Tiger Balm: An Intergenerational Artist Archive

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.