May 2

Visual Curatorial Workshop with Kevin B. Chen

As part of its on-going educational programming, Kearny Street Workshop is offering a Visual Curatorial Workshop on Monday, May 2, led by Kevin B. Chen.

Date: Monday, May 2, 2005

Time: 7-9pm

Location: SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th sts, SF

Cost: $5-25, sliding scale. RSVP required.

More information: Contact sam@kearnystreet.org

May 5

Full Circle: Nancy Hom and Betty Nobue Kano Retrospective
Opening Reception

Guest artists: May Chan and Rick Godinez

presented by Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center in association with KSW and AAWAA

Join KSW for two exhibit openings at SomArts on Thursday, May 5.

Full Circle opens the same evening as Pirated and runs May 5 - 29.

Exhibit Opening reception on Thursday, May 5, 5:00 – 8:00 pm

May 10, 8 pm Panel Discussion with Nancy Hom, Betty Kano and Rick Godinez, moderated by Lenore Chinn

May 17, 7-8 pm Poetry Reading with Nancy Hom, Jeff Leong, Michelle Bautista and Andres Saito

May 22, 2:30pm Painting to Live Music Performance with Betty Kano in collaboration with John Turpin's group, "Expression"
Featuring: John Turpin, Saxophone; Kenneth Nash, Percussion, Keyboards, Spoken Tones; Mali Williams, Contra Bass; Kamau Seitu, Drums & Drum Synthesizer and Robert Birch, Saxophone with Special Guest, Destiny Muhammad, the Harpist from the Hood.

Betty Nobue Kano will create a live music painting, bringing the act of painting full circle to its primordial beginnings — with music, and with a live audience. There will be painting materials available for self-motivated painters of all ages to share the live music moment. Paint and live, live painting.

Presented by Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center in association with KSW and AAWAA

Please visit the Full Circle Gallery of Betty Nobue Kano and Nancy Hom's work.

Click here for information about KSW's Pirated Exhibition.

May 9

Footage: Screenings with Madeleine Lim's Workshop

Join KSW for an evening of screenings of brand new films and video work by participants of Madeleine Lim's Video Production and Post-Production workshops.

Left: Still from Yasmine Gomez' "Look Both Ways"

Featuring 5 new & developing works:

Herded, by Ryan Chin

Last Stop: Vietville, by James Espinas

Look Both Ways, by Yasmine Gomez

Untitled, by Narissa Lee

Untitled, by Kar Yin Tham

Date: Monday, May 9, 2005

Time: 7-9pm

Location: Granma's Camera Productions, 530 Hampshire Street, (between 18th and Mariposa sts), Suite 406, SF

Cost: $5 suggested donation

More information: Contact sam@kearnystreet.org

More on the artists and the films:

Herded by Ryan Chin

Synopsis:
Ryan Chin's Herded (left) is a 10-minute stream of thought about how we are all sheep in some way, herded by various facets of modern Western Society. The film was inspired by a year of teaching and living in Raupunga, a small Maori village on New Zealand's North Island.

Ryan Chin left for New Zealand in September, 2003 after his mate, Toughy(dog) died. His goal was to teach and live in the country. The longing to share his experience and thoughts, combined with his love of telling stories, inspired him to pursue digital editing.

Last Stop: Vietville by James Espinas and Ly Nguyen

Synopsis:
Does such a place exist? A short documentary that reveals everyday life in the Vietnamese Village of the Philippines and the meaning of this special place. The film features rare footage of the people that live in Vietville, music from Viet Nam and the Philippines, and Viet Nam war posters.

Left: Still from James Espinas' and Ly Nguyen's "Last Stop: Vietville."

May 14

Pirated Artist Panel Discussion
Michael Arcega, Donna Keiko Ozawa, Derek Chung, and Scott Tsuchitani, with Alison Bing

As part of the programming around our Pirated exhibition, KSW presents a panel discussion with Pirated artists Michael Arcega, Donna Keiko Ozawa, Derek Chung, and Scott Tsuchitani, moderated by writer, editor, and art critic Alison Bing. The artists will be discussing the new work they developed for the exhibition, how they approached the concept of piracy in their work, and the issue of piracy in general. Question and answer period with audience included.

Date: Saturday, May 14th, 2005

Time: 2-4pm

Location: SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th sts, SF

Cost: Free; Donations welcome.

More information: Click here for more information about the Pirated exhibition. Contact sam@kearnystreet.org

About the artists

MICHAEL ARCEGA is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installations. His art, though visual, revolves largely around language. He mines history for residue from cultural clashes such as accents, Spam, Jesus nightlights, and cocoa crispies. Michael received his BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1998. His work has been shown in San Francisco, Oakland, Marin, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Lisbon. He was awarded a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts for the fall of 2005. Michael is represented by Heather Marx Gallery in San Francisco.

ALISON BING is an author, art critic, and independent commentator for Artweek, San Francisco Chronicle's online edition (SFGate.com), artUS, Sculpture, CMYK, Bidoun, and other arts magazines.

DEREK CHUNG is a photographer, painter and cofounder of Tactile Pictures, a digital design studio in San Francisco. At Tactile, he created the award-winning Tactile12000 MP3 DJ software, featured in Print Magazine. He also develops web sites for nonprofit organizations and foundations, and software for clients including Apple Computer, Macromedia and MTV.com. He helped create the Global Arcade web site in 1998 at an artist residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. In 2000, he helped produce the Whirled Bank website to critically analyze the role of the World Bank in global poverty. Derek is also a visual curator for KSW's APAture, and is currently resisting modern photography by accumulating and using vintage cameras. View his work at derekchung.org.

DONNA KEIKO OZAWA is a third-generation Californian living in Berkeley. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is primarily sculpture and installation, which include kinetic and viewer-activated sculpture, politically- inspired work and art with recycled and found materials. Her work has been exhibited in California, Chicago, Baltimore, and Tokyo, and is in various private Bay Area collections. Currently, Ozawa is working on “The Waribashi Project: San Francisco,” an environmental art collaboration with the Japanese Community and Cultural Center of Northern California. The project involves the collection of thousands of used disposable chopsticks from local restaurants to make sculpture that promotes dialogue about cultural practices and global environmental issues. Visit her website at donnaozawa.com and http://www.waribashi.org.

SCOTT TSUCHITANI is interested in visual culture as dynamic process: how people are represented, how it shapes public perception, and in turn, the impact it has on individual subjective experience. It's empowering to approach art as a process of cultural production: he is participating in creating the culture we live in, and insofar as meaning is a function of cultural context, in his own small way through his art, he can create social change. Through the use of humor, storytelling, and playing with stereotypes, he tries to make the invisible visible, to expose the structures of domination behind the apparent naturalness of social relations. His work is, in part, about creating space from the margins in the mainstream, creating space in the culture, whether it be that of family, community, or mass media, for all of us to be just as we are, rather than how the dominant culture tells us to be.

Click here to read Annie Nakao, "Memoirs of a Geisha Guerrilla" San Francisco Chronicle 5 December 2004.

May 17

Film Curatorial Workshop with Chi-hui Yang

As part of its on-going educational programming, Kearny Street Workshop is offering a Film Curatorial Workshop on Tuesday, May 17, led by Chi-hui Yang.

Date: Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Time: 7-9pm

Location: SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th sts, SF

Cost: $5-25, sliding scale. RSVP required.

More information: Contact sam@kearnystreet.org

May 21

We want the airwaves!!!!!
Pirate Radio Workshop with Jean Chen and Karoline Hatch

As part of the programming around our Pirated exhibition, KSW presents a workshop all about the how-to's, what-if's, and watch-out's of pirate radio.

Do you hate listening to the radio because everything is owned by Clear Channel? Do you ever wonder what happened to the days when the radio played good music?

Three years ago Jean Chen got tired of hearing the same 10 songs on the radio over and over again and decided to take action. She bought a radio transmitter and began to broadcast her own radio station out of her apartment.

Karoline Hatch has been a primary organizer for San Francisco Liberation Radio (listen online: www.liberationradio.net) for 3 years and as such she has learned more than she ever wanted to know about the legal and illegal issues of micro-powered radio and raids, as well as what to do and not to do with electricity and transmission equipment. She finds radio compelling because while it is intrinsically an act of civil disobedience it can be some serious fun.

Join Jean and Karoline as they tell you about their experiences and give advice on how to start up your own pirate radio station. You'll hear about what equipment you need, legal issues to consider, and the state of low power FM.

Date: Saturday, May 21st, 2005

Time: 2-4pm

Location: SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th sts, SF

Cost: Free; $5 - 25 suggested donation. Please RSVP at 415.503.0520 or sam@kearnystreet.org.

More information: Click here for more information about the Pirated exhibition. Contact sam@kearnystreet.org

May 22

1st Annual Asian Heritage Street Celebration in Japantown

Kearny Street Workshop will have a table at the 1st Annual Asian Heritage Street Celebration in Japantown. There will be live entertainment, food, and arts & crafts. Find out more at asianfairsf.com.

Date: Sunday, May 22, 2005

Time: 11am - 6pm

Location: Japantown, San Francisco

Cost: Free

More information: asianfairsf.com

May 24

Pirate Stories

A pirate attack on mars. Ants taking over the United States. Make-up tips for Asian women. A refugee’s first encounter with pirates.

And cover songs. and more....

In the closing week of our Pirated exhibition, KSW presents Pirate Stories, a night of pirate-themed performances and film screenings. Featuring filmmakers Anna-Sophie Loewenberg, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Curtis Choy, and Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong, and slam poet Shailja Patel, shadow puppeteer Trinket Molar Spectacles (Janaki Ranpura), speculative fiction writer Claire Light, and musical entitiesThe Invisible Cities and Goh Nakamura.

We'll also be joined by the good folks of 826 Valencia's Pirate store.

Reception to follow. The exhibit will be open for viewing before and after the performances.

Date: Tuesday, May 24th, 2005

Time: 8-10pm

Location: SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th sts, SF

Cost: $5

More information: Click here for more information about the Pirated exhibition. Contact sam@kearnystreet.org

About the artists

Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong are an interdisciplinary art team which produces installations, performances, and film and video works. As individual artists, they assist each with specific projects.

Yin-Ju Chen & James T. Hong's Total Mobilization is an evocative, ironic, and bombastic experimental video that straddles the line between politically correct and incorrect. The open-minded will see it as a trenchant metaphor of nativist fears; the closed-minded will see it as a document of the truth. Migration is fact; immigration is destiny.

Left: Still from "Total Mobilization" courtesy of Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong.

Curtis Choy has been an independent producer and film worker since the early ‘70s. He has contributed to numerous independent and PBS documentaries, commercials, and feature films as a production sound mixer. When not losing money on his projects, he earns a living working on corporate jobs and feature films. His work as a producer/director include “The Fall of the I Hotel” (1983), “Manilatown Lives!” (1985), “Dupont Guy: The Shiz of Grant Avenue” (1976), and “Making Up” (1974). His new documentary, “What’s Wrong with Frank Chin?” (2005) premiered at NAATA’s 23rd San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and won the Best Documentary Feature Award. Choy received the James D. Phelan Art Award in Filmmaking (1988) and a Rockefeller Foundation Media Fellowship (2002). His films have garnered numerous prizes and honors.

Curtis Choy’s “Making Up” is a short film produced in 1974. In hindsight, its message appears to be timeless. It re-purposes the written advice from cosmetics manufacturer Max Factor in Volume One, Number One of Jade Magazine (a purported Asian American publication), essentially instructing yellow women in the fine points of looking white, and appealing to whites. It employs a form little-understood by AA academia: satire. This work was created on the spur of the moment, with no script and no planning, and co-invented by the actresses (from a scene and set from my film essay “Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue”), using shortends (leftover film), and completed and viewable within a day. It runs less than three minutes and is wholly unambiguous.

Left: Asian women attempt to be western-eyezed in "Making Up", 1974, by Curtis Choy.

Claire Light stepped down as Kearny Street Workshop's program manager to pursue her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing (fiction) at San Francisco State University. She received her Bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona in 1992 and subsequently studied contemporary history and cultural studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. She is also a graduate of the Clarion West Writer's Workshop, an intensive workshop/retreat for writers of speculative fiction. She is a co-founder and the literary editor of HYPHEN Magazine and has had her stories and articles published in McSweeney's, Hyphen Magazine, Other Magazine, Sensor, and a variety of other online and print zines and chapbooks.

Anna-Sophie Loewenberg is a journalist and documentary filmmaker.
She has written for San Francisco and international publications such as Beijing Scene Magazine, BUST, Giant Robot and Pacific Time radio on KQED. Her short story about Beijing, "The Trash Collector's Song" was published in 2005 in the Seal Press collection "Lost on Purpose." She is also a musician and started Bieniu, a girl-fronted punk rock band in Beijing.

"China Pirates" is a short documentary about China's black-market
media trade in pirated and saw-gash CDs, tapes and DVDs. Based on
footage taken during her five years (1996-2001) of living and
working as a journalist and punk rocker in Beijing, Anna-Sophie follows young musicians from Beijing punk bands Hang on the Box, Cold Blooded Animal and Brain Failure, and documents how pirated media is shaping an entire generation of Chinese youth culture. Anna Sophie edited China Pirates thanks to the support of the Bay Area Video Coalition.

Nguyen Tan Hoang is a Vietnamese American video artist whose work interrogates forms of desires in queer Asian male identities. His short experimental videos--including "7 Steps to Sticky Heaven"(1995), "Maybe Never (but I'm counting the days)"(1996), "PIRATED!"(2000), and "Cover Girl: A Gift from God"(2000)--have screened in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Hong Kong. He has programmed film, video, and performance work for MIX: New York Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film/Video Festival and for Artists' Television Access, an artist-run alternative media space in San Francisco. His new hobby is growing cacti and succulents. He also enjoys drinking corn tea and eating pho', a delectable Vietnamese beef noodle soup.

Goh Nakamura cut his teeth on the Boston Music scene providing “stunt guitar” work for various local bands. After a stint at the Berklee College of Music where he sharpened his ears, he came back to the west coast to write his own songs. He likes to think of himself as a combination of John Lennon, John Cusack and John Coltrane. However unholy this trinity is, it seems to work (at least in his head). For the last 3 years, he’s been playing his original songs as well as an eclectic spectrum of covers at assorted venues throughout the SF Bay Area. His debut album, “Daylight Savings”, was recently named one of the Top Ten Local Albums of 2004 by the San Jose Metro. You can hear some of his homemade music and check out his performance calendar at his website gohnakamura.com.

Shailja Patel Kenyan Indian explosion on the national spoken word scene, Shailja Patel has appeared at the Lincoln Center, New York and the Move Against AIDS Danceathon at Manhattan's Javits Center.

Awards include an Outwrite Poetry Prize, a Voices Of Our Nations Scholarship, and a Serpent Source Grant.

Winner of national and Bay Area slam championships, Shailja was Featured Literary Artist for APAture 2004, the nation’s largest showcase of emerging young Asian Pacific artists.

Born and raised in Kenya, Shailja currently lives in Oakland. Contact Shailja at shailjapatel@gmail.com

Left: photo by Steven Underwood.

The Invisible Cities is a San Francisco-based band that makes incandescent rough-around- the-edges sometimes-quiet sometimesloud rocknroll pop music with wiry guitars and boy/girl harmonies. Watertown is their first full-length record, born of late-night, halfremembered reflections about half-remembered places. They have been playing in various configurations in the Bay Area for the last couple of years, including performances piNoisePop 8 in 2003 and APAture in 2003 and 2004. They feel lucky to have had help from Matt Yelton (Pixies, Frank Black) when they started recording the album, and from Jon Evans (Tori Amos) for mixing it. http://www.theinvisiblecities.com

Trinket Molar (Janaki Ranpura) creates and performs pieces that combine shadow puppetry and physical comedy. She studied at Yale University and the Lecoq School of Physical Theater in Paris. Puppetry became part of her repertoire through her work with Larry Reed‚s Shadowlight Productions and Peter Schumann‚s Bread & Puppet Theater. She currently tours with Omax Pi Puppet Theater.

About 826 Valencia

826 Valencia is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Our services are structured around our belief that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success. With this in mind we provide drop-in tutoring, after-school workshops, in-schools tutoring, help for English language learners, and assistance with student publications. All of our programs are challenging and enjoyable, and ultimately strengthen each student's power to express ideas effectively, creatively, confidently, and in his or her individual voice.

For more information, please visit 826valencia.org and 826 Valencia's pirate store.

More information: Click here for more information about the Pirated exhibition. Contact sam@kearnystreet.org

May 26

Bang...! an APAture House Party
Featuring Jimmy Tran, Magnetic North, and Tensegrity Nine

and hosted by the lovely folks at The Tin Can

It's the kick-off event of the APAture 2005 season! join us for a celebratory evening with performances by poet Jimmy Thong Tran, hip hop duo Magnetic North, and other music duo Tensegrity Nine. it shall be a night of adventure and excitement, some art & music thrown in, some eats & drinks, and all proceeds go to producing KSW's 7th annual APAture festival.

also: raffle prizes! advance apature tickets! meet the APAture planning committee and past APAture artists!

also: a real house party kindly hosted by the artist residents of The Tin Can.

Date: Thursday, May 26th, 2005

Time: Doors open 7.30pm; performances begin at 8pm

Location: The Tin Can, 590 Shotwell street, @ 20th street, SF

Cost: $9 - 15, sliding scale.

More information: Contact sam@kearnystreet.org

About the artists

Born in Torrance, raised in Berkeley, Jimmy Thong Tran is a graduated Ethnic Studies major from UC Berkeley who is really glad to be out of school. He has been involved with Theatre Rice, REACH, SASC, APASD, Proletariat Bronze, Asian American Theatre Company, and Youth Speaks. He is a member of the 2004 San Francisco Poetry Slam team and the 2004 National Collegiate Poetry Slam champions UC Berkeley's CalSlam team, which decided to stay together, forming a 4-person collective called Jigsaw. He recently taped for the 5th season of HBO's Def Poetry Jam in New York and is working on a book with the Jigsaw Collective, to be published by First Word Press.

Comprised of close friends that share an unhealthy lust for music, Magnetic North is a hip hop duo that strives to find the balance between insightful lyrics and engaging instrumentals. Though they formed in 2003, both Direct and T-minus have been emceeing for over 7 years. Direct, the mastermind behind their instrumentals, favors melodies heavy in acoustic guitar, piano rifts, and a variety of strings. He tops off his production with honest rhymes and a refreshingly crisp delivery. Then there is T-minus, so called for her timebomb like tendencies, who brings to Magnetic North that final touch - a female emcee as comfortable on the mic as any of her male contemporaries.

More info on Magnetic North at magnetichiphop.com.

Tensegrity Nine is an Oakland/Alameda-based Electronic Pop music duo featuring Matt Payne on keyboards and electronics and Peter Lim on vocals and guitar. Formed in late 2003, Tensegrity Nine utilizes elements of J-pop, Folk, Rap, Usher-like dance routines, noise music and spoken word poetry. Tensegrity Nine's live performance is a seamless, high-energy affair featuring passionate vocals, musical solos on strange instruments, quirky humor, and choreographed dancing. In essence, it is the musical nerd-rock, electro-pop equivalent of John Mayer, anticon, Yanni, and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, thrown into a pot of steaming lava, mixed together with an electric egg beater.

More info on Tensegrity Nine at tensegritynine.com.