What does it mean to see, to belong, and to make place visible? The exhibition Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond invites visitors to look at Washington, D.C., with fresh eyes. Produced by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and installed in a former gift shop at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, its windows open directly onto Chinatown.
D.C.’s Chinatown first took shape in the 1880s and ’90s as a small hub of laundries, tea houses, and restaurants located along Pennsylvania Avenue between Second and Four-and-a-Half streets NW. In 1930, the community was forcibly relocated to the area around H and Seventh streets NW. Today, Chinatown faces rapid gentrification—longstanding restaurants have closed to make room for luxury hotels, leaving only nine small businesses still operating in the neighborhood.
Sightlines draws connections between Chinatown’s architecture, community activism, art, and the everyday lives of Asian Americans in the nation’s capital. It’s organized aroundthree anchor objects: an architectural drawing of the Friendship Archway designed by Alfred Liu, Terence Nicholson’s Safety Jacket: A Mourning in Chinatown, and Cita Sadeli aka MISS CHELOVE’s mural Rise Up! D.C. Stands United Against Hate. These became the heart of the exhibition, each representing a different “sightline” into D.C. Asian American experiences. Curated by Sojin Kim from the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the exhibition opened on September 7, 2024, and will close November 30, 2025.
In this conversation, Kim reflects on how the exhibition came together, what it reveals about D.C., and why maps, martial arts, and murals can all be ways of seeing what’s been there all along.
What is Sightlines, and how did it come about?
The title Sightlines plays a lot with the idea of what’s seen and what isn’t. It’s an exhibition about making people more conscious of the historical presence of Asian Americans in D.C. It’s about their connections to D.C.’s places and their involvement in D.C. communities.
Through exhibitions, such as this one, along with education initiatives and public programs, the Asian Pacific American Center endeavors to bring out stories that show the diversity of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities. Sightlines is one of hopefully a series of exhibitions that will be produced in various spaces across the Smithsonian. The next exhibition will be on view at the National Museum of American History.
The room in which Sightlines is installed was not designed to be a gallery. It was a bookstore for many years, actually. It has four windows that are very large. Big windows that let natural light in are not great spaces for galleries, but it’s actually fantastic for us because its windows look directly out onto G Street, overlooking the historical Chinatown neighborhood. It became a great spot to connect people to where they stand, to reorient them to where they are, to make the surrounding Chinatown area more visible to people who might not actually see the cues that reveal it to be a neighborhood that has a historically Asian American community.
You’ve described Sightlines as being very specific to Washington, D.C. Why was that important?
This is D.C. It’s not New York; it’s not Los Angeles; it’s not Honolulu; it’s not San Francisco. Its Asian American history has not been as well-documented or presented as the Asian American communities in other regions. D.C. is not a city that’s commonly associated with a historical Asian American population.
So Sightlines is a way to have people see D.C. a little bit differently, to see that there are different types of people who have come here, to show Asian Americans not as newcomers but as people who have these deep generational connections to this city and to other people here. The exhibition offers sightlines into a local community, a hometown; and then, for Smithsonian APAC, it’s about showing that Asian Americans are not a monolith.
How did you begin to organize such a big idea into a physical exhibition?
When you first conceive an exhibition, it begins much bigger. Initial descriptions of what it might be had like seven stories, and then we were like, “There’s no way we can get seven stories into that space.” So then it was like, “Okay, maybe five.” Then, the concept kept shrinking.
We had three really great potential anchor objects that we could place in the center of the gallery that could serve as portals to three clusters of stories—about place, identity, and tradition. People go in and out of galleries really fast, and if they saw nothing else, they would at least see these three cases and maybe learn a little bit about the people who produced the items in them, and we figured that would be enough.
How do the stories of Alfred Liu and the Eastern Wind Group connect?
Alfred Liu was an architect, and he felt that Chinatown didn’t look like a Chinatown. People made fun of it because it was so small. It was neglected and overlooked. Some didn’t even know there was a Chinese population. As an architect, someone involved in shaping the built landscape, he proposed strategies for supporting the neighborhood’s visibility that included such things as design guidelines for adding Asian ornamental flourishes to everything from lamp posts to building facades. It also meant creating an iconic landmark that would mark the neighborhood as Chinatown.
That’s the idea of the Friendship Archway. If you come up from the Metro at Gallery Place/Chinatown, and you look up, you’re like, “Oh, I know where I am. Yeah, this must be Chinatown,” because there’s something physically there that represents Asian-ness. This was built in the 1980s through a sister-city collaboration between the D.C. and Beijing city governments. So that’s Alfred Liu.
In contrast, Eastern Wind was a group of young Asian Americans coming up in the 1960s and ’70s, and many of them felt like there were few people who understood their history or particularly cared about it. They may not have grown up feeling proud of their heritage because they lived in an area without a critical mass of Asians. But then starting in the 1960s, you have an Asian American movement that’s swelling up around the country. So among Eastern Wind’s projects in the 1970s was to represent the significance of Chinatown, to make it more visible to people who might not know it’s there: to show that there was a history that connected them to this place. For example, they produced a mural that speaks of the role of Chinese immigrant workers in the building of the transcontinental railroad, but it’s also about the present-day Chinatown, and it also represents elders and young people.
The mural was done in the 1970s, before the archway was created. But both functioned as community markers. Liu’s archway sort of said, “Here we are. This is Chinatown. You cannot deny that it exists because there is this archway.” It marks the neighbborhood as a destination. And then for these young Asian Americans from Eastern Wind—who are high school and college students—it’s like, “We want people to know that Chinatown is about a community of people who have deep roots and connections to both D.C. as a place but also the country.”
Why did you decide to use Cita Sadeli’s mural as an anchor?
The mural that we use of Cita’s in the center of the gallery speaks to more recent social contexts. We identified all of the three anchor objects because they specifically map to a major intersection in Chinatown, the corner of Seventh and H streets. This particular piece was located in Chinatown—wheatpasted onto a boarded-up storefront in June 2020 when protests and counterprotests were breaking out in many cities after the killing of George Floyd.
This piece expresses the artist’s message of solidarity—it is expressive of a message and a community that extends beyond Chinatown. This mural introduces a section of the gallery, Visualizing Identity, that offers a sightline that takes the vantage of an individual artist. These stories explore how an individual draws their sense of identity and community from multiple sources and relationships.
Cita’s mother was from the island of Java in Indonesia, and Cita grows up in a particular moment, and she becomes involved in a lot of different communities, which includes the street art community of the 1990s, different forms of local music communities and subcultures, and groups held together by shared political values—in addition to the Javanese culture, Indonesian culture she experiences through her mother and relatives and other organizations. So in this section, we try to show how Cita’s artwork maps her multiple communities and solidarities.
Another anchor is Terence Nicholson’s Safety Jacket: A Mourning in Chinatown. How did that come into play?
I wanted to do a section on martial arts because it’s a really great way to connect to the idea of ethnicity and heritage and race but also break the notion of “community” out of those confines. Because martial arts in D.C. is so diverse, the landscape of people who participate in it, I wanted to be able to tell that story about how Asian teachers came and taught and helped disseminate Asian martial arts in D.C. Through that participation, you end up with these interesting communities of practice who are bound together through their love and their participation in the arts, and their relationships to one another, not because they live in the same neighborhood necessarily or because they share the same ethnic heritage or race.
Terence Nicholson’s sculpture Safety Jacket is a fairly recent work. His teacher, C.C. Liu, had a studio on Seventh Street in Chinatown, and he was Terence’s first teacher. He became like a grandfather to him, and the artist had spent many, many days inside the studio. He got a call one morning, and someone said that their sifu [teacher] was being evicted. Liu gave Terence Nicholson some of the materials that had been put out from the studio—like the banner for the school, and the kung fu sashes—and I think that Terence for a while felt like, “Oh my God, I’m supposed to do something with this. What’s my responsibility?”
He talked to another kung fu teacher from Chinatown, Raymond Wong, who said to him something to the effect of, “The school is within you.” Meaning that he shouldn’t worry about what to do with the stuff so much as what he could make of his experiences, knowledge, and relationships.
In addition to being a martial artist, Terence is a musician and visual artist, so eventually one of the things he did was make a visible form out of that experience. It represents his feelings about the neighborhood, a changing landscape, and his experiences there, but it’s also an expression of his relationship to his teacher and his martial arts brothers and sisters.
What was your approach to curating this exhibition, and how is it different from curating programming at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival?
Curating involves connecting the dots, finding throughlines across a number of different things, so that it tells hopefully some kind of cogent story.
For an exhibition, you have to work within certain formal obligations. For example, if you borrow something from someone for display, you commit to returning it to them in the same shape. You have to put it in a space that is climate-controlled. The lighting is controlled so that things don’t fade. With Cita’s stuff, for example, we created facsimiles of certain paper items because we did not want to leave them out longer than six months.
What that means is that for curating a static exhibition that’s going to be up for a long duration of time, the timeline and structure for production is very specific and controlled. You must know what your content is going to be and have everything by a certain deadline because everything must be printed and conserved and installed by this period of time. And then once it’s up, that’s it.
With the Festival, you’re working on something that’s ephemeral and and in some cases spontaneous. We have to assemble images and write text for signage, but a really strong focus for curators is to design for experiences and performances and discussions and interactions with human beings in real time. When you curate the Festival, there are fewer things related to content that are fixed, and instead you are trying to create spaces and opportunities not just in the physical way that the spaces are designed but also in terms of the timing of things, in terms of who is there with whom. It’s about creating opportunities for things to happen that you cannot predict but that you hope could lead to something.
My feeling about exhibitions or any project we do is that they’re the beginnings. People think of them as being the culmination of research, but I don’t ever think of them like that. I really feel like they open the conversation to new directions and hopefully more research. That’s sort of what I feel like anytime we do a Festival program, for example, because it generates new conversations and prompts new questions.
Similarly for Sightlines, by putting a photograph on the wall or an item in a case, suddenly people come up, and they’re like, “Oh, you know what? I can tell you a story about this.” You realize that because you put something out in the world, it then opens up a whole new series of directions and information and knowledge that you didn’t have before. I hope it generates more discussion about D.C., D.C. local communities, and Asian Americans in D.C.
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I was fortunate enough to go on a fabulous tour led by Kim and get an in-depth look at Sightlines. If you are in the area, make sure not to miss it before the end of the month, or explore the Sightlines Atlas online.
Sebastian Barajas is an intern in the Folklife Storytellers Workshop and the Mother Tongue Film Festival, and a recent art history graduate from The University of Texas at Austin.
