How I Keep Looking Up / Como Sigo Mirando Arriba / 仰望 (Friday)

 Location: The Commons

Visit a vibrant display of 16 handmade textile banners, heartfelt trilingual video interviews, and inspiring parade documentation from Christine Wong Yap's latest cross-cultural, trilingual bridging project entitled How I Keep Looking Up / Como Sigo Mirando Arriba / 仰望.

How I Keep Looking Up / Como Sigo Mirando Arriba / 仰望 engaged 16 Chinese- and Spanish-speaking, working class, immigrant womxn from San Francisco’s Chinatown and Mission District neighborhoods. With a team of interpreters, lead artist Christine Wong Yap led six trilingual workshops for designers to build community across language, learn about resilience, share stories about their immigration journeys, and design and create fabric banners to represent their personal narratives of power and resilience.

The designers carried these banners in the 2023 San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade as the first contemporary art project in the history of the parade, which started in 1851 and remains the largest of its kind outside of China. The project was a collaboration with Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, where over 20,000 gallery visitors saw the exhibition.

Visit the banner display, learn more about the project, meet some of the designers, and pick up free coloring sheets featuring designers’ banners and statements in Chinese, Spanish, and English before they’re gone!

Links:

Special art project highlights resilience, migration stories of Chinese and Latino women in SF (ABC News)

Immigrant Women Shine at SF’s Chinese New Year Parade, Hyperallergenic