About this event

The USC Pacific Asia Museum hosted a sonic exploration of the Asian American experience and its many beautiful contradictions.

This performance was a follow-up to the 2021 theatrical podcast Blood on Gold Mountain, which gained national recognition for its portrayal of the 1871 LA Chinatown Massacre.

American Dreams/Asian Nightmares engaged with Anti-Asian violence and rhetoric from the inside out. The three-part program combined Asian and American music traditions, Data Sonification, and Anti-Colonial performance art to break down barriers of Race and Nationality and sparked new dialogues about what it meant and how it felt to be Asian-American.

It was a National Endowment of the Arts Award performance.

This program was free. Reservations were required.

More about the performers:

In addition to being international performers, Dr. Hao Huang was a four-time USIA Artistic Ambassador emeritus to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; Micah Huang was a former Fulbright Fellow to the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, Hungary; and Emma Claire Gies was an artist-in-residence in Wairarapa, New Zealand. They had produced the nationally ranked podcast series Blood on Gold Mountain; performed at the UCLA Chancellor’s Arts Initiative award event in the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument park; and performed at the Chinese American Museum of LA, sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation program.