Double Issue Annual Report 2021 & 2022

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The W.O.W. Project

Annual Report 2021 & 2022


About the Annual Report and The W.O.W. Project Based in Manhattan’s Chinatown, The W.O.W. Project is a women, queer, and transled community organization working at the intersection of arts, activism, and youth development. W.O.W. grows and protects Chinatown’s creative culture through residencies, youth programs, public events, and mutual aid. Our programs and offerings enable collaboration between gender-marginalized Asian American youth, socially engaged artists, organizers, and local small business owners. We use shared creativity as an essential tool for building intergenerational bridges of understanding and political consciousness across Asian American communities and beyond. W.O.W. serves as a political home and dreaming space for preserving Manhattan’s Chinatown. We work together to envision a future where community spaces like W.O.W. are protected and resourced, shaping neighborhood growth in a way that serves community interests. This annual report documents The W.O.W. Project’s fifth and sixth program years, which ran from July 2020 to July 2022. It contains insights and highlights from programs organized and held by the team over these two years, including our internship program, youth cohort program Resist Recycle Regenerate, Artist Residency, and other special programs. This report also shares notable figures and statistics from W.O.W.’s fundraising efforts and our vision moving forward.

© 2023 The W.O.W. Project All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner. @wowprojectnyc www.wowprojectnyc.org


Table of Contents Our Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Staff & Board . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Organizational Chart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Fundraising Stats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 6th Year by the Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Yearly Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Resist Recycle Regenerate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Internship Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Artist Residency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Special Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Love Letters to Chinatown Storefront Mural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 In the Future Mural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Bridging Futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Met Civic Practice Partnership Residency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 From Chinatown, With Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Nourishing Our Roots: 5 Year Anniversary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Built to Bloom: 6 Year Anniversary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Grassroots Fundraising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Looking Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 Special Thanks & How to Get Involved . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .106 www.wowprojectnyc.org

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W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2021 & 2022


OUR VALUES

At W.O.W., creativity and the arts are a tool for politicization, relationship-building, and identity formation—all of which are essential in empowering youth to participate in and lead social justice action. Yet, there is a lack of accessible arts spaces that serve intersectionally-marginalized Asian American youth, who are often required to choose between social and organizing spaces that honor their racial identity or spaces that honor gender and sexuality identity.

This is the gap that W.O.W. strikes to fill, serving youth in Chinatown, intergenerational Asian Americans in NYC, as well as the English-speaking Asian diaspora worldwide. Our values include: •

Building long-term relationships with youth, artists, and community partners

Investing in youth and creating opportunities for them to step into leadership roles

Engaging in multiple ways with the issues of gentrification and displacement

Approaching growth as an iterative, emergent process that centers community needs

In-progress community needs map identifying the target audiences of The W.O.W. Project’s work, created in the Spring of 2021. Illustration: Singha Hon

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STAFF & BOARD

Mei Lum (she/her) Director & Founder

Yuki Haraguchi (she/her)

Clae Lu (they/them)

Denise Zhou (she/they)

Development Director & Youth Advisory Board Member

Artist Residency Program Manager

Program Manager

Aishvarya Arora (they/them)

Joy Mao (she/her)

Bonnie Chen (she/her)

Joy Freund (they/them)

Development Associate

Artist-in-Residence

Intern, RRR Coordinator & Youth Advisory Board Member

Intern & Youth Advisory Board Member

Nisma Saadaoui (she/her)

Angela Cai (she/her)

Cocoro Kitagawa (she/her)

Tiffany Wang (she/her)

Intern

Intern & Program Coordinator

Intern & Program Coordinator

Intern & Program Coordinator

Ja Bulsombut (she/her)

Em He (they/them)

Diane Wong (she/her)

Jade Levine (she/they)

Youth Advisory Board Member

Board Member

Board Member

Board Member

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ORGANIZATIONAL CHART

Illustration by Singha Hon 4


FUNDRAISING STATS FUNDRAISING GROWTH (2021 - 2022) Year 5: Fiscal Year 2021

$145,414

Year 6: Fiscal Year 2022

$192,998

FUNDRAISING BY TYPE (2021 - 2022) Grassroots Fundraising

Grants

24%

35% Year 6: Fiscal Year 2022

Year 5: Fiscal Year 2021

65%

76%

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THE W.O.W. PROJECT’S 6TH YEAR BY THE NUMBERS

W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2020

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2021-2022

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YEARLY PROGRAMS

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RRR fellows Sophia Kschwendt and Tiffany Huang from the 5th cohort fly their collective kite project in Columbus Park. Image: Marion Aguas


RESIST RECYCLE REGENERATE (RRR) ABOUT Resist Recycle Regenerate (RRR) is a youth program that seeks to intersect art and activism through building young women, non-binary, and trans leadership within the Chinatown community. RRR uses paper made from recycled confetti collected during the annual Lunar New Year parade as the basis of their artmaking practice. Each year, to cultivate youth leadership and growth, former fellows can become program leaders, mentoring and guiding the next cohort of fellows through artmaking and project development. The RRR program provides youth with a co-created experience grounded by three phases, starting with opportunities to learn from guest teaching artists and culminating in a final project that applies these artmaking skills. These projects engage with themes ranging from personal and collective migration stories, Chinatown history, daughterhood, and diasporic belonging, among many others. Fellows have the opportunity to share and discuss their projects with the community by displaying their work in the 26 Mott St. storefront during the final showcase. The showcase provides a space for the fellows and program leaders to collectively reflect on their growth and development as artists, young leaders, and active community members who are invested in the past, present, and future of Chinatown.

Thank you to our funders:

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2020-2021 RESIST RECYCLE REGENERATE

to weekly solidarity workshops led by Emily Chow Bluck, fellows were able to learn and grow together in a supportive space. Fellows took time to explore their own identities, their relationships to other communities, and eventually implemented this learning into their final projects.

In its fourth year, RRR continued to cultivate community for a new youth cohort while adapting to a digital format. The leadership team translated the program curriculum and weekly artmaking sessions to Zoom while responding to the cohort’s emergent needs as femme and queer Asian youth navigating a difficult political moment. During the first phase, fellows learned a variety of artmaking skills taught by several visiting artists, community partners, and teaching artist, Emily Chow Bluck. They grounded these artmaking practices in identity and social action through workshops on narrative film, social movement art, and oral histories. Fellows then gained hands-on experience in co-created artmaking as they collaborated on the W.O.W. Storefront project.

The third and final phase was a culmination of the first two phases. Using the skills, experiences, and interests they fostered throughout the year, the fellows split into pairs and began to envision, plan, and execute a collaborative final project. Many of the fellows’ projects engaged with themes of collective Asian/American histories, personal migration stories, and communal and collective cultural practices as they incorporated their own personal interests with their digital art-making skills and their knowledge of history, activism, and resistance.

In the second phase, fellows attended workshops centered around solidarity and political education. From reflective writing activities led by K-Ming Chang W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2021 & 2022

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As part of their collaborative group project, the RRR cohort put up a storefront display that addressed themes of community, family, food, and care. Fellows created dishes that held significant meaning to them out of found objects, hoping to bring warmth and spark memories to passersby in the neighborhood. Featured here are close-ups of dishes from Irene Gao, Rose Lin, and Cheryl Chen.

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2020-2021 RRR LEADERSHIP

Bonnie Chen (she/her) 4th-Year Coordinator 3rd-Year Leader 2nd-Year Fellow

Bonnie is excited to grow RRR’s youth voices in the movement of social change through the creative arts. Bonnie is currently exploring how digital arts and narratives can play a role in shaping activism efforts and creating lasting change in locally-scaled communities and ultimately expanding nationally. Reach out to her to have conversations about community development, social justice activism, and mobilizing in advocacy and solidarity work.

Angela Chan (she/her) 4th-Year Coordinator 3rd-Year Leader 2nd-Year Fellow

Angela is excited to continue fostering a community and promoting the project’s mission beyond papermaking as RRR explores the use of digital film projection as a method of storytelling in its fourth year. She aims to advocate against social issues and build meaningful connections within Chinatown and the larger community through the intersection of art and activism.

Stepping into a program coordinator role was challenging at first, but it quickly became more rewarding and exciting as the program went on. I initially had a lot of ideas and expectations of how I wanted the program to go, but I soon realized that things do not always go according to plan. You just have to trust the process, and that’s my biggest takeaway from this experience. Each year, RRR continues to step up in creating new and innovative final projects, and the results always far exceed my expectations and imagination. It was also the first time we had four generations of RRR come together for a virtual showcase, which made it so much more special. These are the moments when I truly feel that we are a community, and it shows how resilient Chinatown can be. — Angela Chan

Amanda Cui (she/her) 4th-Year Leader 3rd-Year Fellow

Amanda is a first generation Chinese-American high school senior. The knowledge she gained from RRR has shown up in other sectors of her activism and she is super excited to continue working with W.O.W.! Outside of Asian American activism, Amanda loves to embroider (a result of her final project), draw, play the ukulele, and eat hotpot with her family.

Cynthia Qian (she/her) 4th-Year Leader 3rd-Year Fellow

RRR allowed Cynthia to find her own unique voice, which for her was in the form of music, and taught her the wonders of self-expression. RRR was an extremely empowering experience for her as a young AsianAmerican woman and she is excited to come back and lead the new cohort with the skills and knowledge she gained as a previous fellow and to give them the support and inspiration they need to find their own voice.

It was the beginning of Covid and I spent a lot of time reflecting on the current political climate, as well as my experiences growing up as a first-generation Asian-American woman. Having created such an impactful piece of work during such a tumultuous time introduced me to the importance of art in activism, and reminded me how storytelling can exist through different mediums. RRR taught me that I could make an impact through retelling history and visual art. My most memorable moment was performing with the lion head that my cohort had built together. It was a perfect physical culmination of the time we spent in the studio, and allowed us to celebrate together. To this day, I look back at W.O.W. with so much warmth—I wouldn’t be who I am today without the experience I had here. — Amanda Cui

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2020-2021 RRR COHORT & TEACHING ARTIST

Cheryl Chen (she/her) is a second-generation Chinese-American, studying Music, Chinese, and Japanese at Hunter College. She loves food, music, the arts, and devouring all kinds of fiction and is excited to get involved in Asian-American activism with the rest of the RRR fellows.

Xi Lin (she/her) is a Chinese-American high school senior. Her interests include playing or watching sports, reading a book, playing video games, and drawing random inspirational things. As a RRR fellow, she is very excited to work with her peers in shaping Chinatown into a safe haven for people and to amplify Asians and other minorities’ voices. In addition, she is eager to learn more about Chinatown’s heritage and her culture.

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Irene Gao (she/her) is a nineteen-year-old AsianAmerican who enjoys playing volleyball and the ukulele during her leisure time. Irene joined RRR as a fellow with hopes of discovering more about her heritage, while finding her creative side through papermaking and other various artmaking skills. She is excited to use art activism to resist gentrification and contribute to the Chinatown community.

Christina Duan (they/ them) is a ChineseAmerican student at Barnard College trying to discover who they are. Recently, they’ve been immersed in traditional lion dance (even though it is very hard!), photography, the written word, and helping out where they can. They believe that art is an act of resilience in it of itself—I was here, I am here, and I will be here—and they are hoping to carry that quality into their activism and relationship with Asian culture.

Rose Lin (she/her) is a first generation Chinese-American college freshman. She enjoys giving back to the community and learning more about her identity. In joining RRR, she is excited to have the opportunity to educate herself about the intersectionality of art and activism to approach activism from a non traditional perspective.

Sophie Wu (she/her) is a rising high school junior who is passionate about art, photography, and badminton. She is excited to learn more about and explore her Asian American identity and culture, and to become more involved in activism to help the community.

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Kaitlyn Lee (she/her) is a first-generation Chinese and Burmese-American and a rising junior. She is passionate about AAPI activism and creating local change in her communities. She hopes to bring art and expression into Asian American youth spaces through the RRR program.

Emily Chow Bluck (they/them) is an artist, educator, and organizer based in New York City. Working primarily with communities of color in urban neighborhoods, they use their art praxis to build local campaigns for social justice. These creative campaigns harness experiences of struggle and oppression to manifest new narratives of overcoming, social value, and self-determined futures.

W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2021 & 2022


My favorite part of RRR is being able to surround myself with other Asian American creatives, each with their own distinct styles, attitudes, and practices. I have learned so much from hearing about other artists’ work, and it inspires me to carry myself with the same care, confidence, and mindfulness. From recognizing the abundance around us, to intentionally engaging with the subjects of photographs, the artists that participate in RRR have instilled in me a deeper curiosity and understanding of Chinatown and the world beyond. I am grateful for The W.O.W. Project and RRR’s supportive community that has helped me gain confidence in my identity as an Asian American, an artist, and an activist. — Kaitlyn Lee, RRR Fellow

Cheryl and Kaitlyn’s collaborative final project, Roots: Reimagining Our Asian American Identities, in which they created six separate but interconnected pieces to explore different ways of defining identity.

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To view the 4th cohort's work, visit https://resistrecycleregenerate.tumblr.com/RRR2021.

Excerpts from Duan and Irene’s collaborative project, Understanding Our Stories: Healing Melancholia, a zine that explores their connection to their heritage through their parents.

An excerpt from Rose and Sophie’s collaborative project, Stitching Bridges: A Collection of Myths, a multimedia storybook inspired by the tradition of oral storytelling.

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2021-2022 RESIST RECYCLE REGENERATE

Fellows pose for a group photo after one of their sessions with teaching artist, Emily Chow Bluck, and W.O.W. director, Mei Lum.

In its fifth year, RRR returned to in-person programming. Building off learnings from the previous year, RRR leadership focused on finding alternative solutions to challenges, concerns, and questions they encountered, including peer-topeer accountability and engagement, and how new mediums and artmaking practices can be used to advance RRR's core values, social action, and community engagement.

During the second phase, fellows worked with sixth artist-in-residence Joy Mao on her residency project, exploring the question, “what does it look like for garments to be vehicles for community building, capsules for living histories, and touchstones for imagining our futures?” Inspired by Chinatown's symbols of abundance, the RRR cohort co-created motifs that became part of Joy’s final capsule collection.

During the first phase, the cohort learned from teaching artists and community partners about placekeeping, social movement art, and oral histories. Women and queer community leaders accompanied the cohort in grounding their artmaking practices in identity and social action. In the midst of another COVID spike, the program briefly moved online. Fellows completed individual projects exploring art and interiority grounded in the artmaking skills, self-knowledge, and community knowledge gained over the first three months of the program.

During the final two months of the program, the focus shifted outward as fellows began to envision, plan, and execute a community-facing group project, bringing together the varied skills and interests each fellow developed in their Phase 1 individual projects. The program culminated in a final showcase in the Wing On Wo storefront where the RRR cohort shared their individual projects, spoke on a panel about their experiences in the program, and invited community members to Columbus Park to watch their group project, a collective kite, take flight.

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The first session of RRR in the fall. Image: Kaitlyn Lee

Fellows learn how to pull confetti paper for the first time.

A Chinatown walking tour with Wing On Wo family member and Chinatown local, Gary Lum. Image: Christina Duan

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2021-2022 RRR LEADERSHIP

Serena Yang (she/her) 5th-Year Coordinator 2nd-Year Fellow

Serena is a poet, writer, and first-generation Chinese American immigrant raised in Queens, New York on unceded Lenape land. (And currently a reluctant student at Swarthmore College trying to find a bearable life under capitalism.) She believes that imagination and storytelling are critical to justice work and creates, always, with the knowledge that a better world is possible. Serena believes that fiction and art is a way to bridge memory—a way for us to see ourselves as being part of the world and a larger historical continuity. In other words, art has the power to make real.

Christina Duan / Duan (they/them)

5th-Year Leader 4th-Year Fellow

Duan is a Chinese-American student at Barnard College trying to discover who they are and hope to create spaces where others can grow comfortably into themselves. Recently, they’ve been immersed in traditional lion dance (even though it is very hard!), photography, the written word, and helping out where they can. They believe that art is an act of resilience in and of itself—I was here, I am here, and I will be here—and they are hoping to carry that quality into their activism and their relationship with Asian culture.

The W.O.W. Project has taught me what praxis means and what it can look like. It's a unique space where we can reimagine our futures in a way that empowers our community to trust that we know what we need, and that we have the strength and agency to protect ourselves. The W.O.W. Project has been a place where I can break free from intellectualizing in circles, where I can finally see my neighbors for who they are, what they're going through, who they love, and what they desire, beyond just being faceless characters within academic or social discourse. — Kaitlyn Lee

Kaitlyn Lee (she/her) 5th-Year Leader 4th-Year Fellow

Kaitlyn is a Burmese-Chinese American, a community organizer, and a high school senior. Her final project was rooted in themes of family, lineage, and matriarchy. Driven by love, Kaitlyn is excited to keep working with the W.O.W. Project to foster connection, community care, and solidarity through art and activism.

W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2021 & 2022

Emily Chow Bluck (they/them) Teaching Artist

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Emily is an artist, educator, and organizer based in New York City. Working primarily with communities of color in urban neighborhoods, they use their art praxis to build local campaigns for social justice. These creative campaigns harness experiences of struggle and oppression to manifest new narratives of overcoming, social value, and selfdetermined futures. www.wowprojectnyc.org


2021-2022 RRR COHORT Vivian Yi (they/she) is a recent college grad, currently employed as a Health Educator in Manhattan Chinatown. Her passions include: traditional Bulgarian choral music, adding books to her Goodreads then not reading them, and the color red. Throughout the RRR fellowship she hopes to keep thinking about questions such as, Is making/consuming art a selfish pursuit? and How do I extricate my personal identity from family history, and is this even something I should be trying to accomplish?

Bridget Li (they/them) is a second-generation ChineseAmerican and studying Urban Studies and Drawing at Hunter College. They are passionate about visual arts and poetry and incorporating their heritage/activism into those practices. They are very excited to be a part of RRR and to explore the intersection between art and activism in Chinatown! Aurora Hom (she/her) is majoring in Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. She is third-generation Chinese American. Her goals for RRR are to learn about the intersections of arts and activism. Through organizing, Aurora wants to promote intersectionality and build community.

Sophia Kschwendt (she/ her) is an Asian American high school senior. She is passionate about artmaking, especially through mediums such as sewing, calligraphy, and collage. She hopes to connect more deeply to her Korean American identity as well as learn more about how to use art to create long-standing change in her communities.

Tiffany Huang (she/they) is a second generation Taiwanese-American high school student. Her hobbies are playing viola, listening to music and recently has gotten into film photography and tarot card reading. They are passionate about AsianAmerican activism and are ready to reclaim histories and to build solidarity with other marginalized communities. Through the RRR program she hopes to combine the power of the arts and activism to bring about social change that is needed for the community.

RRR taught me what it means to be an active part of a community, as well as how to use art as a means of strengthening said community, whether it be through the recycling of confetti into paper or the building of lasting bonds with Chinatown businesses. — Sophia Kschwendt

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May Ying Chen contextualizing the history of Chinese immigration in New York City as part of a series of workshops in collaboration with Joy’s artist residency. Image: Echo Chen and Renee Chang

RRR participating in a ceramics workshop with teaching artist Emily Chow Bluck and their mother. Image: Kaitlyn Lee

RRR fellows Tiffany and Aurora carrying the cohort’s collective kite down Mosco St. Image: Marion Aguas

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To view the 5th cohort's work, visit https://resistrecycleregenerate.tumblr.com/RRR2022.

RRR fellows gathering for a panel discussion during their final showcase in the Wing On Wo storefront. Image: Marion Aguas

Being a part of the RRR and W.O.W. community through my role as a teaching artist has continued to help me feel grounded in Chinatown. Chinatown is in constant flux—it’s hard to keep up with all of the changes going on, both good and bad! Additionally, my own art practice has taken a bit of a back seat since COVID so remaining involved in the hands-on work through RRR has allowed me to continue to feel connected to craft, metaphor, and community-based artmaking. — Emily Chow Bluck, Teaching Artist

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Interns and W.O.W. volunteers pose at the W.O.W. 5 year anni block party on Mosco St. Image: Marion Aguas W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2020 W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2019

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INTERNSHIP ABOUT

W.O.W.’s internship program provides young people space to explore the connection between arts and activism, Asian American identity and history, and placekeeping work in practice. Throughout their internship, youth work closely with the programs team to gain firsthand experience in grassroots cultural organizing and program development. Interns are able to learn from community members, develop a variety of skills, and feel valued and supported as leaders.

2020-2021 Interns Bonnie Chen (she/her) is a recent college graduate. She is passionate about advocacy and policy, and committed to centering issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in her work. Her practice is anchored in the power of communities to embody ethics of care, kinship, and radical love. Joy Yi Lu Freund (they/them) is a Chinese adoptee raised in Brooklyn, New York and recent college graduate. They seek to use their undisciplined multimedia art practice as a means to work through themes of language, empire, gender, race, desire, grief, transformation, and belonging. They are deeply grateful to develop this consciousness through community and treasured relationships and to grow towards nourishing change with the W.O.W. Project. Nisma Saadaoui (she/her) is a Chinese Tunisian American and is interested in the arts, community organizing, and sleeping. She lives a double life as a barista.

2022 Interns Angela Cai (she/her) is a Chinese-American senior studying English and Social & Cultural Analysis at NYU. She is a student organizer fiercely committed to community and mutual care. In her free time, she writes and tries not to kill her plants. Cocoro Kitagawa (she/her) is a Japanese-American junior at Hunter College High School. She is passionate about the arts and hopes to provide solace and foster meaningful conversation among the Asian American community through her internship with W.O.W. In her free time she enjoys making sponge cakes, trying out new restaurants, and napping with her cat. Tiffany Wang (she/her) is a Chinese-American senior studying at LaGuardia High School. Having lived in Chinatown her whole life, seeing the changes in the neighborhood progress rapidly has motivated her to direct positive change, whether big or small. When she’s free, she enjoys seeing friends and photography.

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2020-2021 INTERNSHIP

2020-2021 interns Bonnie, Joy, and Nisma and staff members Mei, Yuki and Kristin during one of their weekly remote program meeting.

Bonnie Chen, Joy Freund, and Nisma Saadauoi joined W.O.W. in the summer of 2020 as our first ever virtual intern cohort. During their time, W.O.W. was an extremely lean team with Mei Lum as Director and Yuki Haraguchi stepping in as Development Director. Bonnie, Joy, and Nisma played a critical role in helping evaluate the evolving nature of W.O.W.'s art and activism work during some of the toughest

times for the country and Chinatown community. In addition to supporting the stewardship of our anniversary program series two years in a row, they also took on responsibilities in program design and development, grant writing, and grassroots fundraising. We were thrilled to later invite Bonnie and Joy to join our inaugural Youth Advisory Board in 2022.

My time interning with the W.O.W. Project was a deeply nourishing and fulfilling experience in learning collaborative event planning and working in a mission-driven setting. W.O.W. is such a welcoming and grounding community and getting to spend time learning and working with the team was an invaluable highlight of my summer and undergrad time. Navigating adaptable and accessible programming during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 uprisings was both challenging but also exciting and rewarding, done in partnership with such a thoughtful and brilliant group. — Joy Freund

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Being in this internship helped me discover everything a community space could be. At W.O.W., I could show up as I was and learn from my fellow activists, while finding space to own what I know and do the work! I could find peers and be a part of not only an AAPI community, but also an artistic community, an intergenerational community. W.O.W. is so many things, it’s hard to encompass! When I first joined W.O.W., I hadn’t explored much and did not realize a community space could exist as all of these things. Chinatown is already a place of rootedness for my family, but less so for me personally, generations down the line. My role at W.O.W. definitely connected me more deeply with the neighborhood; being able to connect with people in W.O.W. helped me better appreciate Chinatown’s history and its existence as a community place. To me, W.O.W. is a community place that feels warm, open, and is a part of Chinatown as a living, breathing organism. It is a place where we can be ourselves, be creative, and make meaning together. — Nisma Saadaoui

Em He, Nisma Saadaoui, Mei Lum, Tomie Arai, Bonnie Chen, Yuki Haraguchi, Denise Zhou, Joy Freund, and Jen Louie during the 5 year anniversary Nourishing Our Roots: Seeding Our Futures program. Image: Marion Aguas

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2022 INTERNSHIP

In 2022, W.O.W. onboarded three youth interns to support our programs, marketing, and communications. Through a mentorship structure, Angela, Cocoro, and Tiffany got hands-on experience co-leading different parts of W.O.W. programming. Cocoro worked alongside the artist residency team supporting workshop facilitation, final showcase planning, and the creation of a zine documenting Joy’s process and reflections on her residency. Angela and Tiffany both worked closely on marketing and communications. Together, they coordinated with W.O.W. staff on archiving and documenting the memorialization of a public altar we created to honor Christina Yuna Lee, maintaining social media and newsletters, as well as supporting the program management of one of our largest anniversary programs, We Are One. This partnership continued even after Cocoro, Tiffany, and Angela’s internships ended, as they all stayed on as summer program coordinators to support with W.O.W.’s sixth year anniversary programming.

2022 interns Angela, Tiffany, and Cocoro with Mei and Denise while setting up the 6th artist residency showcase. Image: Joy Mao

To me, W.O.W. is truly a place that represents “community.” It moves past just invoking a collective “we” and actively tends to the connections both inside and outside the organization. I feel very lucky to have built those connections as an intern—not only with other people, but also between lines of politics, art, and history. — Angela Cai

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I first joined The W.O.W. Project as I saw an opportunity for me to engage more with my community in Chinatown. Little did I know, it opened up a lot more doors as an artist, activist, and long-term tenant of the neighborhood. At W.O.W., I’ve realized there’s nothing that I love more than working with inspiring artists and activists–many of who are Asian American and who have become my personal role models. I’m really thankful for that opportunity as it has jumpstarted my growth as well as solidified my own passions and interest! — Tiffany Wang

Artist-in-residence Joy Mao and Lorraine Lum leading the intern cohort in a sewing workshop where they learned about different fabrics, basic hand stitches, and the mechanics of a sewing machine. Image: Mei Lum

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Excerpts from a booklet made by Angela and Tiffany that incorporates notes, artwork, flowers, fruit, and other offerings from an altar the W.O.W. community came together to create in honor of Christina Yuna Lee.

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Residency team smiling for a celebratory selfie after Joy's final showcase. Image: Marion Aguas W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2019

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ARTIST RESIDENCY ABOUT The Artist Residency is one of W.O.W.’s longest-standing programs. This is a funded 6-month artist residency that includes a stipend, access to W.O.W’s basement studio space, an opening reception, community workshops, and an artist talk. It was created in response to the increasing number of art galleries in the neighborhood. In 2016 alone, over 100 galleries had opened in Chinatown with over 60% of them opening in the last 3 years. After W.O.W. and the Chinatown Art Brigade hosted a panel discussion, “Chinatown: New York’s Newest Gallery Scene?” in the summer of 2016, it was clear that many gallerists and artists who were new to the neighborhood believed that they were bringing culture to Chinatown. Our storefront artist residency program is in direct response to this misconception, creating a 6-month opportunity for emerging Asian diasporic artists to co-create art with community members. Through community workshops, the artist-in-residence is not only able to share their artistic practice, but also learn with and from the intergenerational Chinatown community. The artist's work is put up for public viewing in the window of Wing On Wo., where it becomes part of the daily rhythm of Mott St., and passersby, families, restaurant workers, and community members are able to see art that reflects and is in conversation with histories that are their own.

Thank you to our funders:

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2021 ARTIST RESIDENCY W.O.W.’s fifth artist residency with artist and fashion designer Joy Mao began in honor of Qingming, tomb-sweeping day, centering the theme of grief and grieving. Guided by this theme, Joy developed Woven Narratives: Stitching for Healing, a workshop series which invited participants to embroider a piece of a collaborative quilt, reflecting and honoring the weight of grief felt during 2021. In the spring, Joy worked to develop a deeper understanding of the Chinatown community’s history and legacy of garment-making. The result was her 百家衣 Bai Jia Yi (“Hundred Families Robe”), a quilted robe made from fabric remnants donated by Chinatown’s community of past and present garment workers. Joy’s Bai Jia Yi seeks to connect and preserve important stories from Chinatown’s garment-making history, in order to understand how our shared past can help steward our collective futures. Joy Mao is a Chinese American artist and fashion designer based in Brooklyn, using clothing as a medium for illuminating the bonds between self and society. How do our clothes shape the way we understand ourselves, our relationships with others, and the ways we move through our worlds? How can clothing support and sustain life, rather than exploit it? Her work recognizes and celebrates human effort—the kind of labor that people engage in, both individually and in community with others, to create things with care. This kind of effort comes from a deep place of love, though it is often overlooked and undervalued. Joy designs and constructs intimate spaces—starting with our clothes—to support those who work to build a more just and beautiful world. Lorraine Lum is a 4th generation member of the W.O.W. family, raised in NYC’s Chinatown. She studied art and fashion design and has worked as a pattern maker for decades. Lorraine’s experience includes couture, plus size, and her own small production. She’s thrilled to collaborate with Joy, working first-hand with a designer again.

Above:: Lorraine Lum basting together the layers of the Bai Jia Yi. Image: Mengwen Cao Below: Joy and Lorraine after a day in the studio. Image: Mei Lum W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2021 & 2022

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Joy working with community elders and former International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union organizers, Alice Ip and May Ying Chen. Image: Mengwen Cao

It was so exciting to co-manage Joy’s residency. With the residency being a hybrid program, we were called to think deeply about what it meant to do place-based work at a time when we could not physically gather together. The fabrics used for Joy’s workshops and her cumulating Bai Ja Yi garment were donated by May Ying Chen, collected from Chinatown’s past and present garment workers. This meant that the very materials workshop participants and Joy worked with were rooted in our community, creating space for intergenerational dialogue about our past. We hoped to uplift the deep history and complex relationship of the garment industry in Chinatown. Together, we learned the power of weaving art and storytelling together to honor our past and practice collective care for each other. — Yuki Haraguchi & Bonnie Chen, Artist Residency Program Managers

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Pieces from Stitching for Healing, a workshop series which invited participants to embroider pieces of a collective quilt as a means for reflecting and honoring the weight of grief felt during 2021. Image: Marion Aguas

I attended Joy’s two-part Zoom workshop, Stitching for Healing, in April 2021. I live just outside of the city, and Joy’s workshop really made me feel connected during a time when I was feeling isolated from my family and from any sense of Asian community. I loved learning about Joy’s practice and research and the conversation with May Chen! Having the opportunity to contribute to a larger artwork with others from the workshop was so meaningful—it added a small but significant injection of creativity, intention, and collectivity to some dull and difficult days. — Alex Vargo, Program Participant

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Having someone like Joy who is working currently in the garment industry was very dear to my heart. It’s a big contrast to my experience working with actual factories and factory workers because in the factories, you know, the workers do piece work, moving it up and down a line. It was really interesting to be in the studio and rethink this process of how to produce something that you wear. — May Ying Chen, Bai Jia Yi Collaborator, Former Labor Organizer

Former garment workers and labor organizers Alice Ip and May Ying Chen with Joy Mao holding up the Bai Jia Yi in front of Wing On Wo. Image: Mengwen Cao

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2022 ARTIST RESIDENCY

In its sixth year, the artist residency welcomed back designer Joy Mao. Joy worked with industry veteran Lorraine Lum as artistic partners in the development of the 八宝粥 Ba Bao Zhou collection, a capsule collection celebrating the everyday abundance of our Chinatown. After grounding her inquiry in Chinatown’s rich history of garment work, Joy initiated a creative process which centered intergenerational collaboration and learning with W.O.W.’s fifth RRR cohort. After designing and constructing the garments in the collection, W.O.W.

conducted a photoshoot that celebrated three groups of women with roots in Chinatown’s history of garment labor. Each subject was photographed by June Kim in a location significant to their family’s garment history, and styled by Sueann Leung in customized pieces from the Ba Bao Zhou collection. The sixth artist residency culminated in a showcase at Abrons Arts Center, where a gallery exhibition detailing the process of creating the clothes alongside a public unveiling of the collection was presented with the community.

I began this year’s artist residency at The W.O.W. Project with a series of questions: for a Chinatown community with a deep history and complex relationship with the garment industry, can clothing-making instead be a vessel for community care? How can we make clothes in a way which supports and sustains this community? What would it look like to redesign the design process itself—to prioritize collaboration and learning? Over the past 6 months, I’ve worked with an intergenerational cohort of community members—artists, designers, activists, educators, friends—to develop a capsule collection of clothing inspired by Chinatown’s everyday abundance. We built our process around a series of educational workshops, inviting the RRR cohort and guest speakers from the community. Each workshop coincided with a different stage in the design process, inviting participants to be active collaborators as they cultivated artmaking skills, nurtured intergenerational bonds, and investigated how creative actions can be guided by historical context, personal experience, introspection, and community engagement. Our collaborative process carried our collection in a direction that was more beautiful and meaningful than we could have imagined and I am so grateful for all of the hands that touched and made this residency possible. — Joy Mao, Artist-In-Residence

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Joy and Lorraine planning out a day in the studio in front of their wall of inspiration images, motif stamps, and garment designs.

Joy sketching out motif placements on the garments for the Ba Bao Zhou collection after meeting with stylist Sueann Leung. Images: Echo Chen and Renee Chang

RRR fellows participating in the third workshop of Joy’s residency with guest speaker Mengwen Cao, reflecting on their photography process and what it means to observe the world through a lens.

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Former garment worker and union organizer Alice Ip wearing Ba Bao Zhou with her union pins, photographed in Columbus Park, where she spoke during the historic 1982 Garment Workers' Strike. Image: June Kim

Four generations of the Wing On Wo family—Lorraine, Ava, Mei, and Nancy—wearing Ba Bao Zhou on Doyers Street. Image: June Kim

My mom’s homecoming to her old basement studio these past two years, collaborating with Joy, has been beautiful to witness. The rich, intergenerational, artistic partnership that they have cultivated shines through in their breathtaking collection. Through the process of making, Joy quietly guided and invited my mom to investigate her own journey in the fashion industry in connection with Chinatown’s garment history. I am not sure if my mom really has had the chance to slow down in her career, take a step back, and realize, that she, too has a role in what the future of garment work rooted in Chinatown’s legacy can look like. The photoshoot of four generations of our family embracing each other in the streets of Chinatown donned with Joy and my mom’s collection embody the tight-knit connection between the history and cultural fabric of our community. — Mei Lum, W.O.W. Executive Director

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Being a part of this residency team has given me a newfound appreciation for the unseen labor that goes on in our daily lives, especially in a place such as Chinatown which is so rich in its labor history. Working in the studio and seeing the collection develop after countless hours of brainstorming and sketching has made me realize the purposeful intent behind every garment, which is something that I’ve never really had the space to consider. Those months were filled with so much artmaking, collaboration, and intimate conversations that I’ll probably carry with me for the rest of my life. I’ve never been in such a welcoming environment that prioritizes growth and care and I’m so grateful for Joy and W.O.W. for holding the space for youth like me to be involved with the community. — Cocoro Kitagawa, Artist Residency Intern

Residency Intern Cocoro and Program Manager Denise during an RRR workshop with Joy. Image: Renee Chang and Echo Chen

To read more about making of Ba Bao Zhou, visit https://issuu.com/wowproject. www.wowprojectnyc.org

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SPECIAL PROGRAMS


W.O.W. community member Ray Mak contributing to the mural. Image: Marion Aguas

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LOVE LETTERS TO CHINATOWN STOREFRONT MURAL ABOUT As a memorialization of W.O.W.’s Love Letters to Chinatown project, Wing On Wo’s 2020 storefront gate mural celebrates the foundations of Chinatown, from its early risers and late roamers to its elders and family businesses. Painted with a small cohort of W.O.W. collaborators during the thick of lockdown, the mural stands as a collective love letter to a community that persists and continues to cultivate love and care as resistance. The mural’s imagery incorporates messages written by participants from W.O.W.’s Love Letters to Chinatown and was designed by artist Clae Lu. Thank you to all Love Letters to Chinatown participants and the volunteers who painted the mural: Clara Nguyen, Parker Limon, Tomie Arai, Singha Hon, Ray Mak, Alison Kuo, and Williamson.

Thank you to our funders:

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Throughout the pandemic, Mei and I were thinking a lot about how we might be able to support Chinatown and continue to involve our community in our work despite being socially distanced and in lockdown. This mural project was a beautiful expression of how art and community persist even through the toughest of times. We were excited to have the opportunity to build off of the Love Letters to Chinatown program from last year, uplifting and honoring those who are the backbone of the Chinatown community: elders, service workers, families, and longtime residents through the mural’s imagery. — Clae Lu, Mural Artist

Mural artist Clae Lu, volunteers Alison Kuo and Williamson, and Chinatown mural veteran Tomie Arai plotting out their painting for the night. Image: Marion Aguas W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2021 & 2022

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Original sketches of the mural. Image: Clae Lu

Volunteer Alison Kuo painting the storefront mural. Image: Marion Aguas

Working on this mural under Clae’s guidance gave me the ability to come back to W.O.W. and to Chinatown amidst the pandemic, and to collaborate creatively while still being outdoors and distanced from one another. It was precious to be able to add some beauty and paint these stories to the W.O.W. gate—faces and narratives from the Love Letters to Chinatown project. As the first of two murals I’d get to work on within the next year, the Storefront mural made me think a lot about the experience of making art publicly—talking with curious passersby as they watched us and explaining the project, or seeing them look at it now when the gate is down. It’s a piece of living art, created by multiple hands, and I think that’s really beautiful. — Singha Hon, Assistant Artist

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View of the complete In the Future mural and land acknowledgement. Image: Jess X. Snow

A mockup of the final mural design. Image: Marion Aguas W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2020 W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2019

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IN THE FUTURE MURAL ABOUT In May of 2021, in response to the tragic Atlanta shootings, The W.O.W. Project came together with artist Jess X. Snow and the Smithsonian APA Center to create a mural on Mosco St. that imagines a future where our community transcends white supremacy and anti-Asian violence. Over nine days, The W.O.W. Project community came together—reuniting after being in isolation—to create a portal of safety and embrace for the Asian community. The breathtaking imagery and symbols in the mural were inspired by workshops with our youth and Chinatown elders. The W.O.W. Project hosted an unveiling ceremony a month after the mural’s completion featuring performances, poetry, and music by AAPI and Indigenous artists and activists.

Thank you to our funder:

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This mural is a touchstone, a marker in time to cry out in this moment of injustice, it carves out a period of time when we collectively said, “We will not take it anymore, we will not be victims, we will dare to wish for a safer time, and an end to the violence.” My relationship to Chinatown is deep and complicated and the mural, being very large, and in a prominent location in the center of Chinatown, reminds us all of the many huge murals that used to be all over Chinatown decades ago. It means “we need more murals” and more AAPI representation through art. — Jan Lee, Mural Small Property Owner

Board member Diane Wong adding final touches to the mural on the last day of painting. Image: Marion Aguas

Jess X. Snow kicking off the mural unveiling with a spoken piece on what solidarity means to them. Image: Marion Aguas

This program helped me learn a lot about public art, both in the process of creating it, and how it lives afterwards. It was wonderful to see how everyone approached the mural while painting it, from learning how to use the paint to returning to show their friends. I walk past this mural almost every day and feel incredibly honored whenever I look at it to have been trusted to be a part of it. To me, the mural signifies not only a future of safety, but one that honors the intergenerational community of care and artmaking in Chinatown, an afternoon spent in the sunshine together. — Singha Hon, Assistant Artist

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RRR youth Duan sitting atop a ladder in front of the nearly-finished mural, which features an image of them. Image: Marion Aguas

I was brought in to cultivate an ideation, art, meditation and writing workshop on collectively imagined visions for a future where our community is protected with W.O.W. youth, and a community photography session with community elders and youth, whose portraits made their way into the the creation of a large scale mural on Mosco St. in Chinatown with the words “In The Future Our Asian Community Is Safe.” The youth brought in photos of cultural objects that represented safety and healing for them and together we learned about indigenous Lenape plants. The intention of the mural was to create a women, queer, trans-led intergenerational monument for healing and solidarity—where community members and allies may come together to grieve, heal, host events, and build together toward a future of shared safety and dreaming, where we transcend anti-Asian violence in community. It helped me re-imagine a possibility to connect and find solace and belonging in Manhattan Chinatown, as well as other Chinatowns across borders. As a Chinese immigrant, it inspired me to continue fostering that relationship with other Chinatown communities, and learn more about the interconnected issues they are facing and how I can further support their struggles and uplift their stories. Through this project, I realized that my artwork can help build coalitions across cultures, ethnicities, and political backgrounds, and I hope to continue on that path. — Jess X. Snow, Lead Artist

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My most memorable moment of participating in the mural project was speaking at the dedication ceremony. As a community artist, I was invited to speak briefly about my history of painting murals on the Lower East Side. In 1974, I painted my first community mural on the corner of East Broadway and Rutgers Street with a team of young Black, Latinx, and Asian women from the Rutgers Housing Projects. The Wall of Respect for Women was considered to be the first women’s mural in NYC that was created by women for women. Connecting that feminist history to a mural created by women, queer, trans and gender non-conforming community almost 50 years later was deeply moving. I am so grateful to W.O.W. for giving me the space to chart a timeline between my past and a new generation of young muralists and activists, and for recognizing the importance of these historic connections. In the spring of 2021, many of us were emerging from the pandemic and a year of lock-down and isolation, finding ourselves at the intersection of a global health crisis, a movement for social justice and Black Lives and a surge of anti-Asian violence directed at the most vulnerable members of our communities. Keeping our loved ones safe was on all our minds. At a time when we most needed messages of encouragement, In the Future Our Community is Safe helped us imagine what our futures could look like—if we took responsibility for keeping the things we cherish and love safe. Projects like this mural help us collectively reclaim our stories, create new narratives about our lives, and acknowledge and honor the original, indigenous stewards of the land we are standing on. We all know that more policing is not the answer. Our communities will be safe in the future by sharing our resources and protecting the spaces in our neighborhoods that are threatened by displacement. Building systems of care and dismantling systems that cause harm are absolutely vital to our survival. Projects like this mural help us collectively reclaim our stories, create new narratives about our lives, and acknowledge and honor the original, indigenous stewards of the land we are standing on. These programs show us how to build partnerships with small business owners, small landlords and local residents that want to invest in the future of their neighborhoods. Returning public spaces to the public, and restoring them as spaces of learning and ownership—like this mural has done—would be one of many ways that communities can push back against the increasing privatization of our parks, our plazas, and city streets. — Tomie Arai, Public Artist & Activist

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Mural collaborators Diane Wong, Kaitlyn Lee, Tomie Arai, Denise Zhou, Ken Zhang, Brandon E., Jess X. Snow, and Jia Sung.

The Chinatown community celebrating the mural unveiling on Mosco St. in the summer of 2021. Images: Marion Aguas

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Bridging Futures cohort member holding up Letters to Our Younger Selves. Image: Marion Aguas W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2020 W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2019

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BRIDGING FUTURES ABOUT In its inaugural year, this intergenerational archiving project connected Chinatown movement elders with a youth cohort to draw lessons from the Civil Rights era. The program began by digitizing The W.O.W. Project’s near-complete archive of the original Bridge Magazine, which was published by the Chinatownbased Basement Workshop in the 1960s-70s. Through community discussions and workshops engaging Bridge issues, the cohort explored international solidarity and decolonial futures for their Asian American activism. Workshop themes included Asian queer feminisms, histories of solidarity in Asian American movements, and policing and transformative justice with guest speakers Marilyn Chin, Asian American Feminist Collective, Tamara K. Nopper, Mark Tseng Putterman, and many others. The program culminated in Letters to Our Younger Selves, a publication that responded to the archive and connected the past, present, and future temporalities of Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Thank you to our funders:

Bridging Futures was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

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BRIDGING FUTURES TEAM

Mei Lum (she/her) Program Manager

Mei Lum is the fifthgeneration store owner of Wing On Wo, the oldest store in Manhattan’s Chinatown. In 2016, she founded the W.O.W. Project out of her vision that the future of Chinatown can center young women and nonbinary youth to build intergerational bridges of understanding, collective empowerment, and solidarity across Asian American communities and beyond.

Kristin Chang (she/her) Program Manager

Kristin Chang joined The W.O.W. Project in 2017 as a Resist Recycle Regenerate fellow and has since been a part of program management and RRR leadership. She is a writer currently based in San Jose, California. She is interested in archives, Asian American literary history, and the intersection of art and activism.

What we have appreciated the most about these conversations and questions is that we don’t necessarily land on an answer: rather, we are allowed to sit with the complexity and impossibility of our questions and concerns. In some ways, this cohort has taught us that language, community, and identity aren’t stable or fixed. And while this can often feel problematic, as if every decision we make might be a mistake, it’s also freeing. If we accept the inherent contradictions, instabilities, failures, and successes of community and identity, what might be possible? What might be new? What could change? We are buoyed by the idea of infinite possibility. We hope that this genre-blurring, multifaceted publication can make room for more possibilities, more ways of thinking and questioning and being. — Kristin Chang

Singha Hon (she/her) Designer & Facilitator

Singha Hon joined The W.O.W. Project in 2019 as the 4th Storefront Artistin-Residence and has since been involved through workshops and creating graphics. She is an illustrator and designer based in New York City. She is interested in storytelling, Asian American mythology and folklore, activism, and using creative mediums to process collective and personal grief, and provide a space for healing.

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Noa Kasman (she/her) Consulting Archivist

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Noa Kasman joined The W.O.W. Project in 2021 as a consulting archivist for the Bridging Futures project. She currently works in New York City on contract archive projects for Tusk Holdings. She is passionate about preservation as a core mission of archiving and the creative ways in which the past can be activated through archival materials to connect current and past generations.

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BRIDGING FUTURES COHORT

Celia Bùi Lê (she/her) is a senior at Columbia University studying East Asian Studies and Linguistics as well as the Vietnamese Translator for The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project. Currently, she is exploring the connection between Vietnamese French colonial art and the Surrealist movement through multimedia. Her visual essay, “Race, Nation, and Identity: A Look At Ethnic Minorities and the Nation-State,” has just been published in The Weatherhead East Asian Institute’s 2021 issue of The Reed. In Celia’s free time, she enjoys making various types of pandan cakes. She is excited to join the Bridging Futures cohort to look at art through an intersectional and decolonial lens.

Hua Xi (they/them) is a writer and artist. Their poems have been published in The Nation, Electric Lit and Boston Review. They are so excited to join the Bridging Futures cohort to connect with elders about how to be an activist today including all its complicated questions.

www.wowprojectnyc.org

Lynn Huynh (she/her) is a writer exploring food, race, and design in the city, particularly paying attention to how these conditions shape the Asian American community. Her scholarship, creative practice, and aspirations are grounded in the idea that we must (and can) radically reimagine and rebuild a world made for us. She’s looking forward to the acts of knowledge-building and preserving AsianAmerican activist histories while working with Chinatown elders.

helen yang (she/her), originally orbiting between china and the southern united states, is putting roots down in manhattan as she fully leans into her adult life. she is dedicated to understanding history, labor organizing, and exploring the ways we can collectively care—for each other and ourselves—while living under capitalism. she spends her free time reading, skating, tending to her plants, playing super smash bros, making zines, and is always on the search for the best jasmine tea. she is over the moon to join the inaugural BF cohort so she can build camaraderie, create, and cultivate growth for her organizing and her learning.

Ying Situ (she/her) is an educator and organizer based in Queens. She loves writing, going on long walks, and getting really close to bodies of water. You can usually find her in Chinatown or Flushing, two places she holds close to her heart. Ying is most excited to join the Bridging Futures cohort because she is looking forward to growing deep community relationships and revisiting the bridge we’re walking on as Asian Americans to a future free of prison bars, where all the people we love are thriving!

Kim Savarino 譚金美 (she/ her) is a mixed race ChineseItalian-American performer and choreographer. She has created performance works in spaces ranging from traditional stages to concrete backlots, and (once) an old bathroom in a former mental hospital. Her work weaves together folklore and movement, and has received support from MANCC’s Forward Dialogues lab, the EstroGenius Festival, and the WV Dance Festival. Kim studied dance at Florida State University and the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, and is in training at the Terry Knickerbocker acting studio. She grew up in Los Angeles and West Virginia.

The cohort posing with a collective altar they made in response to a prompt of how they might create a space to honor their younger selves. Image: Mei Lum

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To view the full Bridging Futures publication, visit https://issuu.com/wowproject.

A community member reading Letters to Our Younger Selves at the anniversary showcase. Image: Marion Aguas

A collage of excerpts of Bridge Magazine on recycled paper made by RRR. Image: Helen Yang

I’ve learned so much about Asian American history and lineage in recent years, but it was never part of my formal education—a tiny blip about the Chinese railroad workers is about as far as I got with the U.S. education system. It was almost immobilizing to see all of this material from an entire generation of Asian artists and activists that came before me. It’s one thing to know, in theory, that you come from a lineage, and another thing entirely to hold that lineage in your hands, speak to those people in person, listen to their stories, and marinate in the messiness and complication of their artmaking and political stances. — Kim Savarino, Bridging Futures Member

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Getting to see the old archival issues of Bridge Magazine and spend time with them was really really cool! The magazine still felt so relevant and the writing and topics they focused on, all of it felt like a publication my friends and I would want to read today. I think that’s the sort of thing that makes you really want to be making publications and little zines and other stuff to document our lives today. The cohort really nurtured my relationship to Chinatown. I didn’t grow up going to Chinatown very often, even though my family is Chinese, and I don’t know that I previously felt a significant personal connection to the area, so it was meaningful to get to spend time with other Asian Americans and learn about all the ways they’ve been connected to the space. I think it was cool to get to interact with the archive in a way by making our own publication, and by talking with past creators of the magazine. It made the archive come alive. — Hua Xi, Bridging Futures Member

Above: A map depicting the Chinatown remembered by Bridge, Basement, and Yellow Pearl elders Tomie Arai, Lillian Ling, and Merle Motooka Okada. Illustration: Singha Hon Left: The cohort found the root of their origins threaded along common yet distinct geographies. This postcard series is a memorialization of how place shapes both identity and community. Image: Lynn Huynh and Helen Yang

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n hives magined blic space?

Bridge elders sharing their stories and experience as artists and activists in a storytelling circle in Columbus Park. Image: Marion Aguas

One of my most memorable moments was partaking in the interview with Tomie Arai (which we put into the publication) and learning about her experience as an artist for Bridge Magazine as well as a muralist in Chinatown. After the interview, we walked through Chinatown and passed the spot of one of her former murals. I feel deeply grateful for the ability to connect with her and hear about her path as an artist. As I started designing the publication, I was really inspired by the art direction of the original Bridge issues. As I studied the archive, I wanted to honor that aesthetic alongside the content and creations of our cohort which went into the publication. This overall experience working with the larger archive has shown me the power of finding our roots and forging connections with the people working in the Chinatown community who came before us. — Singha Hon, Letters to Our Younger Selves Designer

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I wouldn’t have expected it then, but Bridge has actually become this incredible archival project. A lot of people were students— we were still trying to figure out what we were going to do with our lives. In terms of learning from the past, Bridge documented what was happening before we forgot, or before it was erased. It was action research. Or research in action. It was proof that we were a movement. Tomie Arai Bridge Elder and Bridging Futures Guest Speaker

Collage and illustration of Bridge magazine covers from Letters to Our Younger Selves. Image: Singha Hon www.wowprojectnyc.org

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Community members smile with their signs and wooden kites after bringing Tomie's vessel imagery to life by marching and parading through the neighborhood. Image: Marion Aguas


MET CIVIC PRACTICE PARTNERSHIP RESIDENCY ABOUT The Met Civic Practice Partnership is a collaborative residency program for artists who are socially minded in their practice to implement creative projects in their own neighborhoods across New York City. Inspired by the Met’s expansive collection, Mei and The W.O.W. Project, in collaboration with artists Tomie Arai and Heidi Lau, focused on the theme of vessels—exploring how they might be sites of learning, connection, celebration, and storytelling for the Chinatown community. This residency spanned the years of the toughest and darkest times of the pandemic. Heidi and Tomie’s activations brought reflection, containers for our grief and anger, and moments of togetherness during the times we needed it the most.

Thank you to our funder:

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CELEBRATING RECIPROCITY: CARE AND COLLECTIVE WISHING In early 2021, W.O.W. worked collaboratively with artist Heidi Lau to create a ceramic wishing well to open the Year of the Metal Ox. Drawing from vessels in the Met collection as inspiration, The W.O.W. Project facilitated a mobile, participatory celebration of reciprocity where community members were invited to reflect upon the year, the cargo that we have accumulated and hold close as a collective, and the aspirations that we look to carry into the future together. Heidi Lau’s enchanting ceramic sculptured work was activated as a wishing well where community members whispered wishes and hung good luck charms as a way to close out Lunar New Year celebrations. As Heidi's ceramic sculpture rolled through the neighborhood and lit up neighbors' eyes with wonder and awe, the activation brought life and pause to the very quiet streets of the neighborhood during the thick of pandemic.

A Chinatown elder whispers a wish to Heidi's ceramic wishing well.

Heidi Lau next to her ceramic wishing well. Heidi Lau was born in 1987 and grew up in Macau, China, and currently lives and works in New York City. Lau received her BFA from New York University in 2008, where she primarily studied printmaking and drawing. Dissatisfied with these mediums, the artist taught herself to make ceramics, creating works that evoke miniature architectures, funerary vessels, and creatures drawn from Taoist mythology. Building her works by hand, Lau channels and fuses her interests and influences into otherworldly objects that perforate the boundaries between the human and the spiritual. Images: Mengwen Cao

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Heidi working on the ceramic vessel at Greenwich House Pottery.

A community member prays at the wishing well on Mott St.

Members of the community leaving written and whispered wishes at the wishing well. Images: Mengwen Cao

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NOURISHING OUR ROOTS: SEEDING OUR RITUALS In the spring and summer of 2021, artist and activist Tomie Arai worked with ceramicist Maggie Boyd to create ritual ceramic vessels adorned with imagery of a parade of Asian women, queer, and trans people, depicting a world where we are celebrated. Nourishing Our Roots: Seeding Our Rituals activated these vessels and invited the Chinatown community and greater public to create our own parade and celebrate five years of W.O.W. The W.O.W. Project paraded with over 30 community members in celebration of the completion of this work and the femme, queer, trans empowerment that nourishes our communities. Healers Emily Siy and Jessie Ngok also joined to lead attendees through somatic practices that collectively grounded us in community.

Above Left: A parade of community members marching by Columbus Park with handpainted wooden kites. Above Right: Tomie’s ritual ceramic vessels with hanging community wishes. Right: Tomie with community members during the Nourishing Our Roots program. Tomie Arai is public artist who lives and works in NYC. She has designed both temporary and permanent public works of art for Creative Time, the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program, the NYC PerCent for Art Program, the Cambridge Arts Council, the MTA Arts for Transit Program, the New York City Board of Education and the San Francisco Arts Commission. In 2015, she co-founded the cultural collective, The Chinatown Art Brigade with artists Betty Yu and ManSee Kong. Images: Marion Aguas

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With all the weight of all the world events that occurred this past year, it just felt like, if there was one thing I wanted to do, it was to make something and bring it into the world and really think how to celebrate being together. And there is a point in which you realize it. This is a moment that we have to think about how we can make the world a better place, to really think forward. And so this idea of celebration and imagining a new world of not going back, but forward. I think all of those different ideas percolated and then Mei gave me this opportunity to create a vessel. Mei shared some images from the Met’s collection of ceramics and pottery. I have always been inspired by the Greek vases and vessels that are displayed there and this idea of celebrating heroes and this sort of procession and display of strength that is so much a part of the motifs of the Greek vases. I tried to combine that with the unique designs that I saw at Wing On Wo. In terms of what I searched for, as far as inspiration goes, it was a combination of looking at the actual images of the ceramics plates and bowls that Mei shared with me and going back and trying to think about how to create a vision of community that is culturally accurate. I think that parades as a form of protest are really a way of sharing what we aspire to in a public way. It’s a public display of affection and anger and all of these things that we care about. — Tomie Arai, Commissioned Artist

Tomie looking through the Met archive and planning out the design of the ceramic vessels.

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Tags of community dreams and hopes hanging from the wishing tree. Image: Marion Aguas

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METFEST

The fifth RRR cohort joins the Butterfly Lovers performers for a joyous finale outside of the Met. Image: Mary Kang

In October 2021, W.O.W. and a cohort of artistic partners put together a breathtaking performance reinterpreting the Chinese legend, Butterfly Lovers, centering queer Asian diasporic love. This project included performers The Illustrious Pearl, Vincent Chong, Clae Lu, Monica Chen, and OHYUNG, with support by costume designer Sueann Leung, and technical design team Joy Mao and Lorraine Lum. Youth from our art and activism program, Resist Recycle Regenerate donned their signature red jumpsuits and joined onstage with communitycreated signage. The performance was part of MetFest, the Met's first block party celebrating the transformative power of the arts. Butterfly Lovers brought together past W.O.W. collaborators, artistsin-residence, staff, and community members. By honoring everyone’s individual artistic practice, they co-created a performance that pushed the bounds of what queer Asian diasporic futurities can look like. W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2021 & 2022

We were a handful of weeks into RRR programming when MetFest happened, and I think the most memorable part of the whole experience was looking at the fellows and remembering why this program is so special and so important for Asian American youth and the queer Asian diaspora! It was really exciting to celebrate in a place that is universally respected and recognized. — Kaitlyn Lee, RRR Leader

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I was introduced to Butterfly Lovers by my elders and have always dreamed of performing to the song. Choreographing it for MetFest reconnected me, now as a queer adult, to memories of them. The experience helped me reignite my artistic spirit! I had not danced onstage for six years prior and am extremely grateful to the W.O.W. community for trusting in me and allowing me to bring my fullest queer self to Chinatown in community with so many amazing queer Asian collaborators. It felt freeing to bring our unbridled queer Butterfly Lovers joy into a space historically inhospitable to us. Although it was my first time meeting many of the collaborators, as our laughter echoed through the Met cafeteria, I immediately felt so connected to them and have stayed friends with all since the performance. — Monica Chen, Performer

Butterfly Lovers artistic collaborators: Monica Chen, OHYUNG, The Illustrious Pearl, Clae Lu, and Vincent Chong. Image: Mary Kang

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Good Field Trading Co. owners celebrate the launch of From Chinatown With Love in front of their storefront. Image: Marion Aguas W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2019 2020

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FROM CHINATOWN, WITH LOVE ABOUT From Chinatown, With Love (FCWL) celebrates the integral role multigenerational businesses have in our neighborhood economically, culturally, and creatively. By building this project from a neighborhood tradition—the distribution of Lunar New Year calendars—From Chinatown, With Love truly embodies community reciprocity through art, relationship-building, and mutual aid. Some of the best moments of this project have been the various meetings we have had with business owners, learning more about their histories, and why they have decided to stay in Chinatown. In partnership with Abrons Arts Center, each participating business is offered 100+ copies of a 12-month calendar, with each month featuring the stories and histories of a participating business. The W.O.W. Project not only facilitates the design and printing of the calendar at no cost, but also supports with marketing and communications, encouraging patrons to spend $20 or more at participating businesses to receive a copy of the limited edition calendar. Oftentimes, for select participating businesses, this is the first time they have used social media and external communications to promote their business. On the day of the calendar promotion, The W.O.W. Project team, alongside a team of lion dancers led by W.O.W. youth, parade around the neighborhood blessing each business with prosperity and good luck for the new year. The program concludes with a finale performance in front of the 26 Mott St. storefront with our confetti paper lion head celebrating the beginning of another abundant year for W.O.W. Project’s cultural organizing work. The project culminates with a free artmaking workshop hosted at Abrons Arts Center where the artists lead participants through activities that make the calendar art accessible to all ages.

Thank you to our partner:

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2021 FROM CHINATOWN, WITH LOVE Artists & collaborators for this calendar include:

To celebrate the Year of the Metal Ox, The W.O.W. Project, Abrons Arts Center, and Welcome to Chinatown came together to present a 12-month photo calendar featuring living memories through different vignettes that integrated products from 20 Chinatown businesses, photographed by Mischelle Moy. Patrons who spent $20 or more at participating businesses received a copy of the calendar. We printed 1,000 calendars at no cost to the participating businesses, raising over $15,000 in support of these long time multigenerational businesses: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Mischelle Moy (she/her), Photographer. Mischelle is a New York City-based digital artist, commercial and editorial product photographer, content creator, prop stylist, and production designer. Ali Rosas-Salas (she/her), Abrons Organizational Collaborator. Abrons Arts Center is a home for contemporary interdisciplinary arts in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood. Through performances, exhibitions, education programs, and residencies, Abrons mobilizes communities with the transformative power of art.

Bangkok Center Grocery [104 Mosco St.] Bok Lei Trading [63 Mott St.] Go Believe Bakery [239 Grand St.] Golden Unicorn [18 E Broadway] Grand Century Market Inc. [281 Grand St.] Grand Tea Imports [298 Grand St.] Hop Lee [16 Mott St.] Jungs Dried Beef [58 Mulberry St.] Kelly Hair Salon [19 Pell St.] KK Discount [78 Mulberry St.] Lucky King Bakery [280 Grand St.] Manhattan Florist [87B Bayard St.] Mott Optical [52 Mott St.] New York Bo Ky [94 Baxter St.] Oriental Culture Enterprises Co. Inc. (Eastern Bookstore) [13-17 Elizabeth St.] Po Wing Hong [49 Elizabeth St.] Ting’s [17 Pell St.] Wing On Wo. & Co. [26 Mott St.]

GP Print Services Inc, Calendar Printer

Image of the final printed calendar 12-month calendar. Image: Sean Chee

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Mei and Mischelle dropping off Hop Lee's calendar image poster to owner, Johnny Moy. Image: Sean Chee

The project was very ambitious for its time: when Chinatown was still deserted and it was our second lockdown and indoor dining had been closed again. I believe it would have been quite difficult for anyone else to execute had it not been for Mei and both our hustle to coordinate, and our drive to bring awareness as well as impact to our community and beloved small businesses. That being said, my biggest takeaway is the relationships formed with these mom-and-pop shops. Listening to them be vulnerable about their situation then and compare it to how it was before brought an emotional element to this project that I tried to translate in the photos created. My goal with the photographs was to recreate and reminisce in fond memories with the items, products, and food that everyone (and me personally) would pick up or enjoy whilst in Chinatown, and show that they are all still there and need us. I love that every single aspect of creating this calendar was also local to the area. I feel a strengthened bond with the neighborhood and its community after photographing this project. From being able to speak and connect with the owners, founders, and members of the community, I now have a deeper appreciation for the neighborhood that I grew up in. — Mischelle Moy

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Ali Rosas-Salas and Mei Lum distributing calendars in the midst of quarantine. Image: Sean Chee

Mischelle walking through the snow while distributing calendars to participating businesses. Image: Sean Chee

Alice Liu at Grand Tea Imports flipping through the calendar. Image: Sean Chee

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KK Discount Owner Ken and Mischelle admiring the flyer of shop trinkets. Image: Sean Chee

A few of the business vignettes photographed by Mischelle Moy. www.wowprojectnyc.org

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2022 FROM CHINATOWN, WITH LOVE Artists & collaborators for this calendar include:

The W.O.W. Project and Abrons Art Center came together to celebrate the Year of the Water Tiger with the second edition of From Chinatown, With Love. Illustrated by Sarula Bao, Singha Hon, and Laura Lee, the 12-month risograph printed calendar featured bilingual comics depicting the daily rhythm of 12 beloved Chinatown businesses. We printed 500 calendars at no cost to the participating businesses, raising over $10,000 in support of these long time multigenerational businesses: • • • • • • • • • • • •

Sarula Bao (she/her), Artist. Sarula is a queer Chinese-American illustrator and graphic novelist based in Brooklyn. She graduated from RISD in 2016, published a graphic novel in 2017 and has since worked as a freelance illustrator. Her personal work explores aspects of Chinese culture, aesthetics, and narrative through a second generation American experience. Singha Hon (she/her), Artist. Singha joined W.O.W. in 2019 as the 4th Storefront Artist-in-Residence and has since been involved through workshops and creating graphics. She is an illustrator and designer based in New York City. She is interested in storytelling, Asian American mythology and folklore, activism, and using creative mediums to process collective and personal grief, and provide a space for healing.

B-Unit Beauty [13 Elizabeth St.] Banh Mi Co Ut [83 Elizabeth St.] Dashop Corp [8 Elizabeth St.] Eliz Digital [77 Elizabeth St.] G&J Florist [91 Elizabeth St.] Good Field Trading Co. [74 Mott St.] Ho Wan Bake Shoppe [146 Hester St. A] Kam Wo Herbal Pharmacy [211 Grand St.] Malaysia Beef Jerky [95A Elizabeth St.] New Bo Bo Bicycle [96 Elizabeth St.] Sanrio Bandai [13 Elizabeth St.] Snack Bar [13 Elizabeth St.]

Laura Lee (she/her), Artist. Laura is a motion graphics artist who started illustrating and painting from a young age. Growing up in New York City’s Chinatown, she loved the diversity, culture, and strong sense of community. Laura’s passion for cartoons, anime, comics and video games led her on an artistic journey from attending NY’s ‘fame school’ LaGuardia H.S. to graduating SVA from the Computer Art department, where she merged her love for technology, art and animation. As an animator, Laura loves telling stories visually, and with lots of color!

This rendition of FCWL also included a public artistled workshop for people of all ages hosted at Abrons Arts Center as well as a celebratory procession, where W.O.W’s youth-led lion dance group blessed the participating businesses for the year of the tiger.

Ali Rosas-Salas (she/her), Abrons Organizational Collaborator Lucky Risograph, Calendar Printer

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Eliz Digital owner Chanika looking through the final calendar bilingual comic made honoring their store's daily rhythm. Image: Marion Aguas

Art is a powerful vehicle to bring visibility to our business. A lot of people learned about Eliz Digital through our participation in the From Chinatown, With Love project. We’re so grateful.” — Chanika, Eliz Digital

G&J Florist owners and operators Jennifer and Gary posing with their cat and their calendar illustration by Singha Hon. Image: Marion Aguas www.wowprojectnyc.org

Mei and Ho Won Bakery owner Warren trading calendars for baked goods. Image: Marion Aguas

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Though I frequent a fair amount of businesses in Chinatown, I don’t really ever talk to the shop owners or staff about topics beyond daily small talk, so it really helped me feel more deeply connected to them—beyond a shared cultural heritage and connection as immigrants or as the child of an immigrant. I think that often that connection is implicit because many of the residents of the neighborhood share similar experiences to my family, who also first immigrated to NYC. But it’s very different from actually hearing their history, stories and getting to know them as people. In particular, I really connected to the owner of Bobo Bicycle, who ran her shop according to really admirable values that I share as well, and that I would like to work towards in my own life. This project really strengthened the relationship I have with the neighborhood and deepened my understanding. — Sarula Bao, Artist

Lion dancers bless Banh Mi Co Ut on Elizabeth St. during a procession celebrating the participating FCWL business owners through lion dance. Image: Marion Aguas W.O.W. Project Annual Report Program Year 2021 & 2022

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Being able to collaborate with The W.O.W. Project creatively and strategically has taught me so much as an arts worker about the kind of collaboration I value, how resources can be shared institutionally, and how we can utilize arts and culture as a specific service as a way to accomodate our local economy, artists, and community members. Ali Rosas-Salas Organizational Collaborator

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NOURISHING OUR ROOTS: 5 YEAR ANNIVERSARY Retelling Our Stories: Resist Recycle Regenerate Final Showcase The fourth year of RRR culminated in a virtual celebration, where fellows presented their end-of-year collaborative projects. By weaving together their collective familial stories and historical narratives, these projects examined themes of intergenerational storytelling and traditional folklore and mythology. During the showcase, the fellows shared their experiences within the program in reclaiming their personal identities and their exploration of emotional healing through building collective power.

Unveiling Our Future: In the Future Mural Unveiling The W.O.W. Project hosted an unveiling ceremony for In The Future Our Asian Community is Safe, a mural in the heart of Chinatown by Jess X. Snow, that imagines a future where we transcend white supremacy and antiAsian violence. Through performances by New York-based poets, musicians, and healers, the ceremony grounded the mural’s intention of creating a local healing space for the AAPI community.

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2021

Seeding Our Rituals: Tomie Arai Collaboration Unveiling Artist and activist Tomie Arai, unveiled her collaboration with The W.O.W. Project as part of the Met Museum Civic Practice Partnership Residency. Tomie created ritual ceramic vessels adorned with imagery of a parade of Asian women, queer, and trans people depicting a world in which they are celebrated. Nourishing Our Roots: Seeding Rituals, activated these vessels and invited the Chinatown community and greater public to create their own parade, celebrating the women, queer, and trans-led space The W.O.W. Project has cultivated and nourished in its 5 years.

Woven Narratives: 5th Storefront Residency Opening The W.O.W. Project’s 5th artist-in-residence Joy Mao, invited the community to an intimate gathering around her 百家衣 Bai Jia Yi (“Hundred Families Robe”)—a quilted robe made from fabric remnants donated by Chinatown’s community of past and present garment workers. Joy’s Bai Jia Yi sought to connect and preserve important stories from Chinatown’s garment-making history, in order to understand how our shared past can help steward our collective futures.

Celebrating Our Growth: 5 Year Anniversary Block Party The W.O.W. Project hosted a lively outdoor block party with sidewalk chalk, music, and the reading of Love Letters to Chinatown against the backdrop of our In the Future Mural. DJ Yiu Yiu, OHYUNG, and Yasmin Majeed played bops as the community joyously danced and celebrated the 5 year anniversary of The W.O.W. Project.

Illustrations by Monica Ramos

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The fourth cohort of RRR fellows present their final projects over Zoom.

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RRR alum and poet, Serena Yang, reads a poem. Image: Marion Aguas

Participating artists and mural collaborators: Regan De Loggans, Treya Lam, Jenevieve Ting, Thanu Yakupitiyage, River Dandelion, Tomie Arai, Serena Yang, Mei Lum, Adriel Luis, Jess X. Snow, and Hollis. Image: Marion Aguas

Muralist Jess X. Snow and transformative poet River Ying Dandelion embracing each other after the unveiling. Image: Marion Aguas

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A community member hanging a wish for their community on the ceramic vessel. Image: Marion Aguas

Mei, Tomie, and Maggie Boyd standing in front of the finished ceramic vessel. Image: Marion Aguas

W.O.W. Project community members parading through the streets of Chinatown as part of Seeding Our Rituals. Image: Marion Aguas

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Healer Jessie Ngok guiding particpants through an embodied somatic exercise. Image: Marion Aguas

Acupuncturist and healer Emily Siy leading participants through a breathwork exercise. Image: Marion Aguas

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Joy Mao presenting her Bai Jia Yi at the Wing On Wo storefront, inviting folks to reflect on the lineage of garment workers in Chinatown and understand how our shared past can steward our collective future. Image: Marion Aguas

Participants using pins to mark places of significance on the patchwork map of Chinatown. Image: Marion Aguas

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Community members with their patchwork hats made from Chinatown garment factory fabric remnants. Image: Marion Aguas

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The community celebrating on Mosco Street during the 5 year anniversary block party. Image: Marion Aguas

Folks dancing to the musical selections of DJ YiuYiu, Yasmin Adele Majeed, and OHYUNG. Image: Marion Aguas

The internship team celebrating their year of hard work at the anniversary block party. Image: Marion Aguas

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BUILT TO BLOOM: 6 YEAR ANNIVERSARY Built to Fly: Resist Recycle Regenerate Resist Recycle Regenerate’s youth fellows invited friends, family, and Chinatown community members to come together and celebrate a year of artmaking, leadership, and engagement with community leaders and artists. Fellows presented their individual projects as well as a collective kite project designed, built, and flown under the guidance of teaching artist Emily Chow Bluck.

The People’s Projection: Celebrating Chinatown’s Labor History Chinatown Art Brigade, The W.O.W. Project, and the Illuminator came together for a night of projections celebrating Chinatown’s labor history through slogans, animation, and moving image. We invited attendees to activate the People’s Pad and project their own writing on the wall as they reflect on questions regarding our neighborhood’s future and its relationship to labor. The projection wall was located next to two former unionized garment factories—148 Lafayette and 150 Lafayette—to honor and activate the foundations of Chinatown’s garment laborers. With support from Citizens Committee for New York City and Asian Women Giving Circle

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2022

We Are One: 40th Anniversary of the 1982 Garment Workers Strike The W.O.W. Project, Workers United, APALA, Labor Arts, and Central Labor Council came together to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the historic 1982 Garment Workers Strike. The event included a host of interactive activities, speakers, dance, poetry, and song performances in Columbus Park, where 20,000 women workers once marched to demand better working conditions. This program honored both the landmark victory for Chinatown workers’ rights and the neighborhood’s continued legacy of women and queer-led people power. With support from Asian Women Giving Circle

Le‫﬙‬ers to Our Younger Selves: Bridging Futures Publication Launch Bridging Futures presented Letters to Our Younger Selves, a publication that interfaced the now defunct Bridge Magazine with Chinatown’s creative futurities. The cohort activated the archive through a collaging activity, encouraging young Asian American artists and writers to continue the dialogue of art, protest, and care. A storytelling circle was led by community elders of Bridge Magazine, making space for insightful conversation and reflection as the community learned to root ourselves in our histories.

八宝粥 Ba Bao Zhou: Artist Residency Showcase W.O.W.’s 6th Artist-in-Residence Joy Mao presented her 2nd year residency project, a capsule collection of easy-to-wear clothing inspired by the everyday abundance of Chinatown. Created in collaboration with Wing On Wo’s Lorraine Lum and W.O.W.’s Resist Recycle Regenerate youth fellows, the project engaged participants in a design process centered around a series of craft-making workshops and community interactions. At this celebratory showcase, the W.O.W. team sported the collection for an intimate performance and gave an immersive glimpse into the creative process.

joy mao x The W.O.W. Project

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RRR leaders Kaitlyn and Serena adjusting their collective kite project before flying it in Columbus Park. Image: Marion Aguas

A program participant interacting with RRR fellow Vivian's final project. Image: Marion Aguas

RRR’s community guidelines created by the fellows, hanging at the final showcase. Image: Marion Aguas

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The RRR showcase is often a singularly memorable moment in each year’s iteration of RRR. The fellows learn and grow so much through the program, often in quiet ways that as the teaching artist I don’t always realize until they crystallize their experience during the showcase. I’m always honored to be able to witness and be a part of their development. I can’t think of another program or organization that exemplifies as strong values about people, politics, community, culture, and place and that align so well with my own. To me, W.O.W. is a political and creative home. — Emily Chow Bluck, Teaching Artist

The fifth RRR cohort poses with their kite at the end of their final showcase. Image: Marion Aguas

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The People’s Projection was a wonderful way to engage and struggle with questions of labor solidarity and history. W.O.W. activated the buildings and sidewalks near historic garment factories with projection, speech, art, and street interaction. Seeing folks’ drawings and slogans interspersed with archival photos and video showed me the countless ways that we continue to struggle together and against the state. — Angela Cai, Intern & Program Coordinator

Left: The W.O.W. Project, Chinatown Art Bridgade, and The Illuminator. Right: A projection of Chinatown Art Brigade members, Emily Chow Bluck and KahEan Chang, holding up holding up a “We Are One” sign in English and Chinese. Images: Marion Aguas

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Attendees and passersby leaving messages for the community through the People’s Pad. Image: Marion Aguas

The People’s Projection happened the same day Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court. After the decision was announced, the energy in New York felt tense and heavy, it was raining, and crowds of people in Manhattan were already gathering in protest. I remember feeling grateful that I had the W.O.W. community to be with that night. Amidst images and videos detailing Chinatown labor history, community members activated the People’s Pad and wrote powerful messages about abortion access, trans healthcare, workers’ rights, community safety, learning through intergenerational relationships, and the practice of hope. Looking back, I’m reminded of how intertwined our fights are and how significant it was to have brought this space to life on a public sidewalk with The Illuminator and Chinatown Art Brigade, two grassroots groups I deeply admire. — Denise Zhou, Program Manager

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Labor organizers, W.O.W. team members, and young attendees gathering for a photo. Image: Tristan Hsu

I am very, very appreciative of the interest, enthusiasm, creativity and energy that the W.O.W. team brought to the activities, especially the event in Columbus Park. My fondest memory was seeing the diverse range of intergenerational participants celebrating the history of the garment workers—seniors, today’s workers and youth in Columbus Park. Everyone was excited and happy to be there, and it brought back vivid memories of those two big rallies in 1982. One of my colleagues from the labor movement, Rachel Bernstein, said, “It was the deepest and broadest commemoration of a labor history event that I have ever seen!” It is a little bittersweet to celebrate the events of 1982. Many of the workers are frail or even passing away. This may be one of the last anniversaries with the active participation of the workers who were involved, or supporters who were there in 1982 in-person. Chinatown has changed dramatically, and the garment factories have largely disappeared. The 1982 events had real impacts on these people and on the community, so I’m glad we put the time, energy and resources into the programs. I want current community and labor organizers to know the importance of solidarity and organizing broadly—to learn to negotiate and work beyond the divides of race, nationality, class, gender, age, and politics. Bring people together in the spirit of “We Are One!” — May Ying Chen, Former Labor Organizer

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We Are One was a very educational yet entertaining event. I didn’t know much about the 1982 Strike Commemoration so being at the event, I was actively reliving the history and learning about an important event from Chinatown’s legacy. It made me feel closer to my home, as there is always much more to learn so I’m eager to be able to learn while also enjoying festivities with my community. — Tiffany Wang, Intern & Program Coordinator

A stunning performance by the Red Silk Dancers.

Em He reading Alina Shen's poem "In June of 1982."

Kids collaging using excerpts from Bridge Magazine.

The NYC Labor Chorus singing union songs. Images: Tristan Hsu

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The Bridging Futures team celebrating the launch of Letters to Our Younger Selves. Image: Marion Aguas

Community members flipping through Letters to Our Younger Selves. Image: Marion Aguas

Bridging Futures cohort member Ying reading from the publication. Image: Marion Aguas

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Program attendees looking through the Ba Bao Zhou zine, created by Denise Zhou and Cocoro Kitagawa. Image: Marion Aguas

Garment factory veteran and labor organizer Alice Ip putting her union pins on display. Image: Marion Aguas

W.O.W. community, Cocoro Kitagawa, Tiffany Wang, Denise Zhou, Joy Mao, Sueann Leung, Clae Lu, Mei Lum, Jade Li, Mischelle Moy, Alice Ip, Lorraine Lum, and Ava Lum, wearing the 八宝粥 Ba Bao Zhou collection during Joy’s final showcase. Image: Marion Aguas

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GRASSROOTS FUNDRAISING

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THE W.O.W. PROJECT’S FUNDRAISING STRATEGIES ABOUT The W.O.W. Project’s grassroots fundraising efforts crystallized after the team had the opportunity to participate in a fundraising workshop supported by NYC Funder Capacity Building Collaborative in 2019. We left feeling empowered by the fundraising toolkit we walked away with and the strong belief that raising our own money with the support of our community is the pathway to liberation. We are stronger and more connected to the work when our community is investing and supporting the programming that is envisioned by us and for us. Our grassroots fundraising strategy has grown since then with several different avenues that not only meet our community where they are but also continue to be led by our mission and values.

THE W.O.W. PROJECT’S FUNDRAISING STRATEGIES

MUTUAL AID

PEER TO PEER FUNDRAISING

SLIDING SCALE TICKETS SALES

RAFFLES

Program Year 2021

Program Year 2022

Total

$35.4K

$66.1K

$101.5K

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PEER-TO-PEER FUNDRAISING Peer-to-peer fundraising rallies our W.O.W. community champions to lead a team of close friends and allies to help fundraise for W.O.W.’s collective fundraising goal. It harnesses people power in fueling our work and ensures the people who are participating in our programs also have a stake in W.O.W.'s growth and development.

RAFFLES Raffles allow for a more accessible way for our community to plug into our fundraising efforts by having a low barrier to entry, with ticket sales beginning at $10. During our 5 year anniversary, we received donated artwork from 17 artists, raising $5,000 in raffle donations. This shows the power that art can have in supporting and funding movements.

SLIDING SCALE TICKET SALES Vital to our anniversary fundraising campaigns, our community programming has always been a way to not only create space for connection and share the essence of W.O.W.’s yearly work, but also to generate community support through sliding scale tickets which directly support the following year’s public programming.

MUTUAL AID After witnessing the impacts of COVID-19 on Chinatown and its multigenerational businesses, The W.O.W. Project team created From Chinatown, With Love (FCWL), a project that raises funds for long time small businesses impacted by the pandemic. Coinciding with our Lunar New Year grassroots fundraising campaign, FCWL uses art as a tool to celebrate and build economic resilience for the small businesses that make up the cultural fabric of our neighborhood. This project is at the intersection of art, economic resiliency, and relationship-building, ultimating sharing the essence of The W.O.W. Project’s mission and values in using art as a tool for strengthening a community.

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LUNAR NEW YEAR FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN The W.O.W. the Crowd Lunar New Year Fundraising Campaign is a peer-to-peer fundraiser that rallies community members to become team captains and recruit 3 or more of their friends and close allies to raise $1000 or more as a team. Teams work creatively to fuel W.O.W.’s work in its future years, using shared resources, social media, direct outreach, and art as ways to share their connection to W.O.W.'s work and galvanize their community to donate.

2021 ACHIEVEMENTS

$12.8K $90 TOTAL RAISED

AVERAGE DONATION

8

FUNDRAISING TEAMS: Sowing Seeds White Plum Gates RRR Team The W.O.W. Cows Team Family Wing On Wo Wow wow WOW! Strong as an Ox

2022 ACHIEVEMENTS

$15.5K $120 AVERAGE DONATION

TOTAL RAISED

5

FUNDRAISING TEAMS: Go Go Wing on Wo! Team Tiger Balm woo-hǔ 虎 RRR W.O.W. Board

Graphics by Juliet Phillips

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The W.O.W. team and Columbia Lion Dance team gathered in front of Wing On Wo after spreading confetti cheer and good fortune to the FCWL businesses. Image: Marion Aguas

I had a wonderful experience leading the fundraising team for The W.O.W. Project! I loved bringing together friends, some of whom did not know each other, to gather around a great cause. I became a team captain because I love what W.O.W. does and would like to support their capacity to continue organizing great programs in the Chinatown community for years to come. Being able to share these meaningful stories with other people and open up about a cause and community I care about deeply brought me so much joy and I hope everyone will be able to learn about the wonderful programs, initiatives, and accomplishments that W.O.W. has made for the community. — Jen Louie, LNY Fundraising Team Captain

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LOOKING FORWARD

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REFLECTING ON W.O.W.’S UPCOMING PROGRAM YEAR As we look ahead to the 2023 program year, we are buoyed by the opportunity presented by Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) to invest in deepening the relationship between artists, youth development, and cultural displacement work. Through the CRNY program, we will be welcoming back 5 former artistic collaborators—Joy Mao, Lorraine Lum, Denise Zhou, Singha Hon, and Juliet Phillips—to join our full-time team as artists-in-residence. This upcoming program year also marks a big milestone for our organizational capacity. With the Mellon Foundation’s support, we will be hiring on our very first full time Program Director and Deputy Director in the spring of 2023. At this critical juncture of what feels like a different era of W.O.W.’s work, we are highly attuned to the impacts this large growth in capacity might have on the direction of our work. In our upcoming program year, we seek to reflect on how to grow our organization’s resilient viability, while courageously committing to our long-term visions for change through our public programs, organizational structure, and beyond. W.O.W. will be spending the 2022-2023 program year slowing down, looking inward, and turning toward each other. Resist Recycle Regenerate will be taking a pause from cohort programming to take stock of its past five years and build a more formal foundation and framework for its future years. We are also excited to pilot an internal political education series called Rootwork to sharpen our political analyses, deepen our team relationships and trust, and be intentional about how we move forward in our work. We look forward to continuing our work at the intersection of youth, art, and activism, and we are grateful for the ongoing community support of our team, programs, and dreams for the future.

Illustration by Singha Hon

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SPECIAL THANKS We couldn’t do this without our incredible community and supporters. These programs were made possible by generous support from:

Funders

Community Partners Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB) The Illuminator Labor Arts International Ladies Garment Workers Union Workers United Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance Abrons Arts Center

Chinatown Businesses Bangkok Center Grocery Banh Mi Co Ut Bok Lei Trading B-Unit Beauty Dashop Corp Eliz Digital G&J Florist Go Believe Bakery Golden Unicorn Good Field Trading Co. Grand Century Market Inc. Grand Tea Imports Hop Lee Ho Wan Bake Shoppe Jungs Dried Beef

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KamWo Meridian Herbs Kelly Hair Salon KK Discount Lucky King Bakery Malaysia Beef Jerky Manhattan Florist Mott Optical New Bo Bo Bicycle New York Bo Ky Oriental Culture Enterprises Co. Inc. Po Wing Hong Sanrio-Bandai Snack Bar Ting’s Wing On Wo & Co.

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DONORS Abbie Marie Aidan Galassetti Aisha Ross Al Macleod-Bluver Alena Chun Alex Cabana Alex Chen Alex Lee Alice Lin Alison Chi Alison Dowski Allison Behringer Amanda Phi Amit Honwad Amy Chin Amy Dreher Andrew Ahn Angela Chan Angela Li Angie Dita Anna Greene Anna Kim Anne Yu April Tran Ariana Alarcon Ashley K Ashley Kwon Ashley Wu Athena Scott Aubrey Vinh Audrey Brown Audrey Lee Audrey Lee Austin Johnson Avery Jones Axis Fuksman-Kumpa Ayen Tran Barr Foundation Bea Williemsen Becca Young Betty Yu Bobby Dresser Britney Chong Caitlin Lee Carl Stovner Carol He Caroline Flynn Caroline Ulwick Carolyn Lau Chalay Chalermkraivuth Charity Seid Cheryl Lo Christian Paneda Christian Schwartz Christie Kimura Christina Kang Christina Ta Christine Lau Christopher Lucero Christy Lau Chu Ying He City Lore Claire Zhou

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Clara Lu Claudia Zhu Cody DeFalco Cole Haan Connie Chan Cyndi Chen Dan Lau Dan Wang Daniel Kwon Daniel Li Danni Lin Darian Thomas David Fraser Denise Zhou Diana Huynh Diane Lin Disha Gupta Ed Lin Ed Lin Elaine Zhou Elena Taber Elise Xu Elizabeth Moy Elle Enander Ellen Larson Ellie Robb Ellie TK Ellie Zarr Ellie Zarr Emily Brink Emily May Jampel Emily Mock Emily Talvola Emma Zurer Emmeline Kaiser Eric Zimmy Erica, Monica, Christine Eugene Gladun Eugenie Tsai Eunice Kim Farrah Su Fiona Zhao Frani O’Toole Gabe Schwartz Gaelle Sharma Genevieve Ng Grace Aheron Grace Gallogly Grace Rosen Grace Xu Guadalupe Gonzalez Hana Sun Hannah Joseph Hannah Joseph Harley Goth Harry Trinh Haysun Choi Henry Minsoo Strickland Here to Sunday Hita Bhagat Hye Yun Park Ingrid Mcneely Irene Hsu

Irene Zapata Isa Wang Isabella Bentley Isabelle Lee Isabelle Vea Jackie Huey Jackson Ave Jacob Torrey Jam C Jamie Cruz Velaquez Jason Toups Jean Chang Jeff Kim Jeffrey Tai Bandeen Jein Park Jennifer Cooney Jennifer Datchuk Jennifer Ho Jep Alaba Jessica Engler Jessica Shin Jillian Riseman John Farris Jon Kriz Jon Law Jonathan Lee Joshua Nguyen Judy Lei Julia Chan Julia Lubey Julia Simpson Juliette Elizabeth Julius Vo Julius Vo Jupiter Elpis Kasia Chmielinski Kat Zhang Katharine Galaxy Kathleen Crowley Kathleen Wah Lee Katie Higgins Katy Wong Kaya Chou-Kudu Kelly Kirkland Kelly Mencin Kenneth Eng Khoi Pham Kiana Wong Koan Zhang Kris Saldana Kris Seto Kristen Sze-Tu Kristin Tabron Kyle Dubiel Kylie Yang Kyra Macarthy Landyn Pan Lara Lorenzo Laura Andrew Lauren Aquilina Lauren Goldberg Lauren Kim Lauren Walters Leanna Chan

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Leland Yu LiJia Gong Lily Andrews Lisa Chen Liz Rush-Smyth Lizzie Lin Lorelei Russ Lorraine James Loubie B Leal Luis Rodriguez Lynnea Lee Madeline Duran Makenna Okeefe Mali Grubner Margaret Vergara Marnie Kunz Maria Candido Matt Buck Matthew Rafferty Mauricio Escamilla Megan Lonski Melina Alice Michael (Mikey) Jung Michael Chen Michael Cherman Michael Lau Michael Siao Michael Suen Michele W Michelle Ker Michelle Lee Michelle Li Michelle Samuels Miguel Martinez Mildred Yu Mildred Yu Minerva Chin Ming Rusli Miye O’Doench Momo Otani Monica Chen Monica Kim Morissa Glatman Munya Nancy Wyden (Strand) Natalie Natasha Go Nate Campbell Navi Singh Nell Gallogly Nicole Byard Nicole Cannizzarro Nina Psoncak Nisma Sadooui Nkosi Harvey Nneoma Adaku nonie hunter Paige McCall Pamela Ouyang Panthea Lee Pari Gabriel Peter Sucher Petra Magno Philip Hirose

Phoebe Bui Quinn Saito Rachel Evans Rachel Ha Ravina Jain Rebecca Wyzan Ricardo Hernandez Richard Elkin Richard Jin Riley Johnson Robert Lee Robert Lee Robert Lee Robert Rusli Roller Chicken Skates Ryan Pan Sabah Parsa Sabrina Imbler Sabrina Tran Sabrina Zhao Safiya Altman Sandra Au Sandy Leung Sara Miller Sarah Kim Saretta Morgan Sesame Projects Shevvie Sialana Shirley Lim Shon Purdy Shyam Kurian Sidney, Andrew, Paul Simon Lee Sisi Zhang Spica Wobbe Squid Tropica Stacey Yu Stefanie Tam Steph Cheng Stephanie Shin Steven Jin Summer Thomas Suzanne Nuyen Sydney Trieu Teresa Li Tiffany Pham Tiffany Piloco Tiffany Wong Tina Le Tom Finkelpearl Tommy Lam Tracy Pham Trisha Castaneda Tuck Woodstock Vanessa Nguyen Violet Dong Wei Si Nic Yiu Yuki Haraguchi Zoe Zeigfeld Zoey Chamberlain

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HOW TO GET INVOLVED www.wowprojectnyc.org 26 Mott St, New York, NY 10013 Volunteer Form: https://forms.gle/kmhP1KtD7ZFeBAwS8

@wowprojectnyc

CREDITS Report Design by Cocoro Kitagawa, Clae Lu, and Denise Zhou with help from Mei Lum, Aishvarya Arora, Di Wang, Singha Hon, Juliet Phillips, Joy Mao, Angela Chan, Serena Yang and The W.O.W. Project Team Front and back cover photos taken by Marion Aguas

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