![]() “His proposal really does a beautiful job at connecting us to workers of today and the past.” “When we see people and we make eye contact, I think we are more aware of our shared humanity and shared experiences,” she said. They are particularly powerful, she said, because they will not be on plinths, but at eye level. Karin Goodfellow, Boston’s director of public art, said the new sculptures will help correct the “dearth of artworks representing the Asian American experience” in the city’s collection. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s office was so impressed with Tsen’s proposal that it allocated an additional $1 million as part of the city’s five-year capital plan. In 2015, he put together a temporary public art project called “Flagging Chinatown” that involved colorful flags with words such as “We want,” “Housing,” “Reclaim,” and “Chinatown” in English and Chinese. For “Home Town” in 2016, he took photo portraits of people in Chinatown along with 12 life-size cutouts he had painted of past residents, based on historical photos from the community’s archives.Įarlier this year, he received a $10,000 grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts that allowed him to take the first steps toward the Chinatown workers project he pictured. Since then, Tsen has directed public art projects across the country, including several in Chinatown. Around that time, activists in Chinatown began protesting the urban development and gentrification that was pricing residents out of the neighborhood, and Tsen was inspired to take part, painting two prominent murals in the 1980s. ![]() In the ’70s and ’80s, he became known for the anti-war posters and booklets he designed for activist groups. They also seemed put off by his long hair and leather jacket.Īfter earning a studio diploma in 1961, getting married, and starting a family, Tsen made ends meet by working as a billboard painter and as a movie projectionist at local cinemas. At that time, most Chinatown residents had immigrated from the Taishan region of Guangdong province and spoke a dialect Tsen did not know. When Tsen moved to Boston and began studying at SMFA at Tufts, he lived on Beacon Hill and did not feel a connection to Chinatown. “That’s when she accepted that I could be an artist.” His mother looked at him with new respect. “That was the beginning-I learned to look, to seriously get down to the hard work of working as an artist,” Tsen recalled. After lunch, they would visit another museum. Every morning, they went to the Uffizi Gallery, where Tsen would do charcoal drawings of classical statues. His mother-partly out of guilt for all the time she spent away, he expects-then took him to Florence for two months to recuperate. When Tsen caught tuberculosis at age 20, he had to spend weeks in the hospital. They lived in Paris and London, although Tsen’s mother was often absent, traveling for her art. When Tsen was 3, a failed assassination attempt on political leader Wang Jingwei, a close family friend, left his father dead and his mother injured.ĭespite the loss of his father, Tsen lived a comfortable life even after war forced his family to leave China. His father was a poet, and his mother was a classically trained artist. Tsen’s respect for that blue-collar heritage is strong, even if his own immigration followed a different path. ![]() “It’s very important for the community to recognize the hard work they have done-and their aspirations,” he said. ![]() They still have this background of not being regarded.” Through the statues, Tsen plans to honor the efforts of Chinatown’s workers, both past and current, and imbue them with dignity. Even if these descendants earn college degrees or doctorates, Tsen said, “they often feel ashamed of themselves. When Tsen moved to Boston in the 1950s, many of the Chinese people he met were children or grandchildren of laundry or restaurant workers.
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