Beyond the Archive: Art, Identity, and Chinese Diaspora - WASHINGTON DC

Join us for a discussion with Chinese American artists across the US as they investigate how their identity impacts their work.

Overview

Join us for a conversation with Chinese diasporic artists Bz Zhang, Evelyn Hang Yin, Connie Zheng, and SK Tsang as they share their current and past work and reflect on how identity shapes the stories we tell. Each artist will discuss how they've navigated (or worked outside of) historical institutions and art spaces to create work that challenges inherited narratives and imagines new futures for Chinese diasporic communities in the United States. This discussion will be followed by an in-person art activity.

This event is held in collaboration with the GIVE FACE 给面子 (Gěimiànzi) exhibition and the Yolo County Historic Collection.

GIVE FACE 给面子 (Gěimiànzi) is an interdisciplinary exhibition unearthing and regrounding past, present, and future narratives of Chinese diaspora in the Sacramento Valley in the sweeping and ever-expanding story of what we currently call California. Historical objects trace the impact of Chinese Americans on Yolo County through the things they left behind, while contemporary artworks woven throughout the exhibit call our attention to their lived experiences, intimacies, and complexities. Using both documentation and speculation, artist Bz Zhang’s work creates dialog between Western ideas and a Chinese-diasporic cultural inheritance and offers ways to “give face” to (that is, to honor or show due respect for) Chinese ancestors in the US West. The stories of Chinese diaspora in Yolo County and the US West span oceans and continents, and their contributions transcend our infrastructures (from railways to agriculture) into the social and cultural fabric of our nation.

The Yolo County Historical Collection is comprised of 11,000 objects which date from the 1830s to the 1930s. The collection includes textiles, agricultural equipment, paintings, archival materials, ephemera, photographs, archaeological items, tools, ceramics, household items, furniture, and personal items. This collection illustrates what life was like for early Yolo County residents. The Yolo County Historical Collection is displayed at the Gibson House and at Yolo County Library Branches.

Panelist Speakers

Bz Zhang

Bz Zhang 张迪 is an interdisciplinary artist, organizer, and educator from Lenapehoking (纽约 New York), 安徽 Anhui, and 山东 Shandong, currently based in Tovaangar (洛杉矶 Los Angeles). Through drawings, paintings, photographs, texts, objects, spaces, and maps, their work uses documentation and speculation to unravel cultural constructions (ideas of people, places, and things) and their physical constructions (whether birthed or built). Bz is also a licensed architect in California with degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University.

Evelyn Hang Yin

Evelyn Hang Yin is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Working at the intersection of personal and collective archives, Yin is invested in history, (dis)placement, diasporic memories and futures.

SK Tsang

SK Tsang is a community builder, filmmaker, and art director, as well as the first son of immigrants. He got his start in filmmaking working across development, editing, and acting.

His directing career unexpectedly began after winning the 2021 One Love national grant for a script about his youth and his experiences with toxic masculinity and violence. The film, Fight Night, premiered in high schools across America to spark conversations around connection and mental health.

For the past few years, he has led Dream State, a creative collective of third culture kids creating works and worlds where it is safe to dream. It has since grown into a community movement in the Bay Area. Their work explores the politics of dreaming: who gets to dream, who doesn’t, and why. In 2025, their takeover exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, Works-in-Progress, explored the American Dream and broke the museum’s single-day attendance record.

He loves creating lucky superstitions, collecting new phrases, playing basketball, thinking about the color red, and spending time with his sister, Samantha.

Connie Zheng

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker based out of xučyun (Berkeley, California). She uses multidisciplinary methods such as hand-drawn maps, analog animation, audiovisual installations, and participatory sculpture workshops to examine the intersections between public, personal and land-based knowledge, the geopolitics of labor, and the interplay between mythology and landscape. Her projects have been shown internationally, through venues such as the National Asian Culture Center (Gwangju, South Korea); Ilham Gallery (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia); Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA); and Esker Foundation (Calgary, AB, Canada). Her work is held in the collections of KADIST and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, and she was featured in Phaidon Press’ Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art (2025). She is currently a PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Zoom Option

Can't make it in person? No worries! Sign up with our Zoom registration: https://yolocounty.zoom.us/j/89760976441