilitation.

Jenny Liou is an English professor at Pierce College and a retired professional cage fighter. She lives and writes in Covington, WA.

Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies. Primarily working with sound and often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories, Nakagawa has been working on a series of semi-autobiographic sound-architecture/tactile sound experiences utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors: Peace Resonance: Hiroshima/Wendover combines recordings of the interiors of the Hiroshima Atomic Dome (Hiroshima, Japan) and Wendover Hangar (Utah); Conical Sound: Antoni Gaudi/Simon Rodia combines recordings of the interiors of the Watts Towers (Los Angeles) and the Sagrada Familia (Barcelona, Spain). Premiered in 2023, Point of Turn is his first vibratory sound work, involving the human voice and the seminal 1970s British rock band 10cc’s hit “I’m Not in Love.” Nakagawa was the first artist-in-residence for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the Los Angeles County Library and is currently the artist-in-residence at the CSU Dominguez Hills Gerth Archives & Special Collections.   

Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Queer, mixed-race Vietnamese/Irish/German/American woman. She is an artist, a filmmaker, an organizer, a cook/private chef, and an educator who lives and works in Los Angeles.

Since founding Retrospective Cinema in 2015, Shan Shaikh has written and directed several films, most recently the short La Ida y Vuelta, which has had a successful festival circuit. Under the alias thebikewriter, he has filmed a number of music videos and short documentary pieces with a focus on individuals and organizations dedicated to serving the community in his childhood neighborhood of Koreatown. Outside of writing and filmmaking, Shan’s creative practice includes graphic design, ambient sound compositions, and experimenting with tape and the digitization process. His most recent creative endeavor was as an artist-in-residence for the Artists Against Apartheid residency in fall 2024.

Patrick Shiroishi is a Japanese American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los Angeles. His projects include solo saxaphone, Upsilon Acrox, Corima, In the Womb, Oort Smog, Nakata, Black Sun Sutra, and more.

Robin Sukhadia is an MFA graduate from the World Music program at the California Institute of the Arts who studies tabla under the virtuoso tabla maestro Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri at CalArts and the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, CA. His special focus on the musical traditions and rhythms of south Asia informs his approach to musical arrangement and composition on a wide range of concert, film, and album productions. He has composed music for and toured internationally.

Truong Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam. He is the author of six previous collections of poetry: The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within The Margins, Four Letter Words, and 100 Words: Poems, Potter, Tran (co-authored with Damon Potter). Truong is also a visual artist who believes that art, be it poetry, cooking, sculpting, and even gardening, are his ways of thinking through the conscious of the times we live in.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Organized by Edwin Hill (French, Italian, American Studies and Ethnicity), Sunyoung Lee (Kaya Press, American Studies and Ethnicity), and Ana Iwataki (Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture). Co-sponsored by the Creativity, Theory, and Politics Research Cluster (American Studies and Ethnicity); the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries; and Asian Pacific American Student Services. 

Photos courtesy of the artists.