Highlights Visual Arts Performing Arts Film/Media Written Arts Art News/ Opportunites Back to Top Highlights Would you like to hear a classical Indian music concert in a perfect acoustic space? Check out Pandit Vikash Maharaji who will play the sarod with his son on tabla in the lovely acoustic setting of the Chapel Performance Space [...]
Migrating to America as a child left Pei Ju Chou feeling like she existed between two generations—the first and second. So, she began referring to herself as being “1.5th generation”. Recently, the University of Washington student produced a documentary about her experience as a part of the 1.5 generation titled “Stuck on the Boat”. (You [...]
The work of Korean artist Boo Duck Lee has roots in two widely divergent eras. She makes sculpture of hanji, a paper made by hand in a tradition dating back thousands of years. She designs fabrics that are digitally printed using contemporary computer technology. Both are on display in the gallery at Kobo at Higo, [...]
He’s a Hollywood actor, businessman and family man. Yuji Okumoto starred in the 1986 film “Karate Kid 2” as the character Chozen, the antagonist to Ralph Macchio’s famous role. He currently resides in Seattle with his family and owns Kona Kitchen restaurant in North Seattle. He has been in other films since then, such as [...]
A comprehensive list of Arts Events happening around Seattle. Updated August 18th 2010.
There’s a popular term known as “a happy accident”, although a press screening gone awry hardly seems the setting for one. Several days ago as the lights dimmed and a reel began to un-spool, voices speaking Japanese along with English subtitles appeared onscreen. That shouldn’t have seemed strange except that the animated characters in the [...]
Bruce Beresford’s presentation of “Mao’s Last Dancer” appears to be all black and white, or perhaps the director wanted to tell a complicated story in a simplistic way. In any case, Beresford ends up with a good film that could have been a great film had he allowed a little more gray to seep through [...]
When we think back on the people who influenced our lives, we often remember our teachers. These individuals, perhaps in the school classroom or even outside in the “classroom” of daily living, endure as indelible impressions that shaped who we are today. Scholar Joseph Campbell in the PBS film “Mythos I: The Shaping of Our [...]
A comprehensive list of Arts Events happening around Seattle. Updated August 4th 2010.
If you are, like me, a relative newcomer to science writing, then you may find Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s “Naming Nature” the perfect introduction to a genre that may at first seem suited for those more scientifically minded. Far from esoteric, Yoon makes accessible the highly technical nature of her subject matter by focusing squarely on [...]
Ghosts are everywhere. Maggie Lee’s play “Kindred Spirits” demonstrates that, for good or ill, memories and the past can often cling to us, and shape how we view the present. Likewise, this season-opening world premiere production by local theatre company ReAct illuminates how our needs in the present influence how we remember the past. Set [...]
The plain gray cardboard box with a dated design of Christmas ornaments belied the treasures within – a dozen or so exquisitely carved and painted birds in miniature, meticulous to the tiniest of feathers, all carved by my Japanese grandfather during his internment in the Arizona desert in WWII. My journey to Washington DC to [...]
A comprehensive list of Arts Events happening around Seattle. Updated July 21st 2010.
When you enter “Migration”, artist Stephen Nguyen’s installation at Suyama Space, the first thing you see is a wall painted dark matte gray, almost black, pierced by dozen of holes, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it (see image above). Fist-sized and larger, the holes reveal steel studs, smashed wallboard, the gallery beyond, [...]
For novelist Jean Kwok, spending a decade of her life writing “Girl in Translation” in the attic of her home in Holland meant risk. “It was bypassing traditional success,” she says while tucked amid boxes in an office at Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle, calm but energized despite the pressures of a book tour. Kwok [...]
The release date of “Long for This World” by Sonya Chung was March 2nd. If it hadn’t been for Chang Rae Lee’s latest “The Surrendered” hitting the shelves two weeks later, everyone who reads the Sunday paper’s Parade Magazine would have come across a review of Chung’s debut novel. But hers was bumped for the [...]
On May 29th, R² productions invited Filipino artists, “Gloc-9” and “Pork Chop” to promote Seattle’s local Filipino group, “The Browned Out Band”. This was Gloc -9’s second visit to Seattle. His first time in Seattle was in October of 2009 when he performed with two famous Filipino bands, Parokya ni Edgar and Kamikazee. He also [...]
Comedian Bobby Lee is lazy, lethargic and really bad at sex. Or so he claims. But yet he somehow still manages to make people laugh, whether it’s through his appearances in blockbuster hits such as “Harold and Kumar Goes to White Castle” or “Pineapple Express”. Even as a regular on MADtv, he intrigued audiences with [...]
Indie-rock singer-songwriter Thao Nguyen’s smoky voice, twirling dance moves, swift guitar licks, heartfelt and honest lyrics, and catchy melodies promise to entertain audiences, July 18, when she performs at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre with “The Get Down Stay Down”. The group will be sharing the bill with the folk-rock Avett Brothers. “I like Seattle a lot,” [...]
Au Revoir Taipei This schizophrenic rom-com-cum-thriller flaunts a tres chic Taipei but with a story stretched beyond believability. After being dumped for Paris by his girlfriend, a young man learns French at a bookstore where, implausibly, a pretty clerk obsesses over him. One night, they meet cute at a food court and youthful thugs—out to [...]
There is something daunting about a novel that strains your hand when you pick it up. Like picking up “War and Peace” for the first time and struggling through that first chapter. There is this pang in the back of your mind that teases, “You’ll never finish.” But there is also something exciting about a [...]
A comprehensive list of Arts Events happening around Seattle.
Click Here for Book Reviews “Of Butterflies And Bees” It’s true that summer will be here any day now (weather permitting) and we’ll have our share of butterflies and bees in the garden but writing this introduction to our latest Pacific Reader brings on memories of Mulhammed Ali’s poetry instead. Our feature story for this [...]
It seems like planners and policy makers, especially environmentalists, have been consumed by the idea of everything being “green and sustainable.” So, the focus for these professionals is what makes communities, environment, transportation systems, economies, development, and so on, ecologically right and sustainable. Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from the Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens”, which [...]
Henry Chang and Joe Tsujimoto come from opposite ends of the isle of Manhattan, but their recent books, “Year of the Dog and “Morningside Heights: New York Stories”, reside on the same artistic/generational aisle of NYC/Asian American awareness. Both came of age in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, and while thirty or forty years may not [...]
Sarah Sze is a young talent that came out of the late 1990s, and is now nationally and internationally recognized. We can see one of her installations in Seattle, permanently installed, a white chandelier at an entrance to the Marion Oliver McCaw Hall in Seattle Center. The piece has her signature material base of electric [...]
Even after the Olympics in Beijing, China continues to transform itself at a startling pace, driven by the opening of its economic market to modernize. This trio of books document a turning point in China’s history. They also show just how differently artists can approach the same subject and their ability to evoke such varied [...]
It has been over 6 decades since the incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians took place during WWII, and in the last decade or so, there has been a relatively constant stream of publications and films about these events. This stream is unlikely to dry up in the near future. If anything, the later [...]
In 1989, students in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) marched for democracy and an end to government corruption. They held Tiananmen Square and the world’s attention for many weeks before martial law was declared and the demonstrations were ended in bloodshed. In the midst of that push for social change, three men from Hunan [...]
Chiura Obata’s 1925 painting of flaming sunset skies over the Sacramento Valley that graces the cover of “Asian American Art: A History 1850-1970” is a fitting choice to represent a unique survey of artists. Above a low-slung charcoal-colored landscape the sunset is rendered as furious crimson and gold flames in a fluid style that suggests [...]
