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 above the Manhattan skyline with a traditional Chinese junk boat passing underneath. that painting, East meets WestIt was made in 1951 by Dong Kingman—one of the most important 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 left among the construction debris. She survived because Roslyn Gammell, a former Kingman student at Hunter College and a frequenter of the restaurant, recognized what she was looking at and refused to let it be thrown away.
One of Jameel’s conditions for donating East meets West is that whatever institution held it had to display it, and the work spent years on display in the Brooklyn Public Library. But when the library underwent renovations in 2022, the mural was removed with no plans to reinstall it. Jamil and her family began looking for a new home, and when they consulted with Eileen Kingman, the artist’s widow, about where the work should go, she recommended MOCA.
“It is such a monumental work by an American artist that is so important that we felt we had to show it, and that meant committing to showing it,” Herb Tamm, the museum’s chief curator and senior program director, told the Observer. East meets West She arrived at MOCA at a moment of transition for the organization, which acquired its building at 215 Center Street, on the border of Chinatown and SoHo, in 2024, and is now in the middle of a renovation, working out how best to use the five floors it has yet to occupy.
The museum was founded as the Center for Community Studies (or the New York Chinatown History Project) in 1980 by Jack Chen and Charlie Lai, not as a philanthropic project with significant institutional support, but as part of a community effort to salvage its history in a period of transition. Chen and Lai have watched a generation of immigrants in Chinatown retire, close their businesses or move away, and rather than pass anything on, “a lot of people will shut down and close their doors,” according to MOCA President Michael Li. Signs, personal effects, and business records were discarded along with everything else, and the founders began collecting what they could.
Two years later, they held their inaugural show, an exhibition of Chinese hand-washing sinks, in a public library. Hand laundries were Chinatown’s first real economic engine, a way to bring money into the community before restaurants took over that role. “Chinese Americans in 1982 had never experienced any kind of exhibition in which their lives were displayed in this way,” Lee said. “People talked about how grandmothers would walk up the library stairs carrying their canes and see their lives and contributions to the country being recognised.”
There were initially no plans to convert the Community Studies Center into a permanent museum. Instead, the plan was to collect materials and eventually hand everything over to a larger institution such as the New-York Historical Society or the Museum of the City of New York. The organization held meetings with those institutions, but they did not want to obtain what had been collected. “No one wanted to tell these stories because they didn’t think they were part of a bigger story,” Tam said. “I think that’s when the mentality of the organization changed from being a temporary project to something they wanted to establish as a permanent institution for that neighborhood.”
In 1986, the Community Studies Center acquired permanent space in the old PS23 school building at 70 Mulberry Street, along with other local organizations. A rotating exhibition schedule was formed, along with a long-running permanent show called “Where’s Home?” And after that for a long time, the group simply grew. According to Tam, for decades, the answer to any donation from the community was almost always yes: “People living in the neighborhood started thinking of MOCA as a place where they could bring belongings of their relatives or businesses they were involved in, but whether there was enough space to take care of everything and enough staff to document it all started to become a real concern.”
Today, MOCA holds more than 80,000 cataloged artifacts, and by Tamm’s estimates, the real number is much higher. About 30,000 of them have been digitized and made keyword searchable Online museum databaseincluding oral histories in English, Twishan, Cantonese, and Mandarin dating back to the 1980s. The group continues to reveal new surprises.
A community member once salvaged decades of negative photos taken by a local newspaper photographer who documented Chinatown almost daily from 1975 to 1985. “We have a photo of Chinatown every day for a decade,” Lee said, adding that a National Historical Publications and Records Commission grant is funding the slow work of cataloging and digitizing those photos. A visiting fashion designer, browsing the museum’s textile holdings, told staff they were sitting on one of the country’s most important clothing collections, linked to specific, prominent families whose stories the museum had not yet researched. There are sculptures made by Chinese Americans who were detained during the Clinton administration. “A boat carrying a number of illegal Chinese immigrants from China – which became known as the Golden Venture – arrived in New York and immigration officials did not allow it to dock,” Lee explained. “One detainee was an artist, and to pass the time, she taught all the other detainees how to make sculptures out of tissue paper and any materials they could get their hands on… Immigration detention is more common now, but at the time it was shocking.”
Then there is the story of the Moi family. A historian, who was looking through the museum’s collection, tagged a photo of a cemetery, and a relative of the person buried there found the photo on the Ministry of Coordination and International Cooperation’s website and contacted him. This connection led to a book, Moise’s New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolutionpublished in March 2026, chronicles a family whose history includes a member who served as a radio host for Nazi Germany. “It’s really important that any item we bring into the collection has these vivid narratives behind it, so we can show the breadth of how different Chinese people live in this country,” Lee said.
MOCA’s acquisition of the building in 2024 launches what the museum calls MOCA Rising. “We are renovating the entire building, but what we will open to the public are the first three floors,” Minye Su, a member of the board of trustees, told the Observer. “This project will start in the fall, and then there is a longer-term project to do a more complete renovation.” McKinsey & Company is currently helping to determine how to divide the space between permanent exhibitions, rotating displays, community events and education. However, Su stressed that she and MOCA Advisory Board Member Jessica Wang are not waiting for future plans to position the museum to be fulfilled as urgently required at present.
The expansion occurs as MOCA’s history aligns, in a very literal sense, with current events. In June, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Citizenship Clause guarantees citizenship to anyone born on US soil, a constitutional protection that exists because of a case brought by a Chinese-American man who was barred from returning to the country of his birth. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as violence and anti-Asian rhetoric spread, the museum responded by curating an exhibition called “Responses,” collecting real-time stories of harm and mutual aid and connecting them to a long timeline of anti-Asian politics. Violence that extends over many generations. “What we wanted to do was create a safe space for people to think and engage,” Tam said.
Along with its physical expansion, MOCA filled its board with people who had an instinct for meeting audiences where they already were. Wang, who has a background in fashion, digital media and experiential events, said she was drawn to the museum because “there are a lot of people who may not necessarily think of themselves as museum-goers but care deeply about identity, culture and community.” Su, who joined the board around the same time, described his desire for “a home for all types of Chinese Americans, in terms of their generation, whether they just arrived as immigrants or have been here for five or six generations, whatever dialects they speak or have in their family.”
In recent years, the Museum has enacted a multi-pronged social strategy. “We brought in a lot of incredible influencers and cultural leaders who were involved with the museum organically, because they loved the experience,” Wang said, though she was careful to frame the institution’s ambitions in terms of relevancy rather than reinvention. “The goal is not to make MOCA trendy but to give the museum a new platform to connect with people and help people understand why this is important.”
MOCA’s more Instagrammable moments, along with initiatives like the annual program with nearby PS 124 Yung Wing school and the museum’s searchable artifact database, are just another way to get people to engage with the museum’s massive collection. “We did a story about a menu from a Chinatown restaurant in New York that was probably 60 or 70 years old, and young people found that really interesting,” Su said, describing the museum’s approach to social storytelling as taking earlier material and “packaging it in a more seamless and entertaining way for the new generation” without losing what made it worth preserving in the first place. She pointed to increased engagement among Gen Z audiences online and at events as evidence that this approach is working.
Underlying all of this is the argument that Chinese American history is not a specialized interest. It’s an immigration story, a civil rights story, a labor story, a story about who becomes an American and under what circumstances—themes that resonate with so many people in our current moment. “We want to be the institution, on a national level, that people can come to and learn about our history,” Lee said. “Chinese Americans are more than one story; there is great diversity in the different paths people took to get here.”
“Much of the Chinese American experience has been simplified, stereotyped, or excluded from the broader American story,” Su said. “MOCA gives us the space in which to tell our history with depth and humanity. It connects generations, honoring the sacrifices made by early immigrants while also creating a space for us to tell a more modern story through identity and belonging.”
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