Moon Gazing: A Call to Ancestors

This September, millions of people of across the world will celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival by gathering together as family and in community to gaze at the bright full, harvest moon and eat delicious food, including fruit and special moon cakes filled with red bean paste and other sweet treats. It’s also a time to remember family and loved ones who are no longer with us. For those who are separated from family members, whether because of distance, geography, or death, it can be a time to reflect and remember.

As Asians living in the United States, the deep traditions of cultural holidays and their meaning are sometimes lost, minimized or re-interpreted. ‘Moon Gazing: A Call to Ancestors‘ is an exhibition designed to bring ancestral heritage into conversation with the present. Inspired by the work of the late painter, printmaker, and professor Chen Lok Lee (1927 – 2020), the exhibit will explore contemporary expressions of identity for Asian and Asian American artists with Philadelphia connections and call into conversation the dynamic tension that underrepresented and marginalized artists with hyphenated identities face in creating art. The exhibit explores the expectations of what is considered an authentic representation of Asian art, who Asian and Asian American artists get to be, and what they get to create based on the limitations or boundaries that they face in the field.

This fully immersive and multi-sensory experience will feature soundscapes that capture the joy and longing in the voices of an Asian American family; the visual works will provide faces, images, and expressions of ancestors long gone and those who have recently passed; newly created visual images that capture the exploration of identity, spiritual longing and the impermanence of all things; and stories told from the voices of those who are making sense and meaning of the distance and gaps that we feel as those separated from our homelands and longing for connection.

Chen Lok Lee, whose selected works are the centerpieces for the exhibit, developed his art over more than 50 years across three continents. Lee’s work will be in conversation with the following artists, bringing the past into the present, and causing us to examine what has or has not moved forward for artists of Asian descent.

Moon Gazing: A Call to Ancestors will be on view in Gallery 2 at Da Vinci Art Alliance starting September 5 until September 22. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, September 7, from 4-7 pm.