$10 General Admission | $5 Student and Senior Admission | Free for MOCA Members
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to a captivating conversation with artist and photographer Pok Chi Lau. For more than five decades, Lau has traced the journeys of the Toishan/Taishan diaspora from the Pearl River Delta to Hong Kong and across the Americas. Grounded in his own family’s migrations dating back to the mid 19th century, his camera has documented kitchens, back rooms, storefronts, clubhouses, home altars, and streetscapes, spaces where language, labor, faith, and memory take root far from home.
In this talk, Lau will share images and stories from cities across North America and the Caribbean, including New York, San Francisco, Kansas City, Vancouver, and communities throughout Cuba. His work reveals how Toishanese migrants navigated language and cultural barriers, often confined to Chinatowns and precarious labor, while building intergenerational footholds. His recent projects extend into the legacies of colonial trade and the afterlives of slavery, exploring Afro Chinese lineages in Cuba. Together, his photographs offer a counter narrative to idealized depictions of Asian diasporas, highlighting the everyday resilience and transnational ties that bind families across oceans.
The discussion will be moderated by Herb Tam, MOCA’s Chief Curator and Senior Director of Exhibitions & Programming.
About Pok Chi Lau
Pok Chi Lau (b. 1950, Hong Kong) is a photographer and Professor Emeritus of PhotoMedia at the University of Kansas. He earned a BPA in Industrial Scientific Photography from Brooks Institute of Photography (1975) and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (1977). For more than five decades, his work has centered on global migration and the Chinese diaspora, with a particular focus on Cantonese communities. His research and photography span North America, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Togo (West Africa), and Vietnam, documenting the resilience, labor, faith, and adaptation of migrant families across generations. His work has been widely exhibited, published, and collected internationally. Learn more at pokchilau.com
