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MOCA Rising: How New York’s Chinese American Museum Is Redefining the American Canon

"So much of the Chinese American experience has either been simplified or stereotyped or left out of the broader American story," board member Minyi Su told Observer. Anchored by an 80,000-item collection and a permanent Manhattan footprint, the museum presents this history with the depth it deserves.

Earlier this year, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York unveiled a 10-foot by 15-foot mural depicting the Brooklyn Bridge rising over the Manhattan skyline with a traditional Chinese junk boat passing beneath it. That painting, East Meets West, was made in 1951 by Dong Kingman—one of the most significant American watercolorists of the 20th Century—for the Lingnan Restaurant on the Upper West Side. When the restaurant closed in 1980, the mural was damaged during removal and abandoned among construction debris. It survived because Roslyn Gamiel, a former student of Kingman’s at Hunter College and a regular at the restaurant, recognized what she was looking at and refused to let it be thrown away.

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One of Gamiel’s conditions for donating East Meets West was that whatever institution held it had to display it, and the work spent years on view at the Brooklyn Public Library. But when the library underwent renovations in 2022, it took down the mural without plans to reinstall it. Gamiel and her family began looking for a new home, and when they consulted with Elaine Kingman, the artist’s widow, about where the work should go, she recommended MOCA.

“It’s such a monumental work by such an important American artist that we felt we had to take it, and that meant committing to put it on display,” Herb Tam, the museum’s chief curator and senior director of programs, told Observer. East Meets West arrived at MOCA at a transitional moment for the institution, which acquired its building at 215 Centre Street, on the border of Chinatown and Soho, in 2024, and is now mid-renovation, working out how best to use the five floors it does not yet occupy.

The museum was founded as the Center for Community Studies (or the New York Chinatown History Project) in 1980 by Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai, not as a philanthropic project with grand institutional backing, but as part of a community’s effort to save its own history in a period of transition. Tchen and Lai had watched a generation of Chinatown immigrants retire, close their businesses or move away, and rather than pass anything down, “a lot of people would just shut down and close,” according to MOCA president Michael Lee. Signage, personal effects and business records were being thrown out along with everything else, and the founders started collecting what they could.

Two years later,........

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