Video Matcha in Asian Art Museum

Greetings,

On Thursday August 26, 2012, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco CA held their summer event, MATCHA, in conjunction with SpaceBi. The event was entitled, “Taking Up Space,” and it showcased over 28 Asian American artists’ work covering various art forms. I had the privileged to take part in this event through an invitation from my buddy and fellow artist, Derek Chung. His project was to bring Asian American voices to the screen via Karaoke videos. Read more about it at Asian American Karaoke Project.

One criteria for the video was to include how I identified as being an Asian American. As I was conceptualizing for this, I was reminded of my Asian and Asian Pacific American action figure collection. The lack of representation through various toy lines led me to become an avid collector of Asian and Asian Pacific American action figures, dolls included. My current collection contains 248 figures and it’s still growing! The video I made was put together by gathering various action figure commercials that were based on Asian characters or played by Asian or Asian Pacific Americans. While making this video, I noticed that I was able to visually play with these action figures, because the clips were interacting with each other just like the tangible toys were from the toy chest of my youth. The song I used was from an artist you may recognize, Dune Tran! Dune was very kind and supportive of this project and allowed me to use her track, “Kites” from her album. There are two versions of the track for the video, an instrumental and a sing-a-long.

Check out the Video!

-Jason