Research
We believe that our work supports connections, social cohesion, well-being, and engagement in our community. We are committed to contributing to academic and popular knowledge to why arts, culture, and creativity arts are essential. Since our opening in 2017, we have participated in the following research on the Asian, immigrant and Boston Chinatown community.
Impact Report by Data + Soul Research
Data+Soul Research in collaboration with Pao Arts Center, 2025
Pao Arts Center’s 2024 Impact Report highlights our impact on the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in Chinatown and Greater Boston from January 2024 through February 2025. With our evaluation partners at Data+Soul Research, we explored our impact related to five goals: building relationships of care, instilling joy and purpose, fostering a sense of belonging, nurturing collective action, and cultivating a vibrant Chinatown. The report covers findings from an annual survey along with select program highlights, and pays special attention to our programming geared towards creating spaces for community building and social and cultural connection, a lack of which are often risk factors for public health concerns such as poor mental health and onset of gambling behavior. This report documents our impact and sets our resolve to continue the good work for the years to come.
At Home in Chinatown: Collaborative Public Art for Community Change
Heang Leung Rubin, Jeena Chang, Leslie Condon, Cynthia Woo
Published in 2023
Arts, culture, and creative practice are important tools for healing collective trauma. They can help weave together frayed threads in a community, promote connection and social belonging, and help change how we use and think about public space. Public art can be a vehicle through which a community expresses its vision for its future and through which community members express ownership over their neighborhood.
Between 2019-2022, Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC) and Pao Arts Center (the Center) created the Residence Lab (ResLab) program, collaborating to bring arts, culture, and creative practice in support of artistic and community development goals to Chinatown. What began as an experiment and prototype in 2019, grew into an innovative, unique residency for artists and residents alike, creating change agents for the community and planting the seeds for neighborhood change.
Critical Ambiguity: The Performance of Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown, 2017–2018
Yizhou Huang
Published Fall 2022 in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Volume 8, Issue 2, pp.144-169.
As the first community-based arts center in Boston’s Chinatown, Pao Arts Center invites further discussion about the intricate relationship between art, gentrification, and the building of minority communities. Based on the data collected in a year-long research project, this article examines Pao Arts Center’s performance in its inaugural year, 2017-2018. Using performance studies methods and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, I argue Pao Arts Center takes on a layered performance of critical ambiguity. The center’s spatial relationship to Boston’s inner city embodies a specific urban history that has produced and shaped the Chinatown community while its artistic practice performs a pan-Asian identity based on an open interpretation of Chinese-ness.
Arts, Culture, and Creativity as a Strategy for Countering the Negative Social Impacts of Immigration Stress and Gentrification
Carolyn Leung Rubin, Virginia Rall Chomitz, Cynthia Woo, Giles Li, Susan Koch-Weser, Peter Levine
Published May, 2021 Health Promotion Practice, Volume 22, Issue 1_suppl, Pages: 131S - 140S
A collaboration project between academic researchers, Pao Arts Center, and BCNC which investigated the role of arts, culture, and creativity in supporting social connection in the wake of gentrification in Boston Chinatown. The research investigates the role of a community arts center in an ethnic neighborhood that is under stress due to gentrification. The research was funded by ArtPlace America, Tufts Collaborates, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Untold Stories, Unsung Heroes: Using Visual Narratives to Resist Historical Exclusion, Exoticization, and Gentrification in Boston Chinatown
Carolyn Leung Rubin, Loan Thi Dao, Izabela Villanueva, Cynthia Woo
Published September, 2020, Journal of Folklore and Education. 7:93-111.
An article presenting the Inside Chinatown project which allowed current and former residents and workers in Boston Chinatown to use photography and visual storytelling. The participants were able to create their own stories about the current moment in Chinatown’s history.
CAN THE ARTS COMBAT THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF GENTRIFICATION?: THE PAO ARTS CENTER IN BOSTON’S CHINATOWN
Carolyn Leung Rubin, Virginia Rall Chomitz, Cynthia Woo, Giles Li, Susan Koch-Weser, Peter Levine
Published in 2019
Pao Arts Center is a two-year old cultural institution in Boston’s Chinatown. It was founded on the assumption that the Chinatown community has offered social and health benefits to Asian- American and Asian immigrant residents in the Boston area due to its community cohesion. Chinatown faces rapid and powerful gentrification that disrupts community cohesion and could, in turn, cause harmful social outcomes. However, the arts can strengthen people’s connection to their community, thus mitigating the damage done by gentrification.
In this study, a highly interdisciplinary team of social and health scientists, humanities scholars, and community residents observed and analyzed art performances and collected data from artists and audiences, community members, and key informants to generate a methodologically innovative case study. The resulting narrative largely confirms the assumptions on which Pao Arts Center was founded and lends support to the thesis that The Center builds community cohesion, although the study also identifies nuances and complexities. The impact of this new Center on the whole community remains to be seen.