What does it mean to flex identity in the face of power? How do different forms of art and culture vibrantly counter the erasure of certain communities?
Chinatown’s Fourth Annual Contemporary Art Festival, which takes place Saturday from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., offers answers.
Over the past three years since its inauguration, the festival — organized by Edge on the Square — has dipped into different modes to celebrate Chinatown’s art and culture, its themes ranging from ceremonial rituals to neon lighting. This year’s festival aims to counter ongoing attacks on civil rights and art itself in the United States.
“Super Flex: Powered by Alter Egos and Shadow Selves” takes a broad definition of alter egos, incorporating elements of heritage, migration, drag and more in an evening of art installations, performances and music from more than 20 artists.
“Contemporary art is being summoned to do its thing right now — to provoke, to introduce ideas, to reframe and to invent,” said Candace Huey, Edge on the Square’s head curator. “It is all the more important in this moment of silencing and erasure.”
Huey said she and fellow “Super Flex” curators Taraneh Hemami and Theo Lau are interested in showcasing San Francisco’s Chinatown as a site for a contemporary art and cultural renaissance interwoven with social justice. Merging a legacy of resistance with the current political context in the United States, the result is multigenerational and multimedia.
Rene Yung’s “Alter-liminal” is a call-and-response performance in which the public is invited to join in a procession up and down Ross Alley, between Jackson and Washington Streets. The procession will be led by a performer wearing a headdress woven from stands of twine, itself made from the pages of the 100 civics questions used in the U.S. naturalization test.
During the procession, participants will respond to these questions — but with altered answers. “What is the opening of The Constitution?” The official answer would be: “We the people.” Yung’s alternate answer comes in the form of a question: “Who are we?”
Following the performance, members of the public will be invited to share their experiences of immigration through collaborative cord-weaving and spell-making workshops.
“The official narrative is a kind of magic spell,” Yung said. “When you call out certain words, you become an American. We’re asking people to write counter-spells on Post-It notes, reminiscent of Hong Kong’s Lennon wall.”
Similarly, the “Non-Alien Box” project invites members of the public to share stories of their immigration experiences. The mobile public-art project reclaims decommissioned newspaper boxes across San Francisco to share crowdsourced stories of immigrants navigating the U.S. job market and restrictive visa conditions.
The project, which began as a collaboration between three California College of the Arts graduate students — Grace Cao, Yunfei Hua and Xinling Wang — sheds light on stories many keep to themselves for fear of retaliation. What began as a desire to create a safe space to tell the stories their peers are often afraid to tell has evolved to include murals, workshops and opportunities for immigrant students to showcase their artwork.
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“There is so much Chinese immigrant history here but a lot of it is being forgotten,” Wang said. “We realized there was one story we wanted to tell — that not many people do tell — about international workers and students being treated unfairly.”
Recording history in real time is a strategy that activists and artists have employed for decades. Since the 1980s, editor and publisher V. Vale has published zines and books documenting the history of counterculture and punk rock. Vale will be selling books and zines at “Super Flex” from his publishing imprint Re/Search that offer a wealth of history of the Bay Area’s counterculture.
“Publishing is what I call instant history,” Vale said. “If you don’t have a history, what identity do you have?”
The popularization of photocopiers in the 1980s opened the floodgates for people to make zines during the punk movement, grounding the period in a strong sense of cultural identity. The power to produce a kind of instant history is resistance to erasure of identity. For Vale, the history of punk itself is a blueprint for countercultural resistance and activism writ large.
“Start a punk community,” Vale said. “The principles are DIY — anyone can do it, and whatever you do, try to have an eye toward it being against the status quo.”
For some artists, issues of identity extend to include gender and sexuality. “Super Flex” will include a drag workshop, hosted by performer SNJV, and a performance by Vincent Chong blending traditional calligraphy with drag.
Chong said the relationships between drag, calligraphic traditions and Chinese heritage are intertwined.
“It feels like a beautiful way to reconnect as someone growing up as a diaspora Chinese-American,” Chong said. “Feeling disconnected from what it means to be Chinese and being able to center who I feel and think I am through gender presentation and a connection to that lineage and another form of self-expression.”
The concerns of the artists in “Super Flex” extend beyond Chinatown to include the communities with which their artwork intersects. Immigrant and gender identities, for example, are not mutually exclusive and are under attack across the country and in several communities. The artists in “Super Flex” offer a model of resistance.
“Art is one of the few venues that helps us think about resistance to oppressive culture, demonstrating that there are alternative ways of thinking and creating worlds we want to see exist,” Chong said.
What these alternative ways of thinking and imagined worlds show us is a path forward at a time when we desperately need it.
Max Blue is an art critic whose State of the Arts column appears monthly in The Examiner.
