Asian-American Artists, Now Activists, Push Back Against Hate

Newly spurred to action to combat bias, they generate subway posters, leverage social media, stage Zoom webinars. “Our community couldn’t take being invisible any longer,” one artist says.

Early in the pandemic, word started to travel among Asian-American artists: racist attacks were on the rise. Jamie Chan told a fellow artist, Kenneth Tam, about getting kicked out of an Uber pool ride by the driver who noticed her sniffling. Anicka Yi, an artist based in New York, called Christine Y. Kim, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to talk about being spit at on a Manhattan street; Kim, in turn, recounted being accosted in a Whole Foods parking lot. Tam decided to start recording these incidents in a Google spreadsheet he named “We Are Not COVID.” It circulated on social media first among arts communities, then to wider audiences. Over the last several months, the document has filled up with reports ranging from microaggressions to outright violence. “I had assumed that things like this were going to start happening, but not so quickly, and not to people I knew,” Tam said in a phone interview. “It made me realize that I needed to educate myself and perhaps other people about it.”