*baby pink*

For Cabinets of Wonder this week, I walked around Chelsea Art District and went to a building called “ARTS Building” where 19 galleries are located. At a glance, this building looks like one of the typical manufacturing houses or office buildings in Chelsea, because there is no obvious sign or indication of art galleries except the name “ARTS.” Without the help of a friend with his map enabled iPhone, I would have never known that those galleries existed.

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I went to a newly-opened Museum of Chinese in America (MoCA) as a field trip for Cabinets of Wonder. After more than 20 years of collecting artifacts and materials about the life of Chinese in America, the museum was reborn on September 23 as a modern place designed by a renowned architect Maya Lin.

My first impression: a wine bar

Who did say a museum couldn’t be a wine bar? The new MoCA does not look like what I normally associate a museum with. There is no sign that says “MoCA is here”. There is no banners about current exhibitions. People can either miss this museum, or mistake it for a wine bar. I was the former by the way.

MoCA storefront. Is it a bar or a museum?

Notes

I’m going to jolt down notes from my visit. I will update this section as I remember more…

• I liked a bare-bricked, skylit atrium and “windows” between bricks that function as a screen on which videos are projected as if someone’s looking down the atrium. It feels like an Americanized old Chinese house.
• Rooms were too dark to read written materials.
• If one of MoCA’s missions is to become a platform for cultural dialogue among local communities, I wondered if the museum is too stylish for locals to casually stop by.
• I liked a collective storytelling website that was available at the museum’s interactive kiosk. It is a site with stories submitted by Chinese in America. Submissions are responses to following three questions: “What was your journey – your experience coming to and iving in this country?”, “What has the word ‘home’ meant to you living in the United States?” and “What are the stories you have head about the first members of your family to arrive in the if you have a multi-generational history?” There was one American-born Chinese who said, “I was born and raised in the US. When people ask me where I’m from, I tell them I’m American. They usually give me this look as if they expected me to say that I’m Chinese. I’m American.” What is the role of museums like MoCA for multi-generation Chinese whose identities are almost 100% American?

The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, National Design Museum is my favorite museum in New York City. As a design nerd, I love checking exhibitions about current design at a gorgeous townhouse on Sunday morning, and walking along the Central Park afterwards. I like the fact that exhibitions feel “manageable” and “digestible” in this two-story townhouse. I can finish two exhibitions in an hour or less.

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For Cabinets of Wonder, I went to the Tenement Museum in Lower East Side with Liesje, Mustafa, and Eyal. The museum promotes tolerance and historical perspective through interpretation of some of estimated 7,000 working class immigrants who resided in the building between 1863 and 1935. Read more

"Birthday Parties" under Visit section

For Cabinets of Wonder this week, I visited the New York Hall of Science in Queens. When I checked their website before my visit, I got a strong impression that the museum primarily targets families and school kids. The website has a “Birthday Parties (please refer to the picture)” category as part of the Visit menu. I have never seen a museum that puts so much emphasis on kids’ birthdays. The funny thing is that I found that children in Queens actually celebrate their birthdays quite often at the NY Hall of Science. When I came back from my museum trip, by chance I met one of my colleagues who was born and raised in Queens. He told me that he, as a kid, “always had birthday parties at NY Hall of Science,” and so did his friends. It’s no wonder why the museum highlights birthday parties on the landing page! Read more

Japan Society

For the museum review assignment this week, I went to the Japan Society in midtown, New York, with Eyal Ohana, who’s an accomplished motion graphic designer. I’ve been there several times last year including a lecture with Tadanori Yokoo in September 2008 and a performance by Dumb Type in November 2008. But I never came here during the day since most of events I went happened in evenings, so it was my first time observing the place with daylight, which helped me see the place differently.

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The entrance of UC Botanical Garden

Last weekend I attended a wedding reception at University of California Botanical Garden, which is a place literally surrounded by forests and natural abundant beauty in the UC Berkeley Campus. So my first impression was “why do you even need a botanical garden if the surrounding environment is so green?” Read more