Artist Storefront Residency

During her artist residency at W.O.W. from February-July 2021, Joy Mao created a special 百家衣 Bai Jia Yi in collaboration with the Chinatown community. She collected fabric remnants from the community’s past and present garment workers,  and assembled them into a special 百家衣 Bai Jia Yi alongside garment industry veterans—May Ying Chen, Alice Ip, and Lorraine Lum.  

From January 2022-July 2022, Joy returned to The W.O.W. Project as Artist-in-Residence for a second year. Her project investigated how clothing-making can be a vessel for community care and culminated in the community co-creation of 八宝粥 Ba Bao Zhou, a capsule collection celebrating the everyday abundance of Chinatown.

‍Joy Mao is a Chinese American fashion designer and artist using clothing as a medium for examining how our clothes shape the way we understand ourselves, our relationships, and the ways we move through our worlds. She was the Artist in Residence at The W.O.W. Project from 2021-2022, and now works as a Teaching Artist on the Creatives Rebuild New York program while creating for her small batch fashion brand, joy mao.

Singha Hon (韩星霞) is a mixed-race artist and illustrator born and raised in New York City, with roots in Pennslyvania and NYC's Chinatown. Singha has studied painting, costuming, and theatre at Bates College in Lewiston and at Central Saint Martins in London. She is one of the founding illustrators for Womanly Magazine, an organization that provides accessible health information to women and non-binary people through visual and literary art. As a painter and illustrator, she creates work aimed at exploring inner thoughts and private experiences, combining small details of everyday life with images inspired by mythology and animal archetypes, weaving together the universal and the personal.

Singha’s proposal explores the following questions: who are you and who am I? How am I seen and how would I like to be seen? What does it mean to change faces to survive? What does it mean to change faces to thrive and find peace? During the residency, Singha will utilize the model of community workshops -- focused on portraiture, self-portraiture, and mask making (using paper mache) -- to encourage participants to create new types of images of themselves and find agency in those images.

Watch our recap of Vincent Chong's Storefront Residency!

Vincent Ge-Ming Lia Chong (莊志明) is a queer mixed race Chinese American artist and printmaker. The Chinese side of his family has roots in Chinatown via the Daipang (大鵬) peninsula, and the Italian and English side of his family has roots in Binghamton, NY and outside of London, UK. He has studied Chinese calligraphy and stone seal engraving for about three years now, and he works as a printmaker in NYC. Vincent’s everyday art practice consists of calligraphy studies, watercolor painting, seal carving, etching, and bookmaking.

Vincent's proposal fills the Wing On Wo window with spring couplets (春聯) and a bookshelf displaying the artwork of participants in two residency long workshops—one on Chinese calligraphy, and one on bookbinding and box making. He would like to approach both traditions from a queer perspective. We often talk about the erasure of queer people and our narratives, but throughout Chinese history we have seen the burning of books and burying of intellectuals since the beginning of the dynastic system. Vincent believes it’s important to address not just the erasure of queer people, but the burning of our narratives and the burying of our lives. Throughout the residency, he wants to focus on reimagining and rewriting narratives to include those people erased from history as a central theme.

Watch our recap of Emily Mock's Storefront Residency!

W.O.W. Shadow Puppet Theater is a community project centered on the question “what do you do to sweep away evil?” From October through January, as the 店面Storefront Artist-in-Residence and alongside Residency Coordinator Clara Lu, I held public programs and workshops in the Wing On Wo studio and Columbus Park, teaching paper cutting and shadow puppetry. Participants made their own puppets and devised short plays based on memories, practices, traditions, or imaginaries about how they sweep away evil. These recorded plays were featured from February through March 2018 as a storefront window installation at Wing on Wo & Co.

Emily Mock is an artist making paper cuts and performative works from paper. She studies and uses the crafts and methods of her cultures and ancestors to explore dynamics of ancestor/diaspora, place/identity/displacement, and how communities build power. She makes paper cuts, develops and facilitates curricula, and organizes cultural programming as an exercise of how culture and heritage are realized in bodies, places, knowledge, and experience. Having lived in the Outer Sunset, Western Massachusetts, Oxford, Chengdu, and NYC, she is interested in how place and identity frame each other, as well as access to ancestral knowledge and crafts. Originally from San Francisco and currently living in New York City, she is a cultural and community organizer and educator working at CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities as the Chinatown Tenants Union Membership Organizer. She was the Center for Neighborhood Leadership Community Organizing Apprentice for two years at The Laundromat Project. As an educator at the Museum of Chinese in America, Emily gives survey and specialized gallery tours and walks. She holds a BA from Smith College in Art History and Political Science. Inspired by the youth and elder tenant leaders in Manhattan Chinatown from CAAAV and the Chinatown Tenants Union, Emily is working on a bilingual paper cut book about a diasporic community of color’s fight against gentrification and displacement.

As Wing On Wo’s inaugural Lunar New Year 店面 Artist in Residence, Melissa Liu created a window installation that was filled with handmade red envelopes (紅包, known as lai see in Cantonese, hong bao in Mandarin) and short-form oral history responses collected from members of Asian Communities in New York City and beyond. In the weeks leading up to Lunar New Year (January 28, 2017), anyone identified with the Asian Diaspora celebrating the Lunar New Year was invited to participate in workshops organized by Melissa in collaboration with The W.O.W. Project, local artists, and community members and groups. Participants had the opportunity to design and make their own red envelopes, in which they placed a question to share with a family member or friend from an older generation and then collected a written response. Participants also received basic training on how to conduct an oral history interview within their community, and had a safe space to discuss issues that Asian communities face in today’s political moment.

In her window display project, which compelled participants to engage in an exchange of questions through shared Lunar New Year traditions, Melissa sparked deeper conversations and moments of empathy between young and older generations that helped bridged intergenerational understanding in Chinatown and Asian American communities  and also prompted other Chinatown locals and visitors to consider the importance of the sharing of stories and memories.

Melissa Liu 劉慧慈 is a cultural worker, activist, oral historian, and social sculptor, and a first-generation Chinese American. Melissa has worked as an arts administrator in Los Angeles, Paris, and New York with institutions and organizations such as The Laundromat Project, Columbia University School of the Arts, Hammer Museum, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Terra Foundation for American Art, and The Getty Foundation. She has organized and facilitated workshops for the College Art Association and Kelly Street Garden Bronx, and was part of Arts & Labor and its Alternative Economies working group. She is currently part of the working board of Museum Hue, and a longtime advocate for better representation of communities of color in cultural institutions. As a social sculptor and oral historian, Melissa explores culture, cuisine, identity, and place in the Asian Diaspora through cooking, writing, artmaking.