STAINED PLEXIGLASS
Prisca’s stained plexiglass installations invite viewers to bathe in light and color. Her pieces are most comfortable in community spaces where they can facilitate play and healing. When they leave, they carry the joy and resilience of that community to share with new friends.
NEWSSTAND LANTERN
2021 started with a crushing loss to Chinatown and opened with difficult few weeks in a difficult year. Friends and neighbors in Chinatown came together to celebrate the life of a beloved neighbor, Corky Lee by throwing a block party in his honor in the newsstand where he had his last exhibit. Commissioned by Think!Chinatown, “Newstand Lantern” honored the power of intergenerational community and was a thank you to Corky for his unwavering love for this neighborhood
CHINATOWN BLOCK PARTY
Chinatown Block Party is a monthly celebration of community care and creation. A collaboration between Think!Chinatown and 8OX SET, these parties feature local artists as well as guest DJs to create spaces for the whole family to dance in the streets to Canto and Mandopop from the 1940’s-00s!
LANDMARKS 地标式的听故事项目
Landmarks Storytelling project is an ongoing collection of memories from community members about their personal Chinatown landmarks, produced by T!C’s storytelling team lead, Rochelle Kwan. Explore Chinatown’s many pasts through these short audio stories at the very locations where personal histories unfurled. Artists Prisca Choe and Xiaoyin Xie bring the Landmarks storytelling project to life with onsite installations at 91 Bayard and 107 East Broadway.
LIGHT UP CHINATOWN
Hundreds of paper lanterns are glowing above Mott Street—between Canal and Bayard streets—casting a warm and inviting glow. Installed by the Light Up Chinatown Project, the new fixtures are intended to light up the street in these dark times, and also inspire New Yorkers and tourists to stop by and visit hurting restaurants and shops. Prisca led a team of neighborhood volunteers to inscribe and weatherproof and arrange these lanterns and they are still up over a year later!
SOUNDS NICE NYC POP UP
Sounds Nice NYC was a 5 week pop-up with over 60+ curated sound experiences designed to support the mental health of attendees. Prisca Installed REST and THE HEALER in the windows so their colorful reflections could fall on attendees as they healed.
MOON SQUARE
As part of post-Mid-autumn festivities, Chinatown Arts Week held an exhibition featuring works created within mooncake tins. In the spirit of the treasure boxes of small things, memories, and preserver of wishes that mooncake tins become after the holidays, artists shared their own treasures.
MASKS
While her plexiglass work was born out of community care and healing, her masks specifically isolated the body and explored the ways it housed and releasing grief. They plucked away the vulnerability of facial expressions and forced the wearer to focus only on the heat, pace, and closeness of their own breath as they expressed their pain. This exploration fell directly in the year prior to the pandemic when there was unresolved frustration at wellness spaces where healing practices of BIPOC ancestors were plundered and stripped of their historical and cultural contexts and pulled out of reach of their descendants. This was an intimate act of resistance to pull from the legacies they left in our bodies.
