Discussion begins at 6:30PM
Reception to follow at 8:00PM

Known throughout his lifetime as the “undisputed, unofficial Asian American photographer laureate,” the late photojournalist Corky Lee documented Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for fifty years, breaking the stereotype of Asian Americans as docile, passive, and, above all, foreign to this country. Corky Lee’s Asian America is a stunning retrospective of his life’s work — a selection of the best photographs from his vast collection, from his start in New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s to his coverage of diverse Asian American communities across the country until his untimely passing in 2021. 

Join us for the New York launch of Corky Lee's Asian America a seminal work that traces Lee’s decades-long quest for photographic justice, following Asian American social movements for recognition and a remarkable documentation of vital moments in Asian American history and a timely reminder that it’s also a history that we continue to make. 

Speakers include David Henry Hwang, a Tony- and Grammy-Award-winning writer for stage and screen, whose works include M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Aida, FOB, and Soft Power; Akemi Kochiyama, a Harlem-based community builder, writer, scholar-activist and co-director of the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project; Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Stay True and staff writer, The New Yorker; and Mae Ngai, co-editor of Corky Lee's Asian America, is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and professor of history at Columbia University, and author of The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021); and Chris Kwok, Chair of the Issues Committee, Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY).

Please click here to flip through Corky Lee's Asian America.   

Copies of Corky Lee's Asian America will be available for purchase at the event.

Speakers

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016) and the memoir Stay True (2022). He serves on the boards of the Asian American Writers Workshop and Critical Minded, a collaboration between the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2018 (New Yorker); was a finalist for the James Beard Award for Food Writing in 2013 (for “Wokking the Suburbs,” Lucky Peach); and his work has been anthologized in Best Music Writing (2010 and 2012) and Best African American Essays 2010. He previously wrote for Artforum, The Atlantic, Grantland, Slate, and The Wire; his scholarly work has been published in American Quarterly, Criticism, PMLA, and Genre. He previously taught at Vassar College and was formerly a fellow at the New American Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He teaches at Bard College and publishes a series of zines on music and life called Suspended in Time.

David Henry Hwang is playwright, librettist, and screenwriter, David Henry Hwang is a Tony Award winner and three-time nominee, a Grammy Award winner and two-time nominee, a three-time OBIE Award winner, and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He has written libretti for thirteen operas, including the Grammy Award-winning Ainadamar, with music by Osvaldo Golijov; The Sound of a Voice, with music by Philip Glass; and The Rift, with music by Huang Ruo and which recently premiered in a series of commissioned work to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center. Other works include the plays Chinglish, The Dance and the Railroad, FOB, Golden Child, M. Butterfly, and Yellow Face; the musicals Aida, Flower Drum Song, Soft Power, and Tarzan. His film and TV work includes the movie M. Butterfly and four seasons of The Affair (Showtime). The performance at this year’s Asia Arts Game Changer Awards comprises a selection of pieces written by Hwang in collaboration with Huang Ruo.

Akemi Kochiyama (she/her) is a scholar-activist, community builder, and fundraiser who currently serves as the Director of Advancement at Manhattan Country School. Her work is focused on multicultural community building and BIPOC solidarity and centered in intersectional feminism. She is also Co-Director of the Yuri Kochiyama Archives Project and co-editor of Passing It On: A Memoir by Yuri Kochiyama. A graduate of Spelman College, Akemi is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. She is author of the award winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010); and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Dissent. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65- UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea (under contract with Princeton University Press)

Chris M. Kwok, Esq. (moderator) serves as the Co-Chair of the Issues Committee and Asia Practice Committee for the Asian American Bar Association of New York. He received his B.A from Cornell University with a major in Government and minor in Asian American studies, and his J.D from UCLA Law School, where he served on the staff of the Asian American Pacific Islander Law Journal. Formerly, he was the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Coordinator at the U.S. Equal Employment Commission in the New York District office. He is a mediator with JAMS.

This program is made possible in partnership with the Asian American Bar Association of New York.