Resist Recycle Regenerate 2021-2022
2021-2022
Resist Recycle Regenerate is a youth program that seeks to intersect art and activism through building women-centric leadership within the Chinatown community. RRR’s youth mentorship program model promotes young women as leaders and role models to inspire growth and leadership development in their peers through artmaking. Former fellows can become program leaders, mentoring and guiding the next cohort of younger fellows.
The program is organized into three main phases: the first phase focuses on situating fellows’ within RRR’s history and intent. Fellows learn about why RRR was created and larger concepts such as gentrification, histories of art and activism in Chinatown, and “place-based” work and place-keeping. Fellows also learn how to make confetti paper with materials collected from past Lunar New Year parades. This phase culminates in a collaborative project where fellows explore how their personal histories and Chinatown’s history interact and shape one another.
The second phase revolves around a group project designed and led by the program’s Teaching Artist, building on the connections between art-making and political education. The phase closes out with WOW’s Lunar New Year programming and the “regeneration ceremony,” which celebrates the fellows’ group project and gives them an opportunity to reflect on what they have learned thus far. This ceremony is also an opportunity to emphasize the generational nature of RRR as fellows collect confetti for the next year’s cohort.
The third phase is grounded in the fellows’ individual projects, an opportunity for fellows to synthesize the skills, experiences, and interests that have been fostered throughout the year. Fellows are given a materials budget and guided through the process by the leaders and teaching artist. The project must incorporate the recycled LNY confetti and be related to RRR’s central concepts (e.g. place, identity, history), but fellows otherwise have creative freedom over the final outcome. This phase also includes at least 2 community art-making workshops led by the fellows. The program culminates in a showcase and celebration that provides a space for the fellows and program leaders to collectively reflect on their growth and development as artists, young leaders, and community members who are invested in the past, present, and future of Chinatown.
RRR 2021-2022 Fellows
Vivian Yi is a recent college grad, currently employed as a Health Educator in Manhattan Chinatown. Her passions include: traditional Bulgarian choral music, adding books to her Goodreads then not reading them, and the color red. Throughout the RRR fellowship she hopes to keep thinking about questions such as, Is making/consuming art a selfish pursuit? and How do I extricate my personal identity from family history, and is this even something I should be trying to accomplish?
Tiffany Huang is a second generation Taiwanese-American and a senior at high school. Her hobbies are playing viola, listening to music and recently has gotten into film photography and tarot card reading. They are passionate about Asian-American activism and are ready to reclaim histories and to build solidarity with other marginalized communities. Through the RRR program she hopes to combine the power of the arts and activism to bring about social change that is needed for the community.
Sophia Kschwendt is an Asian American senior at Hunter College High School. She is passionate about art-making, especially through mediums such as sewing, calligraphy, and collage. She hopes to connect more deeply to her Korean American identity as well as learn more about how to use art to create long-standing change in her communities.
Bridget Li is a second-generation Chinese-American and studying Urban Studies and Drawing at Hunter College. They are passionate about visual arts and poetry and incorporating their heritage/activism into those practices. They are very excited to be a part of RRR and exploring the intersection between art and activism in Chinatown!
Victoria Maung is a junior at New York University studying decolonial fashion and cultural criticism who hopes to work in the business and legal sides of fashion. She has a deep appreciation for Peter Do, interactive art galleries, and her Resy app. A lover of monochromatic black, she will never be caught dead wearing color. Talk to her about your favorite designer.
RRR 2021-2022 Leadership Team
Serena Yang (she/her) is the coordinator for RRR’s fifth cohort and a 2018-19 RRR alum. She is a poet, writer, and first-generation Chinese American immigrant raised in Queens, New York on unceded Lenape land. (And currently a reluctant sophomore at Swarthmore College trying to find a bearable life under capitalism.) She believes that imagination and storytelling is critical to justice work and creates, always, with the knowledge that a better world is possible. Her final project explored migration, womanhood, and storytelling through an altered book format. She is more interested in myth than she is in truth, and so her mapping of her mother's stories does not seek to be biographical or exact; instead, she asks: why do these stories matter to me, a daughter of diaspora? What do they tell me about myself? Serena believes that fiction and art is a way to bridge memory––a way for us to see ourselves as being part of the world and a larger historical continuity. In other words, art has the power to make real.
Christina Duan (also known as just Duan) was a 2020 -2021 RRR fellow and is a co-leader for RRR’s fifth year. They are a Chinese-American student at Barnard College trying to discover who they are and hope to create spaces where others can grow comfortably into themselves. Recently, they’ve been immersed in traditional lion dance (even though it is very hard!), photography, the written word, and helping out where they can. They believe that art is an act of resilience in and of itself – I was here, I am here, and I will be here – and they are hoping to carry that quality into their activism and their relationship with Asian culture. Their final project centered around family and cultural melancholia; they are interested in Asian mental health and healing, as well as traditional art practices and urban design. Recently they’ve been struggling with personal choices and diverging paths.
Kaitlyn Lee is a co-leader for RRR’s fifth cohort, and former 2020-2021 RRR fellow. She is a Burmese-Chinese American, a community organizer, and a senior at Hunter College High School. Her final project was rooted in themes of family, lineage, and matriarchy. Driven by love, Kaitlyn is excited to keep working with the WOW Project to foster connection, community care, and solidarity through art and activism.
Emily Chow Bluck is an artist, educator, and organizer based in New York City. These three identities coalesce to shape her evolving art praxis rooted in performance, collaboration, dialogue, and community building. As an eternal foodie, much of her work has manifested as performative installations centering food as a vehicle to unpack the politics around incarceration / self-determination, value / consumption, and invasion / migration. She's returned to RRR as the 2021-2022 teaching artist out of her love for working with young people, Chinatown, and traditional paper and sculptural crafts. To see Emily's work, visit emilychowbluck.com.
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Resist Recycle Regenerate 2023-2024
Resist Recycle Regenerate is a youth program that seeks to intersect art and activism through building women-centric leadership within the Chinatown community. RRR’s youth mentorship program model promotes young women as leaders and role models to inspire growth and leadership development in their peers through art-making. Former fellows can become program leaders, mentoring and guiding the next cohort of younger fellows.
Following an internal year of pause, Fall 2023 brought the momentous restart of RRR for its sixth year, under a revitalized curriculum created by RRR alums Serena Yang, Bridget Li, and Vivian Yi. The 2023-2024 cohort was made up of six fellows ages 16 to 22: Emma Hua, Vicki Li, Max McCall, My Ahn Phan, Sonia Tsang, and Sasa Yung; and a leadership team comprised of Program Director Yuki Haraguchi, Coordinator and RRR alumna Angela Chan, Program Leaders Alicia Kwok and Fanny Li, and Teaching Artist Joy Freund; all prior interns.
The program is organized into three main phases: the first phase focuses on situating fellows’ within RRR’s history and intent. Fellows learn about why RRR was created and larger concepts such as gentrification, histories of art and activism in Chinatown, and “place-based” work and place-keeping. Fellows also learn how to make confetti paper with materials collected from past Lunar New Year parades. This phase culminates in a collaborative project where fellows explore how their personal histories and Chinatown’s history interact and shape one another.
The second phase revolves around a group project designed and led by the program’s Teaching Artist, building on the connections between art-making and political education. The phase closes out with WOW’s Lunar New Year programming and the “regeneration ceremony,” which celebrates the fellows’ group project and gives them an opportunity to reflect on what they have learned thus far. This ceremony is also an opportunity to emphasize the generational nature of RRR as fellows collect confetti for the next year’s cohort.
The third phase is grounded in the fellows’ individual projects, an opportunity for fellows to synthesize the skills, experiences, and interests that have been fostered throughout the year. Fellows are given a materials budget and guided through the process by the leaders and teaching artist. The project must incorporate the recycled LNY confetti and be related to RRR’s central concepts (e.g. place, identity, history), but fellows otherwise have creative freedom over the final outcome. This phase also includes at least 2 community art-making workshops led by the fellows. The program culminates in a showcase and celebration that provides a space for the fellows and program leaders to collectively reflect on their growth and development as artists, young leaders, and community members who are invested in the past, present, and future of Chinatown.
RRR 2023-2024 Leadership Team
Joy Freund (they/them) is a multimedia creative adopted from Jiangsu, China, raised and living on unceded Lenape land/Brooklyn, New York. They completed a BA in Media Studies in 2022 and use their artistic practice as means of unpacking themes including grief, belonging, language, ancestry, love, nation, gender, and embodiment. Their thesis project was a collection of four short comics processing their experiences as an adoptee and can be read on Issuu. Other mediums of interest include collage, painting, photography, and poetry. They are interested in works that play with the divisions between mediums and raise anticapitalist, anti-imperial approaches to media analysis and media making. They started with WOW as a volunteer in 2019, had the pleasure of interning and coordinating programming from 2020-2021, and are honored to serve as the 2023-2024 RRR Teaching Artist.
Alicia Kwok is a co-leader for RRR’s 2023-2024 cohort and a former Public Programs intern at WOW. She is a second/third-generation resident of Manhattan’s Chinatown, currently trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do with a degree in being pedantic about Asian American literature. She has a lot of opinions about late-2000s off-Broadway musicals, and also about how understanding the specifics of one’s relationship to heritage and history is an essential part of becoming politically aware. Above all, she’s very excited to support this year’s cohort in their development as artists, and in their exploration of the relationship between the personal and the political.
Angela Chan is the coordinator for RRR’s sixth year. She joined RRR as a second-year fellow, returned as co-leader for the program’s third year, and co-coordinator for RRR’s fourth-year cohort. Angela is excited to return to the W.O.W. space to continue creating a space for youth to reflect on their identities in the movement for social change through the intersection of arts and activism. Her love for the W.O.W. community and Chinatown inspired her to return, as the RRR program provided her the support and inspiration she needed to find her own voice as a young Asian American woman. Angela is currently exploring how digital arts and data visualization can play a role in influencing activism and sparking meaningful conversations in create lasting changes within Chinatown and the larger community.
Fanny Li is a Brooklyn native who first joined The WOW Project as a media intern. After navigating life's twists and turns, she finds her way back to Wing on Wo. As a co-leader for RRR’s 2023-2024 cohort, she is humbled and thrilled to help nurture a lasting lineage of youths who are curious about themselves and their connection with the community. She is especially looking forward to exploring human-centered design in relation to space, art, and activism. In her free time, Fanny can be found reading Asian American literature, working on her secret art project, or taking pictures of unsuspecting dogs on the streets.
RRR 2023-2024 Fellows
Emma Hua (she/her) is a Chinese-American junior in high school. She is a passionate artist who loves sculpture, drawing, and photography. She is excited by the opportunity to explore her true artistic voice and explore her identity further through the WOW Project's RRR Fellowship.
Vicki Li (she/her) is a second generation Taiwanese-American and a senior at high school. Her hobbies are playing viola, listening to music and recently has gotten into film photography and tarot card reading. She is passionate about Asian-American activism and is ready to reclaim histories and to build solidarity with other marginalized communities. Through the RRR program, Vicki hopes to combine the power of the arts and activism to bring about social change that is needed for the community.
Max McCall (he/him) is a biracial Taiwanese senior in high school. He loves cooking comforting dishes and listening to music (especially jazz), and he always seeks to learn as many new things as he can about the world. In joining RRR, Max hopes to develop confidence in his Asian-American and queer identities and learn how to contribute to the communities he is a part of, especially by applying art as a tool of activism and love.
My Anh Phan (she/her) is a Vietnamese-American senior currently attending High School in Queens. She loves art and has a passion for painting and many other mediums of art. Besides being an artist, she’s also a major foodie and looking to find amazing food places within NYC. By joining RRR, My Anh hopes to educate and advocate for others while exploring what it means to be Asian American.
Sonia Tsang (they/them) is a first generation Chinese-American, studying commercial photography at LaGuardia Community College. Their interests consist of bouldering, collecting CDs, and spending hours at the photo book store. They are excited to be gaining new perspectives from their peers. They are hoping to teach and engage folks about the intersectionality between art and activism. In addition to that, Sonia hopes to become a better storyteller in their future photography work.
Sasa Yung (he/they) is a 19-year-old transmasc Chinese and Vietnamese American artist currently in their third year at Parsons School of Design for Illustration, as well as an upcoming performance artist and puppeteer. They aspire to utilize their creative voice to directly speak out against active racial injustice and violence, as well as nurture the power of Asian American stories.