Paper press release for Private Practices: AAPI Artist and Sex Worker Collection
LACA has initiated Private Practices with curator Coco Ono, co-producer of Sacred Wounds, which highlights healing-focused celebrations of Asian perspectives through erotic ritual. The archive that LACA and Ono have established is a living collection, meaning that items—such as screenshots, paystubs, apparel, set pieces, police reports, text messages, and other ephemera pertinent to sexual labor—will be added on an ongoing basis. The contributors to this collection have actively described the materials in this archive by cataloguing and entering their own keywords; therefore, they play an active role in shaping the narrative of the holdings and the collection as a whole.
The March 16th 2021 shooting spree that targeted Asian women in Atlanta Georgia is a stark reminder of the systemic misogyny that minimizes racial violence in the United States. In LACA’s shared neighborhood of Chinatown, we have seen firsthand a notable expansion of police presence. We are mindful that the securitization of our neighborhoods is not the answer to the entrenched systemic misogyny and racism that pervades our country.
LACA asks how artists, archives, and Chinatown community members can effectively collect together. This collection address anti-Asian violence by locating it narrowly in the experience of AAPI sex workers. We believe that by amplifying some of these voices, Private Practices can draw into focus how racism toward Asian bodies can be marked by a uniquely sexual register.
-S.L. 10/07/2021
