Lantern Stories 2022: Boston

Auntie Kay and Uncle Frank Chin Park
Boston, MA
August – November 16, 2022

Lantern Stories is a public art installation that celebrates the past, present, and future of Boston’s Chinatown community. First commissioned by the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy in 2020, artist Yu-Wen Wu created thirty-one lanterns to illuminate Boston Chinatown’s history, culture and resiliency. For the 2022 iteration of Lantern Stories on The Greenway, Wu designed new imagery for her previous lanterns Stop Asian Hate, Exclusion Act, and Lions, as well as worked with artists from both Boston and San Francisco to create five new lanterns that begin a bicoastal dialogue with Wu’s concurrent West Coast iteration of Lantern Stories in San Francisco’s Chinatown, opening September 2022. This project was commissioned and supported by the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy

PRESS (2022)

“Chinatown Gate lanterns light up for equality” by Angie Ye, Boston University News Service, September 27, 2022
“Lantern Stories: Using public art to share a story of migration in Boston's Chinatown,” City Line: WCVB Channel 5 Boston, September 22, 2022

ABOUT LANTERN STORIES

Lantern Stories is an ongoing, iterative, and national public art installation of lanterns by artist Yu-Wen Wu. Highlighting history, culture, the arts, education, entrepreneurship, and social justice, Wu’s lanterns relate the past, present, and future stories of Chinatown communities across the country. Lantern Stories was created with the hope that each lantern initiates the desire to learn more about the history of Asian immigration to the United States and the social justice issues faced by AAPI communities on multiple levels. The project involved a process of community engagements, intensive historical research, drawings, the design of lantern forms, and the creation of images on the lanterns specific to each Chinatown site.