Tiger Balm: An Intergenerational Artist Archive

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Tiger Balm is a series of intergenerational interviews conducted by artists of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora working in the United States. These conversations connect two artists at different points of their careers and life practices in a familial and inquisitive tone. This project seeks to fill a void of AAPI representation by creating an archive that expands the network and discourse around our vital practices. At the heart of this project is the importance of interpersonal relationships. Through sharing artist-to-artist dialogue, we aim to create a resource that preserves knowledge of the diasporic experience for educators, students, arts workers, and community members.

 

About This Project

First and foremost, Tiger Balm demonstrates how social connection enables our vital practices! Tiger Balm delivers rich, focused, and first-person perspectives on the experiences of being artists of the Asian diaspora. As a series of conversations, it focuses on points of solidarity and community. When we explore the intersections and differences in our life stories and creative practices, we grow as people and makers. When that growth through camaraderie is publicly shared it becomes a model for how to build and locate yourself in the community and in an art context. Through building this archive of recorded and transcribed audio conversations between working artists, the project becomes a resource for artists and scholarship in the future. 

This project was initiated as a collaboration between artists Hương Ngô and Maggie Wong. Many of our solo art projects have tackled the history of immigration and kinship structures, particularly through the lens of Asian-American history. We met as colleagues at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where we collaborated on anti-racism programming for the first-year program. This programming work aimed to support students as well as the API artist community, one that was becoming ever more connected in the aftermath of COVID-19. When the world experienced anti-Asian violence during COVID, it was a network of fellow artists, organized by the late Greg Bae, that provided us and many other artists of the Asian diaspora in Chicago with a sense of community and solidarity during those confusing and isolating times. Wong and Ngô created Tiger Balm out of the desire to continue grassroots organizing at a time in our political landscape when we need community and connection.

You can find the first set of conversations through the project’s website, tigertigerbalm.net, including conversations between Hương Ngô and social practice artist Kim Yasuda, Maggie Wong and filmmaker Kyuri Jeon, and artists Laura Kina and Cori Nakamura Lin. Your financial support on this project will ensure its continuation through compensation for participating artists towards our goal of 10 interviews, keeping the project’s website running, and sustaining the archive for future audiences.

Thank yous

Contribute any amount or choose from the levels below.

• $20
  A shout out on Social Media ($20.00 is tax deductible.)
• $25
  A personal “thank you” letter ($20.00 is tax deductible.)
• $50
  Risograph by Hương Ngô ($25.00 is tax deductible.)
• $100
  Unity Newspaper, publication and poster by Maggie Wong (edition of 40) ($60.00 is tax deductible.)
• $200
  Friday Academy Red Party Cup - from Kim Yasuda ($100.00 is tax deductible.)
• $300
  Daisy Chain Link, pewter cast by Maggie Wong ($200.00 is tax deductible.)

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Huong N Ngo

Next Level Spare Room & Reva & David Logan Foundation Awardee

Hương Ngô (Huong Ngo, Ngô Ngọc Hương, 吳玉香) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her work attends to refugee epistemologies, expanding concepts of time and knowledge to those that are generational, ecological, ruptured, and reconstructed. Often beginning with research in …

View Huong N Ngo's profile

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• Thank you to the following for contributing to 3Arts with the recommendation that we support this project.

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