From Art to Activism, Ivy Wong uses etymology and images to craft signs of protest

Walk through Chinatown today, and you might see some colorful bilingual posters in the windows of upstairs apartments and ground-level businesses with slogans reading “Chinatown Is My Home, We Are Here To Stay,” and “Chinatown Is Not For Sale.” These posters, designed by a young visual artist named Ivy Wong, bring attention to the mixed-use nature of central Chinatown as well as the concerns of both residential and small business tenants who worry about development-driven displacement.

I recently spoke with Ivy, who works for the Center for Art and Community Partnership at Mass College of Art, and has a strong focus on communications and collaborative work with communities. She discussed how she is working to develop her skills as an artist as well as her connections to the Chinatown community.

Sampan: Where did you grow up?

Wong: I grew up in New York and Connecticut. And then I went to college in New Jersey and then I moved to Boston after college. So, I stayed mostly in New England. A lot of my family is in New England, but my mom is an immigrant from Taiwan. She came to New York when she was three with her family. And my dad was born in Brooklyn; he actually has roots in New York Chinatown. His grandfather used to own a business like a dry goods store.

Sampan: Tell me about how you became an artist.

Wong: I guess I’ve always had art as a part of what I do. My degree is in cultural anthropology and I minored in Chinese language studies, but I kind of fell into art education through (working at) Red Oak. There’s always visual arts and engagement with young kids because, you know, they’re learning literacy and there’s lots of pictures. They’re very stimulated by color and texture. So. I don’t know. I kind of fell into all of that through the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, through working in Chinatown, and I loved working in Chinatown.

Since I started working at Mass Art, I am surrounded by other artists, by students who are artists, people who are staff who are also artists like me, and that really inspired me to continue and to hone some of my crafts. And so I chose to take a letterpress class. I’ve so been trained on the computer, you know, whereas letterpress kind of takes you back a couple decades and, you know, pushes you to rethink how and where you put things on the page. Yeah. And so, you know, communications is one of my art forms or graphic design. I’ve also been doing different kinds of print making and I also do quilting. So I’ve been trying a lot of different things and learning a lot being at Mass Art.

Sampan: How did you start working on the Chinatown posters?

Wong: One of the things we do every month is we plan different activities for students to learn how to engage with community. So that was my responsibility within the past year, and I chose to focus an arc of three of our sessions around the Chinatown community.

So, in planning and thinking about connecting with people and taking this class in letterpress, we had to pick a theme, and I was really interested in, you know, the protests that are ongoing in many Chinatowns, and specifically the Boston one, because I knew a bit of history from when I worked in Boston Chinatown. And so what the community organizations and the residents wrote on the posters is really interesting to me. And that’s when I started doing a little bit more digging and research, learning about the messages that people are putting up. And I feel like also I’ve been feeling a bit more connected to incorporating Chinese in my graphic design.

I’ve been trying to use my art as a learning process for me to explore more about my heritage, and, you know, looking up the posters, some of them only have Chinese on it. And looking at the origins of some words, I’m really interested in etymology as well, and so I’m making those connections and creating bilingual posters. And so through my art, I choose to learn about different things that I’m interested in, and I want to connect more with these elements.

Sampan: Your whole art practice seems to have been very rooted in communications.

Wong: Yeah, I think it’s been rooted in being around people, you know, like in college, finding these communities with social clubs at school. In the classroom, working with communities of a lot of Chinese immigrants and Asian American families and figuring out what they’re interested in and changing curriculum based around that. And then working with the Center for Art and Community Partnerships. We do a lot of art related collaborations, whether it’s employment or creating print materials for our office or designing programs for Spark, the art mobile to kind of go out into the community thinking about the communities that they touch, thinking about the people that they will interact with and how it can empower them or embrace their creativity, the possibilities of what they can do. That’s what I felt art has felt like for me. It’s emboldened me to do more and I hope that other people feel the same way.

Sampan: Did you have a goal in mind when you started working on the Chinatown posters?

Wong: I guess at the very beginning, my goal was just to learn letterpress, and to learn about what Boston Chinatown is doing with their activism work. Each time I go back to Chinatown, I see so many changes. I’m glad of the artistic practice that I’ve grown in, but I’m also glad that I have a way in to communicate with, you know, community members who work and live in Chinatown because I felt like that was missing when I first started. I’m glad I’m transitioning more into a phase where I’m more interactive.

To talk with people I think is really important. Sometimes just doing like research online is not always as fruitful as having a conversation with an elder who lives in Chinatown. Those elements are really important, not just going thinking you know everything but having actions and reactions.

One of the things I was thinking when I was making this poster project was I want to make sure that residents don’t stop making posters. Like I’m not trying to replace that. I’m showing that you know the essence of what they’re doing and their actions and their feelings, and that the work that they’re doing, you know, shouldn’t go unrecognized. And kind of combining it with, you know, my artistic talents and things that I’m learning. Don’t stop making posters. Don’t stop making that work.