ADMISSION: 
Admission is free. Reservations required.

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DESCRIPTION: 
Celebrating Kaya Press’s 30 years of publishing award-winning, avant-garde, experimental, and expectation-busting Asian diasporic literature, Club Kaya is a collaborative, multi-genre, interactive performance and experience developed by artist-in-residence Alan Nakagawa. 

Inspired by Kaya’s political organizing, queer agit-prop influences, and experimental feminist interventions, this one-night event explores the idea of archives as a mapping of dynamic, transformative, and necessarily collaborative relationships rather than a cataloging of static objects and artifacts. Live, interactive performances will include: 

> Micro operas
> Vibratory sound experiments 
> Book-inspired interactive music boxes 
> Literary karaoke 
> And more! 

What happens when we think of the archive as a place of refuge? How can we engage with the histories of cultural production beyond what is expected? Guest collaborators including anti-colonial musician and artist Umi Hsu (Bitter Party), Emmy- and Peabody Award–winning filmmaker Elizabeth Ito (Adventure Time, City of Ghosts), experimental video artist Nisa Karnsomport, and filmmaker Shan Shaikh will join Nakagawa in engaging and instilling the publisher’s shared history and shared struggle: to make spaces to exist in the fullness of one’s own lived reality. 

This event also marks the opening of Anatomy of a Publisher: 30 Years of Asian Pacific Diasporic Voices with Kaya Press, which will be on display at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries from February 12 through April 26, 2025. Featuring archival editorial notes, promotional posters, and original artwork, the exhibition will demystify the publishing process, explore the steps between manuscript and bound book, and invite visitors to participate in a publishing project of their own.

Bios:  

Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies. Primarily working with sound and often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories, Nakagawa has been working on a series of semi-autobiographic sound-architecture/tactile sound experiences utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors: Peace Resonance: Hiroshima/Wendover combines recordings of the interiors of the Hiroshima Atomic Dome (Hiroshima, Japan) and Wendover Hangar (Utah); Conical Sound: Antoni Gaudi/Simon Rodia combines recordings of the interiors of the Watts Towers (Los Angeles) and the Sagrada Familia (Barcelona, Spain). Premiered in 2023, Point of Turn is his first vibratory sound work, involving the human voice and the seminal 1970s British rock band 10cc’s hit “I’m Not in Love.” Nakagawa was the first artist-in-residence for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the Los Angeles County Library and is currently the artist-in-residence at the CSU Dominguez Hills Gerth Archives & Special Collections.   

Umi Hsu (they/them) was born in Taipei and moved to Virginia at age twelve. Hsu is a trans nonbinary sound artist, musician, and writer whose practice is driven by inquiries about sound and migratory communities. Working to create social change through sound, Hsu leads LA Listens, a community engagement project on the city’s changing sonic and social ecology, and mobile placemaking collective Movable Parts. They also perform and write songs about the melancholic postcolony in their L.A.–based ghost pop band Bitter Party.   

Elizabeth Ito has been working as a creator, writer, director, and storyboard artist in the animation industry since 2004. She has worked on TV, feature, and commercial projects. Elizabeth is also the creator of the award-winning short Welcome to My Life, the second-most-viewed short in Cartoon Network history, and received an Emmy for her directing work on Adventure Time. Her first series for Netflix, City of Ghosts, premiered in 2021 and won a Peabody Award, and two Emmys for directing and best animated children’s show in 2022. She also directed a music video for The Linda Lindas.   

Nisa Karnsomport is a Los Angeles–based video artist, interdisciplinary designer, and software developer. Her work explores real-time and interactive processes between audio and video, often overlapping experimental media practices with new technology.   

Since founding Retrospective Cinema in 2015, Shan Shaikh has written and directed several films, most recently the short La Ida y Vuelta, which has had a successful festival circuit. Under the alias thebikewriter, he has filmed a number of music videos and short documentary pieces with a focus on individuals and organizations dedicated to serving the community in his childhood neighborhood of Koreatown. Outside of writing and filmmaking, Shan’s creative practice includes graphic design, ambient sound compositions, and experimenting with tape and the digitization process. His most recent creative endeavor was as an artist-in-residence for the Artists Against Apartheid residency in fall 2024.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Organized by Edwin Hill (French, Italian, American Studies and Ethnicity), Sunyoung Lee (Kaya Press, American Studies and Ethnicity), and Ana Iwataki (Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture). Co-sponsored by the Creativity, Theory, and Politics Research Cluster (American Studies and Ethnicity); the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries; and Asian Pacific American Student Services. 

Photos courtesy of the artists.