Graphic by Mimi Zhang
Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams remembers and honors those who have come before us—blood, chosen, and place-based ancestors, those who have dreamed of our existence today. This multi-disciplinary exhibit activates Chinatown as a memory archive, a diasporic temple, a space for spiritual, ancestral, and communal refuge.
Related Programming
(Registration coming soon).
Ancestors of Chinatown: A Ceremony for Remembering, Healing, and Dreaming
Saturday, April 11 | 3:00 – 5:00 PM
Join us in opening the new exhibition with a collective ceremony that remembers and honors Boston Chinatown’s earliest group of immigrants who faced exclusions and neglect in Mount Hope Cemetery. We will tend to their stories, memories, and lineages through rituals while reflecting on our personal, collective hopes, and dreams.
Public Program: Performance Pilgrimages on the Immigrant History Trail
Saturday, May 16, 3:00 – 6:00 PM
Rain date: Sunday, May 17, 3:00 – 6:00 PM
Witness performance artists activate and care for the histories of Boston Chinatown along the Immigrant History Trail. Participants are invited to visit multiple performance sites across Boston Chinatown to find refuge and meditate on the deep histories embedded in the neighborhood.
About the Curators
Sung-Min Kim (she/her)
Sung-Min Kim is a scholar and curator based in Boston, MA. Her research examines Asian diasporic air travel as a metaphorical and material experience of untethering, belonging, grief, and futurity. Sung-Min has worked in Boston Chinatown in various community organizations and public art projects as a project manager, researcher, and youth worker. Her curatorial practice is centered around cultivating spaces for gathering and dialogue on pertinent issues of Asian American subjectivity, politics, and community. Sung-Min is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at Tufts University.
Photo credit: Sung-Min Kim
Wenxuan Xue (they/any)
Wenxuan Xue is a Boston-based theater and performance artist, curator, and educator. Their artistic practice is guided by grief work that disorients conditions of compulsory forgetting—of ancestral and spiritual lineages, queer kinships, and abundant relations to the earth.
Photo credit: Cat Lent
Supported By
Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams and its public programming are supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts' Public Art for Spatial Justice program, with funding from the Barr Foundation and the Fund for the Arts at NEFA.