Experience Chinatown 2024

Experience Chinatown is a festival organized by the Pao Arts Center to draw traffic to Boston’s Chinatown. I was commissioned by Pao along with other local artists to create murals on storefronts in Chinatown. This year’s prompt was “What are collective actions we can take for a healthy Chinatown?”

Community Garden highlights the beauty of urban community gardening as a symbol for collective resilience and community care. This mural is inspired by Chinatown Backyard, Chinatown’s community garden, and the collective care I have witnessed there. Gardeners sow seeds in the spring and nurture them as they grow into flourishing plants that feed them and their community. Community gardens are hubs for community care, as gardeners water eachothers’ plots, share growing tips, and spend time caring for their plants together. Community gardens provide an outdoor respit in the city for people to relax and reap the physical and mental benefits of gardening. Community gardens also increase food access and food sovereignty, and it allows imigrant communities to grow the culturally relevant food. In my mural, vegetables overflow from traditional Asian pottery wares as an ode to the creativity and adaptability of container gardening I have witnessed in my own Korean American family as well as other Asian diasporic households. Photos by Mel Taing.