Like all histories, LA Chinatown’s story is one that is fundamentally about people.
Author Archives: Caroline Ellen Liou
Caroline Ellen Liou is an Asian-American artist, art historian, and curator based in Los Angeles. She received a BFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in contemporary Chinese art and geopolitics at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Posted inArt
Navigating Home, the Way Children Might See It
Stuck at home as we have been, Busy Work at Home invites us to rediscover our sense of wonder.
Posted inArt
“Made in LA” Mines the Necessary Performance of Everyday Life
Performance has always been essential as a means of survival to participate in the fiction of America.
Posted inArt
An Artist’s Crash Course in Government
In a series of PSA-style videos, Paul Pescador poses questions about government that quickly unravel into a nightmarishly complex knot of existential crises.
Posted inArt
Gabriel Sanchez’s Cuban Portraits Grapple With Home and Belonging
Sanchez’s most arresting paintings allow the viewer to get lost in a vast expanse of skin.
Posted inArt
A Gut-Wrenching Illustration of the Asian American Experience
Comprised of 15 panels, Ben Sakoguchi’s “Chinatown” is a history lesson in miniature.
Posted inArt
In Never-Before-Seen Drawings, Robert Colescott Satirizes Art History
In his “Complete History of World Art,” Colescott skewers notions around propriety, race, beauty, and art.
Posted inArt
Translating Deaf Culture, Christine Sun Kim Underlines the Difficulty of Interpretation
The artist, who gave an iconic ASL performance at the Super Bowl last year, draws our attention to the struggle of power, ideology, and systems in the juncture of languages.
Posted inArt
Processing Our 2020 Feelings With Patty Chang
In March, Chang put out an open call for our fears and made a video out of them. Watching it eight months later, I hoped it would help name whatever it was I was feeling.
Posted inArt
How Do You Paint Portraiture Without a Portrait?
By negating the figure, Amir H. Fallah expands the limits of portraiture to make space for multiple interpretations.
Posted inArt
The Wonderfully Unsettling Paintings of Charles Garabedian
Garabedian gave himself over to his instincts, pretensions, and mistakes, unafraid to explore and even embrace what others considered to be “bad.”
Posted inArt
In America’s “First Suburban Chinatown,” Asian Americans Have Negotiated Cultural Representation
In the San Gabriel Valley, home to the largest concentration of Asian Americans, cultural landmarks tell a story of the formation of a collective cultural identity.