On Fighting for Love: Pik-Shuen Fung and Laura Gao
Sunday October 9, 2022* at 3pm PST
FREE IN-STORE event with Virtual Live Stream
NOTE: THERE HAS BEEN A CHANGE IN DATE FROM SATURDAY OCTOBER 8, 2022 TO SUNDAY OCTOBER 9, 2022
Sunday October 9, 2022* at 3pm PST
FREE IN-STORE event with Virtual Live Stream
NOTE: THERE HAS BEEN A CHANGE IN DATE FROM SATURDAY OCTOBER 8, 2022 TO SUNDAY OCTOBER 9, 2022
How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings?
Pik-Shuen Fung‘s powerful debut, Ghost Forest explores migration and grief, joy and sorrow, through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist as she travels through the collective memories of her family. Through spirited prose, Ghost Forest reminds readers that “grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive” K-Ming Chang
Laura Gao's graphic novel debut "Messy Roots is a laugh-out-loud, heartfelt, and deeply engaging story of their journey to find themself--as an American, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, as a queer person, and as a Wuhanese American in the middle of a pandemic.”—Malaka Gharib, author of I Was Their American Dream
Join us Saturday October 8, 2022 at 3:00pm for a conversation surrounding love and identity, featuring authors Pik-Shuen Feng, author of Ghost Forest , and Laura Gao, author and illustrator of Messy Roots. Together, their individual works showcase women breaking free from tradition, old values, and expectations. Art becomes a mean to navigate their own humanity and independence. Through their works, each author writes to a new generation of immigrant Asian Americans who break free to define a new world for themselves as they learn to ask for and claim the love that they deserve.
Masks and Proof of Vaccination are required.
There will be also simultaneously be a virtual livestream: https://youtu.be/jzgu7-qSdvA
Pik-Shuen Fung‘s powerful debut, Ghost Forest explores migration and grief, joy and sorrow, through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist as she travels through the collective memories of her family. Through spirited prose, Ghost Forest reminds readers that “grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive” K-Ming Chang
Laura Gao's graphic novel debut "Messy Roots is a laugh-out-loud, heartfelt, and deeply engaging story of their journey to find themself--as an American, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, as a queer person, and as a Wuhanese American in the middle of a pandemic.”—Malaka Gharib, author of I Was Their American Dream
Join us Saturday October 8, 2022 at 3:00pm for a conversation surrounding love and identity, featuring authors Pik-Shuen Feng, author of Ghost Forest , and Laura Gao, author and illustrator of Messy Roots. Together, their individual works showcase women breaking free from tradition, old values, and expectations. Art becomes a mean to navigate their own humanity and independence. Through their works, each author writes to a new generation of immigrant Asian Americans who break free to define a new world for themselves as they learn to ask for and claim the love that they deserve.
Masks and Proof of Vaccination are required.
There will be also simultaneously be a virtual livestream: https://youtu.be/jzgu7-qSdvA
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ABOUT MESSY ROOTS: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR OF A WUHANESE-AMERICAN
A TOUR DE FORCE of graphic memoir storytelling about growing up a queer Chinese-American immigrant in Texas. After spending her early years in Wuhan, China, riding water buffalos and devouring stinky tofu, Laura immigrates to Texas, where her hometown is as foreign as Mars—at least until 2020, when COVID-19 makes Wuhan a household name. In Messy Roots, Laura illustrates her coming-of-age as a girl who simply wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why girls make her heart flutter. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laura Gao is a queer artist, author, bread lover, and nomadic traveler. Originally from Wuhan, China, Laura immigrated to Dallas, Texas, and began their art career by doodling on Pokémon cards, and later featured in NPR, the MOCA in NYC, and most notably, her parents’ fridge. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Gao worked as a Product Manager in San Francisco before April 2020, when in response to anti-Asian racism and rampant misinformation about Wuhan, Laura published a webcomic, "The Wuhan I Know", on Twitter where it went viral and attracted attention from several book publishers. The comic inspired their bestselling debut graphic memoir, MESSY ROOTS, which was published in March 2022 with HarperCollins. Besides drawing and fighting off early-onset back pain, Gao enjoys biking, jamming out to music, and watching SNL. Laura’s pronouns are she/her and they/them. |
ABOUT GHOST FOREST
This “powerful” (Buzzfeed) debut about love, grief, and family welcomes you into its pages and invites you to linger, staying with you long after you’ve closed its covers. How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings? This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. As she revisits memories of her father throughout the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs. Buoyant, heartbreaking, and unexpectedly funny, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese Canadian astronaut family. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Pik-Shuen Fung is the author of the debut novel Ghost Forest, which won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. She has received fellowships and residencies from Kundiman, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Millay Arts, and Storyknife, and her writing has appeared in Guernica, LitHub, Poets & Writers, The Italian Review, and elsewhere. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, Canada, she now lives in New York City with her husband and their rambunctious dog. |
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GODZILLA: Asian American Arts Network Book Talk
Sunday October 30, 2022 at 2pm PST
FREE IN-STORE event with Virtual Live Stream
Sunday October 30, 2022 at 2pm PST
FREE IN-STORE event with Virtual Live Stream
Godzilla: Asian American Art Network was formed in 1990 to support the production of critical discourse around Asian American art.
Eastwind Books is pleased to host a book event and reception for Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001(Primary Information) featuring a discussion with editor Howie Chen and Godzilla members Betty Kano and Arlan Huang.
Click here to PURCHASE the Godzilla anthology!
Use this link to access the YouTube livestream
Eastwind Books is pleased to host a book event and reception for Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001(Primary Information) featuring a discussion with editor Howie Chen and Godzilla members Betty Kano and Arlan Huang.
Click here to PURCHASE the Godzilla anthology!
Use this link to access the YouTube livestream
About the Book:
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Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001 is a comprehensive anthology of writings, art projects, publications, correspondence, organizational documents, and other archival ephemera from the trailblazing Asian artist collective. Edited by curator Howie Chen, this publication includes full essays and contextual material detailing the critical genealogies embodied by the group as well as its wide-ranging activities.
The collective known as Godzilla: Asian American Art Network was formed in 1990 to support the production of critical discourse around Asian American art and increase the visibility of Asian American artists, curators, and writers, who were negotiating a historically exclusionary society and art world. Founded by Ken Chu, Bing Lee, and Margo Machida, Godzilla produced exhibitions, publications, and community collaborations that sought to stimulate social change through art and advocacy. For more than a decade, the diasporic group, having grown from a local organization into a nationwide network, confronted institutional racism, Western imperialism, anti-Asian violence, the AIDS crisis, and representations of Asian sexuality and gender, among other urgent issues. |
Godzilla created a social space for diasporic Asian artists and art professionals, including members Tomie Arai, Karin Higa, Byron Kim, Paul Pfeiffer, Eugenie Tsai, Alice Yang, Lynne Yamamoto, among others. Envisioning a lateral and porous network, Godzilla was independently run by successive steering committees that included Diyan Achjadi, Tomie Arai, Todd Ayoung, Monica Chau, Debi-Ray Chaudhuri, China Blue, Allan deSouza, Skowmon Hastanan, Arlan Huang, Michi Itami, Jenni Kim, Franky Kong, Jeanette Louie, Yong Soon Min, Helen Oji, Sanda Zan Oo, Athena Robles, Carol Sun, Eugenie Tsai, Lynne Yamamoto, Rubina Yeh, and Charles Yuen.
About the Speakers:
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Howie Chen is a curator and writer based in New York. A founding director of Chen’s, a townhouse gallery in Brooklyn, he has held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1. His writings have been published by Primary Information and Badlands Unlimited and have appeared in magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, and Art in America. With artist Mika Tajima, he formed New Humans, a moniker for collaborations with musicians, artists and designers. Chen is the editor of the anthology Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990-2001 (Primary Information, 2021), and is on the faculty of the NYU Steinhardt School.
Arlan Huang (b. 1948, Bangor, Maine) is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City and an active member of Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network. Through painting and other media, Huang’s artistic practice merges his political activism with personal memory and archival history, often weaving together themes of race and representation with the mystique of abstraction. He most recently joined abolitionists and the Chinatown community in condemning the construction of new jails that involved the Museum of Chinese in America, New York. Huang has exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Drawing Center, Artists Space, Sculpture Center, Taft Museum and is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Creating a Living Legacy award. Betty Nobue Kano is an artist, curator and lecturer based in Berkeley; her solo exhibits include the Triton Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, UC Santa Cruz. She co-founded Art Against Apartheid, Asian American Women Artists Association and Women of Color Camp. She taught at San Francisco State University.
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