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In 2019, I began hosting and instructing a monthly Salon, capped at fifteen attendees, at Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City which mimicked “virtuoso circles” from the French surrealist movement.

 

Just like these “circles,” Asian identifying creatives came together through a series of instructed exercises and activities to create a single work together.

 

Collages, zines, ekphrasis, paintings, and even traditional poems came forth. In the span of an hour and half, I held the intentionality of creating an educational space governed by the image of play and conversation through an activity that used different visual, aural, and textual attributes, to effectively build a strong community out of a group of creative strangers.

 

In this regards, the salon not only gave a space for solidarity, but it also gave me the realization of how powerful art is as a tool to build relationships.

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In total, we held 12 sessions, from April 2019 to April 2020. Below are some of the work created.