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.

3 Days to APAture 2009…

3-2-1…

APAture 2009 kicks off this Thursday with the opening of our gallery exhibition!

Stay tuned for a “backstage pass”-style blog series written by our General Planning Committee. They’ll be giving you the behind-the-scenes perspective of every night of APAture.

GPC has been working very hard for the last SIX months to plan, curate, fundraise, promote, and make the APAture magic happen. They are all volunteers, and thankfully, they’ve volunteered to blog too!

Lastly, we had a great time at the PreParty at Otis last Saturday. Thank you to Courtney Escanio of itsdesignrelated.com for supporting APAture!

The APAture PreParty this Sat. @ OTIS

itsdesignrelated.com and ThomasJosephRoche are throwing us an APAture preparty! Be among musicians, writers, cinematographers, philanthropists, designers, photographers, & artists while you mingle, network, and celebrate this year’s launch. APAture is KSWs annual multidisciplinary arts festival showcasing the work of emerging Asian Pacific American artists.

INTRODUCTION, the APAture PreParty
At Otis, 25 Maiden Lane, SF.
9p-3a | 21+
$5, portion of proceeds benefit KSW
for further information: http://itsdesignrelated.com/featured-events/

APAture 2009 Schedule Released!

KSW’s APAture 2009 is only 2 weeks away!

This year is going to be a GREAT APAture. With events at Poleng Lounge, VIZ Cinema, Hotel Rex, Goforaloop Gallery, and Intersection for the Arts, where will you be this September? This is your chance to see Asian American artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, performers, and more all within two amazing weekends.

Go to kearnystreet.org/apature to see the full schedule…

Farewell, Present Tense Biennial

It’s been a great run, and the Present Tense Biennial has come to a close. Present Tense is now past tense…until next time! 

Hope you were able to catch the storefront installations, including the Chinese for Affirmative Action window by Tucker Nichols (above).

You haven’t seen the last of Present Tense artists Justin Hoover and Charlene Tan (she made the giant cornucopia), who will be creating new installations for APAture 2009! Don’t miss APAture’s gallery opening, Sept. 17 at Goforaloop Gallery.