REVOLUTIONARY STREETS OF CHINATOWN
Darkroom Photography Series, 2025
Founded in 1969 by Asian American students at Columbia University, I Wor Kuen (IWK) emerged from a desire to oppose the Vietnam War and transform the material conditions of Manhattan’s Chinatown. Taking their name, translating to “Righteous and Harmonious Fists” in Cantonese, from the Boxer Rebellion and working alongside the Black Panthers and Young Lords, IWK articulated a militant twelve-point program for self-determination. In practice, their work unfolded through political education, mass demonstrations, community health clinics, free childcare, and tenant and labor organizing, efforts that forced the end of the Vietnam War and laid the foundation for Chinatown’s social service organizations today.
This series overlays archival materials from Getting Together, IWK’s newspaper, onto present-day photographs of the sites where the movement lived: the storefront at 24 Market Street in Manhattan; the park and community spaces beside it; the San Francisco storefront once housed in the I-Hotel, where the struggle against eviction and displacement galvanized a generation of Asian American activists; and the pool hall where the Red Guard Party, whose members later founded IWK’s San Francisco chapter met. Layering past and present, in this way, creates a deliberate dissonance—a distance between the figures and text of the archival images and the political realities of today. At the same time, the series brings IWK into conversation with its historical and spatial descendants, including the statue of Lin Zexu, a symbol of anti-imperialist memory in Kimlau Square, and East Broadway Mall, founded in 1985 as a hub for Fuzhou migrants and now largely abandoned, struggling under the relentless threat of gentrification.
Through these overlays, the series aims to reactivate a radical imaginary of revolutionary change in Chinatown today, revealing how IWK’s struggle endures in the very streets where it was born. IWK’s legacy affirms that revolution begins in community: in remaining grounded in conviction while mobilizing the most effective tactics to empower people. Their organizing reimagined what revolutionary power could look like within Asian American communities, sparking an enduring vision, a righteous and harmonious fight for collective liberation.