LAWLESS

On May 15th from 7-9 pm, please join us for an evening of radical storytelling to celebrate Chinatown Soup’s debut production: LAWLESS, a multidisciplinary retrospective that explores the youth gangs and counterculture of 1970’s Chinatown. 

Before street writers were tagging homages to rent-hike casualties and community activist groups were demanding that Mayor de Blasio halt the corporate-condo takeover, the blocks east of SoHo’s Cast-Iron District and below Canal Street were marked by blood spilled at the hands of the Ghost Shadows and a tenuous trust in “Mayor of Chinatown” Man Bun Lee. 

How does  lawlessness in Chinatown persist and shape the dynamics of an increasingly intermingled community? Challenging stereotypes about the neighborhood and its inhabitants begins with asking the right questions. While broader political and economic forces of a bankrupt New York leveraged crime to reshape immigrant communities in the 70’s, we're now contending with a culture of commerce. But to reckon with our present we must first immerse ourselves in a past culture of fear. 

LAWLESS uses alternative artistic practices to intersect the politics of place and memory in this historically isolated and misrepresented space. Today, we witness the opening of New York's once “forbidden fortress” as government policies that champion “cleaning up” Chinatown allow for more top-down development and displacement. Here, gentrification meets an untold history that compels us to remember. 

This exhibition features:

Watercolor and paintings by Boy Kong
Digital installation by Victoria Loke 陆詠怡
Video by Eric Jenkins-Sahlin
Film photography by Ali Glatt
Sound mixing by Chinese Man

Flyer design by Tom O’Toole

Artifacts from The Museum of Chinese in America

Researched, curated, and produced by Michelle Marie Esteva

Special thanks to the MOCA Collections team, CartoDB, and Tiger Beer for their generous support!