A Tour of the APAture Handmade Fair

Just got sent this video by one of our APAture artists, Ed Penano (creator of Dinky Ninja Bears), giving a tour of APAture 2009’s Handmade Fair. Includes a performance by Wilson Wong at the end!

Thanks for making this video, Ed!

KSW Ticket Special at #5 Angry Red Drum

#5 Angry Red Drum is a tragic-comic parable reminiscent of an early David Lynch film. This world premiere features a live original sound score using traditional and found instruments, misremembered fragments of Bob Dylan lyrics, and post-post-post modern dance. This is where Beckett meets Burning Man.

Opening Night    September 28, 2009  (Monday • 8:00 pm)
Performances    October 1-17, 2009  (Thu-Sat 8:00 pm • Sun 5:00 pm)

Location: THICK HOUSE   1695 18th Street (Potrero Hill)
Tickets $25 (student & senior rates available) | 415-401-8081 or www.thickhouse.org

Discount for Kearny Street Workshop members: $5 off with code ‘ICW2′ valid from Thurs Oct 8th through Sunday Oct 11th
Special event for Kearny Street Workshop members on Sunday Oct 11th includes a Q&A session after the show.

More information at www.asianamericantheater.org

APAture Backstage: Chris Bucoy Brown on the Handmade Fair 9/26

There has long been the idea that Asian American empowerment comes with the need to cast off and shun the characterization of us as nerds and geeks. No matter how cool or successful you may be, nothing can pull you down a peg faster than to invoke the indelible 80s caricature of Long Duk Dong. Some might say that APAture exists specifically to challenge the stereotype–here you’ll find many examples of artists, writers, musicians and performers who buck this concept with artistic exuberance.

The truth is we’re committed to embracing The Nerd. What could be more nerdy than comics? APAture has celebrated excellence amongst self-published creators of comics and zines since nearly the beginning, and we’re proud to say that we’ve caught some bright stars on their rise over the years.

At the Handmade Fair this year, we’re excited to be showcasing some terrific new talent to APAture, including Bay Area Artists Unite (BAAU), a collective that publishes an annual anthology of manga and other graphic art. And we’re thrilled to be bringing back a league of extraordinary creators who have been featured artists, including Eisner winner Jason Shiga, National Book Award finalist Gene Yang, Comix Claptrap podcast host Thien Pham and the amazing zine-making duo of Mark Miyake and Jing Bentley.

Not to be outdone, this year’s featured artist is new to us at APAture but has been a staple of the indie comics scene for years. Debbie Huey and her adorable character Bumperboy have bounded from mini-books to publishing kids’ books and become champions of making comics kid-friendly again–and making fans out of anyone who loves cuteness.  And Debbie will be sure to have some Bumperboy-inspired crafts on hand in the spirit of our handmade fair.

Yes, we are comics geeks at APAture. And we fully encourage you to embrace your Inner Nerd as well this Saturday.

APAture Backstage: Kristin Lamb on the Handmade Fair 9/26

The APAture Handmade Fair is one of the new elements we have brought to the yearly APAture festival. I am part of the DIY Craft committee, which is organizing the crafty half of the Handmade Fair. It’s a marketplace of all things handmade: comics, zines, apparel, accessories, plushies, and more.

One of the most exciting parts of the fair is the collaboration between committees. The formation of the Handmade Fair in conjunction with the comic/zine expo has been really fun to coordinate with the help of a few different committees. My fellow craft committee member Yola and I have had to share information and brain storm with the comic/zine committee as well as the gallery committee to create what we think is going to be an awesome event.

Our Featured Artist in DIY Crafts, fiftyseven-thirtythree, was given a spot in the APAture Runway fashion show which turned out to be a super fun event!  It was really great watching the models strut their stuff wearing our artist’s pieces.

Note: Many of the vendors at the Handmade Fair accept cash and check only. Prepare you wallets!

APAture Backstage: Lloyd Rivera on Performance Night 9/25

Let’s not mince words. Performance art is a crazy beast with many heads and personalities pulling it in different directions, which is not surprise seeing how it pulls from, and is influenced by, so many disciplines; dance, music, visual, theater—as well as fringe art. Our task as curators for the performance art night has been to strike the balance between all these mediums within the course of one evening.

In our search for performers we were very lucky in that we not only had quite a few talented artists who submitted applications, but so many of those came with a number of acts that reflected the diversity of talent in the APA community; ensemble improv groups, stand-up comedy, playwrights and actors, drag queens, musicians, etc. We had the luxury of not being limited by the applicants but instead by only having two hours to showcase the skills of our performers.

The selection process is only the beginning. In fact, writing the process of this seems premature, as we are right now gathering technical requirements for each performer and our technical head, Benjamin Gonzales, is working to make their six acts fit into the excellent performance space at Intersection for the Arts in the Mission. Sound, lighting, entrance and exit cues, scene transitions- these are all in the technical aspects which we will be going over with our performers in the upcoming days. And as with most performances our work won’t be complete until the curtain goes up on September 25. It’s nerve wracking, but that’s what makes working on this piece of the APAture festival so exciting and amazing.

Top 10 Photos from APAture so far

APAture 2009 is off to a great start! Wanted to highlight some fun moments by sharing amazing photos taken by Kenni Camota. Come back this week for Happy Hour (Weds), Film Night (Thurs), Performance Night (Fri) and Handmade Fair/Closing Performances (Sat)!

Johnny Hi-Fi rocks it at APAture Music Night.

Hopie $pitshard shows off her swagger.

Mandeep Sethi drops some knowledge.

Keep looking…7 more pics!

APAture Backstage: Eugene Chung on APAture Music Night 9/18

I blame it all on William Hung.

The other day, I had a phone chat with my old friend, S.Chou. It went like this.

“How’re you doing?” he asked.

“I’m wiggin out. I gotta promote this showcase for Asian American bands and I don’t really know what I’m doing. How should I sell this?”

“Hmm..Asian American bands. That sounds kinda random, like you’re trying to sell…Russian cars.”

“Or Egyptian beer.”

“Or Alaskan architecture”

“Yeah.”

“People don’t really associate those things.”

And that right there was the whole point! Why shouldn’t people associate Asian Americans with good music? I blame it all on William Hung. But on the bright side, we got Kazu Makino, James Iha, Chad Hugo, Q-bert…that guy from Linkin Park…Dan the Automator, Cheb i Sabbah, that guy in the Glitch Mob…Great! Still, we want more.

And that’s what APAture 09’s music night is about, if I may speak for the collective. We thank Johnny Hi-Fi for their warm and generous sound. We thank Hopie $pitshard for her wit and fire. Lumaya for their visceral edge. Mandeep for his insight and lyrical precision. We thank Nomadik Messengers for speaking a language that is immediate, both personal and universal.

At the end of the day, there still aren’t a whole lot of Asian Americans out there making music that gets heard. Those that do put in the sweat time end up representing for the rest of us, a little bit. Throwing a glimpse of us into the pop culture prism, if you will. Honestly, I look forward to a day when this showcase becomes unnecessary! Could you imagine going to “White People Rock Fest?” or “Af-Am Hip Hop Night”?

Regardless, all our artists for 2009 are doing things right, tearing it up, and for that we can’t thank them enough. So whatever color it be, get that ass into the ever-sexy Poleng Lounge this Friday evening, bring your friends, bring a date, whatever…let’s get toasty and hear some good music.

APAture Backstage: Cathlin Goulding on Literary Night 9/19

When I first moved to the Bay Area in the summer of 2003, I went to a poetry reading at Locus Arts with a group of people from my teacher education program. At the time, Locus Arts was housed in a darkened restaurant in Japantown. I grabbed a flier sitting at a table near the front door—this is when I first learned about Kearny Street Workshop.

After this event, I kept an eye on the Kearny Street webpage and then applied the following spring for the 2004 APAture. That work, a humor essay about the hit and misses in my (non) dating life, was eventually accepted into festival. It was my first time reading my writing in a non-academic setting—I can recall the festival was an all-day extravaganza of literary readings, film, and musical performances in the cavernous SOMArts Center.

This festival was another first for me: it was the first time I identified or was partaking in an event as an “Asian American” writer. As a person of mixed Asian heritage, I had long grappled with the subject matter I approached in my writing, in addition to having difficulty seeing myself as Asian. I was either absorbed entirely with generating work about my Japanese-American family or I was avoiding it, staunchly. Kearny Street Workshop and APAture allowed me to be a writer within a community—and it was due to this, this very offering of a community, that I managed an acceptance of myself as Asian as well as continuing to develop my craft as a writer. And that was a pretty tall order to fill.

For the past six years, I have taken several writing workshops with Kearny Street and attended a slew of KSW programming. In my swamped life as a public school teacher, it is Kearny Street that keeps me composing. What makes APAture so unusual as an event is that it binds artists to an organization, an organization that we often remained involved with for years after our initial participation. Now, it is my second year reading submissions for the APAture Literary Night. We on the Literary Committee are anticipating a surprising and winning state of affairs this Saturday evening at the very swanky Hotel Rex (which is apparently a literary themed hotel) in Union Square—right off of the BART line and with a splendid people-watching-stroll to boot. We’re also excited to hear new work from featured artist Aimee Suzara, who has been part of KSW as a workshop teacher and APAture 2008 literary artist.

In reading the submissions this year, we loved Jennifer Cheng’s mercurial prose poems in which characters are half-hidden in shadows. In Cheng’s work, water and fragrant plants are pervasive, lonely elements inserted into languid sentences. Yasmine Gomez and Linda Park are two writers with spunky punch and verve—they will be reading non-fiction that slyly dismantles the process of home hunting in the San Francisco Bay Area and the pathos of anti-depressants. I am thrilled, as well, to see two writers from the KSW-sponsored Intergenerational Writers Lab, Kenji Liu and Mai Doan, read their image-laden, finely wrought poems. I saw both writers perform recently at the Asian Pacific American-Latino Poetry Night at Oakland’s The Nest—I was quite enraptured with both writers’ humor and their interwoven narratives of immigration and teenager-dom.

And, well, shoot, nothing gets me more than reading a well-placed Ranch 99 reference.

See you at the Hotel Rex, Saturday September 19th, 7-9pm, yeah?

APAture Backstage: Chris Bucoy Brown on Film Night 9/24

Let’s face it, the film and video night of APAture is not Cannes.  Nor do we want to be. We celebrate emerging filmmakers, especially those in our own backyard. So when we get a submission hailing from as far away as the Netherlands, we have to wonder–did this person get the address right?

As it turns out, Vivian Wenli Lin is a true native to San Francisco and her short Loving Work is quite at home here.  Sexually explicit and straight-up in its portrait of a couple making a living out of fetish media, I can think of no better place with as sophisticated audience as San Francisco to keep their eyes and minds open to appreciate this piece. Well, except maybe Amsterdam.

A still from Chihiro Wimbush’s Double Features, filmed at SF’s Balboa Theatre.

But as exotic as this makes our evening sound, there are stories from Bay Area filmmakers whose work will resonate with our audience if only by the locations they’ve chosen: the title for Chihiro Wimbush’s film Double Features will be instantly recognizable to patrons of the old Balboa Theater, and more of the Richmond District can be found in Kevin Wong’s Sunflowers. Philip Huang makes the East Bay his stage for absurdist performances in his videos, and Nara Denning composes a pastiche of familiar sights to create a dark urban landscape full of peril for Madelien the Small.

The new work from our featured artist, Tanuj Chopra, carries on this theme as well.  Though probably best known to our audience for his feature film Punching at the Sun, a quintessentially New York tale that garnered attention at Tribeca and Sundance, Tanuj has been shooting in San Francisco–right in the same building where Kearny Street Workshop once occupied.  We’re excited to see some of what he’s been doing in our old neighborhood.

So as it turns out, our evening celebrating emerging filmmakers hasn’t lost our local flavor at all. Yes, that includes a Dutch documentary about making fetish sex videos. It’s a perfect lead-in for the the Folsom Street Fair on Sunday. How San Francisco can you get?

APAture Backstage: Lucy Kalyani Lin on APAture Visual Art

Above: Artist Hui-Ying Tsai at work.

Rain or shine. It’s been beautiful chaos in the gallery all weekend with my fellow curator, Jackie Im, laying out the APAture 2009 gallery show. We’ve had several artists come through to drop off work including Eloisa Guanlao, Mik Gaspay, Hui-Ying Tsai, and Jacqueline Gordon (in her first year at Stanford’s MFA program).

Eloisa Guanlao’s installation involves a 19th-century camera. Come look through the “aperture” at Goforaloop Gallery.

Dorathy Lye’s “walking sticks” in front of Raymond Wong’s paintings (still in the wrapper!) waiting to be hung.

Natalia Nakazawa and Stephanie Mansolf putting art directly on the walls.

Installation artists Natalia Nakazawa and Sandra Ono (whose work is currently shown in NextNew: Green at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art) have been working continuously and meticulously in the gallery all day. I occasionally will overhear from the corner of Natalia and her collaborator some loud references to certain sexual processes that I only assume must be integral to the brilliance of their own artistic creation process.

With amazing volunteers (thanks Amy Ho and Daniel Chen! Both whom are also artists) helping with prep, KSW staff checking in, and not to mention four old couches thrown out and one semi-movable wall hoisted on the stage. YES. It has been one busy install weekend. But I’m feeling that tingle, that familiar excitement and anticipation of seeing another APAture visual show all come together. Now if only we could just get a hold of the art for the other half of the show…

And a sneak peak at the work from our featured artist Taraneh Hemami:

Jackie and I had a chance to visit Taraneh at her artist studio a couple weeks ago, and were given an inspiring tour of her body of work. Taraneh is one of those artists who make you feel incredibly humble without doing anything but explaining the history behind her works and her motivation for continuing social and community activism.

We are extremely pleased to have Taraneh as our featured artist this year.

About the writer:

Lucy Kalyani Lin is an artist, curator and arts administrator working and living in the SF Bay Area. Her work will be included in an upcoming show at the California Institute for Integral Studies Gallery in November 2009.