On Sunday, a group of protesters stormed an art gallery in New York’s Chinatown with signs that read “Chinatown lives are not poverty porn” and “Racist art has no business here”. They stood together to hold up a large, yellow banner that said “Racism Disguised as Art” written in English, Spanish and Mandarin.

The group was led by the Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB), a group of art activists targeting the James Cohan Gallery, where the Israeli artist Omer Fast has changed the outside to look like an old Chinatown storefront.

Meant to look like a dirty waiting room, the gallery features two broken cash machines, graffiti, shabby red lanterns, cheap plants and fold-up chairs.

The installation is meant to have “an eclectic aesthetic”, according to the gallery website, as the artwork “speaks about community, citizenship and identity”. But the protest group says the work maintains “racist narratives of uncleanliness, otherness and blight that have historically been projected onto Chinatown”.

“We cannot underscore enough how offensive this is to the people who live and work here,” the CAB said in a statement. “The artist’s choice to ignore the presence of a thriving community filled with families and businesses reduces their existence to poverty porn.”

Betty Yu, one of the organizers of Sunday’s protest, said the exhibition had upset local residents since it opened last month. The community of low-income immigrant tenants came and spoke about how disappointed they were at the exhibition.

“Chinatown is a 150-year-old thriving community that people built on their own,” said Yu. “When an artist equates our culture as garbage, it’s really insulting to the community.”

More than a hundred art galleries have opened in Chinatown over the past 10 years and are pushing out the locals. “We’ve mapped 40 new art galleries over the past two years and it’s accelerating,” said Yu. “Galleries are part of the system of gentrification.”

Omer Fast’s installation. Photograph: Phoebe d'Heurle

The protest aims to show the conditions that low-income tenants are facing in Chinatown. “They’re being threatened with evictions and harassments, as landlords relocate low-income tenants to raise rents and rent spaces to businesses like James Cohan gallery,” said Yu.

The gallery said in an email that the artist’s work was meant to be “an intentionally uncomfortable look inward – both at himself, an immigrant to the US, and at the gallery, a new arrival to an established neighborhood”.

The gallery argued that the response proved the artwork’s effectiveness. “That this work would generate such a variety of strong reactions, positive and negative, reinforces the paradox it is trying to capture. People are free to draw their own conclusions about art, but they should also be given the opportunity to do so without censorship, barriers or intimidation.”

After the recent protest, the artist apologized in a statement on the gallery’s website. Fast, who was born in Jerusalem and immigrated to New York City before relocating to Berlin, said the artwork was about tension and was a reflection of his own experience as an immigrant. “The actual gallery is being used as an immigrant surrogate: a transplant that tries to affect an appearance and blend in, even while its essence is undeniably foreign,” he wrote.

Fast called the installation an act of “erasure”. He explained: “I wanted to erase the passage of time and to recreate what the space looked like before the gallery moved in almost two years ago.”

He also addressed the protesters and drew comparisons with the Charlottesville protests. “A group of protestors hanged a large poster outside the show, which accuses the gallery of representing ‘a non-US and non-New York artist.’ I expect this sort of characterization from right-wing trolls carrying Tiki-torches and howling for walls to be built, I don’t expect it from left-wing activists in lower Manhattan.”



This Chinatown show has divided the international art community, but especially the New York galleries that represent Asian art. “It’s a shame that people felt it was racist. The intention is to challenge stereotypes and bring awareness of immigrant issues,” said Ethan Cohen, the director of Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, which specializes in Asian art in SoHo. “I hope that the artist and Chinatown groups can create a conversation for better understanding, Omer Fast should be able to show his work. The idea of art is to create a dialogue, to address issues. Good or bad, this is what art is.”

One art collector and former art gallery owner disagreed with Fast’s aims in the exhibition. “It’s the same tired, recycled bullshit that Asian Americans have been dealing with for over a century in this country,” said Big Brigman. “Trying to capitalize on a marginalized community with bogus stereotypes is trash, and to do it with a complete erasure of the people whose world you now inhabit is the worst of the worst.”

The Klein Sun Gallery in Chelsea, which specializes in Chinese art, thinks the artwork taps into larger issues. “While I would never promote racist art, it’s sometimes hard to draw a fine line between promoting discrimination and fighting against it,” said Phil Kai, the Klein Sun Gallery’s assistant director. “One piece of art can be interpreted and marketed into either these directions; I support all kinds of art that generates debates or discussions such as this one.”