Chinatown Soup

The Gallery at Chinatown Soup invites artists to participate in a new, intermingled facet of the city’s creative community that exists outside of “the art world.” When the gallery isn’t hosting emerging artist pop-ups, Soup exhibits re-contextualize artifacts and artworks to make alternative New York narratives visible, granting dimension and a fresh awareness to traditional understandings of space and place through radical storytelling. Employing multi-sensory techniques from video displays to oral history recordings, art meets activism to co-create and guide gentrification with respect for living histories. For us, “advancement” suggests a grounded and visionary approach to the arts, one that is both reflective and future-focused from a hyper-present perspective. This connective strategy is an example of creative placemaking, which proposes arts-based solutions to community challenges as economic forces and government policy drive real estate’s corporate-condo craze and displace residents. Chinatown Soup recognizes the persistence of a false dichotomy between residents and artists when the reality is that we’re all creative individuals. By opening up the limited notion of what it means to be an artist we find the ways residents of all backgrounds can experiment and innovate to preserve neighborhoods.