Join ICP for a special screening of the short film Dear Corky followed by a Director’s Q&A with Curtis Chin. Chin will be joined for remarks by Chee Wang Ng and Mae Ngai, coeditors of Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice, a major retrospective under contract with the Estate of Corky Lee and Penguin Random House, forthcoming in 2024.

For over fifty years, New York native Corky Lee photographed his hometown's Chinatown, and Asian American communities around the country. With a strong sense of social justice, he captured activists, celebrities, and everyday heroes with equal passion, taking over a hundred thousand photos. Sadly, while documenting the latest rise of anti-Asian hate crimes, Corky fell to COVID. Through his own words and pictures, Dear Corky reveals the man behind the camera.

Chee Wang Ng is an artist photographer who recently curated Photographic Justice: a Tribute to Corky Lee, an exhibit of 32 Asian American photographers at the Charles Sifton Gallery, US District Court (EDNY) in Brooklyn.

Mae Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University and author of The Chinese Question: the Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021).

A co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, Curtis Chin served as the non-profits’ first Executive Director. He went on to write for television before transitioning to social justice documentaries. Chin has screened his films at over 600 venues in sixteen countries. His essays have appeared in CNN, Bon Appetit and the Emancipator/Boston Globe. A graduate of the University of Michigan and former Visiting Scholar at New York University, Chin has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. His memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant will be published by Little, Brown in Fall 2023. He can be found at CurtisfromDetroit.com.

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