Graphic by Mimi Zhang Across many regions of Asia, temples serve as a site of ritual and ceremony, offering protection for ancestors and their descendants of the land. This exhibition invites you to invoke and honor Chinatown as a temple that holds ancestral histories and dreams. The segregated burial grounds at Mt Hope Cemetery, the bulldozing of neighborhood life through urban development and gentrification, the echoes of children laughing, and the voices of labor and community organizing are but a few examples that evidence histories of struggle and resilience in Boston Chinatown and Asian diasporic communities. In observance of these lineages, this exhibition serves as a portal for grief work that can open towards respite and healing. Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams remembers and honors those who have come before us—blood, chosen, and place-based ancestors, those who have dreamed of our existence today. This multi-disciplinary exhibit activates Chinatown as a memory archive, a diasporic temple, a space for spiritual, ancestral, and communal refuge. About the Artists Photo courtesy of the artist Michelle “Mimi” Zhang (they/them) Michelle “Mimi” Zhang is an interdisciplinary sculpture artist with a basis in painting. Their ongoing work focuses on using methodologies like biomythography to portray lived experiences in lighthearted, whimsical, and mystic ways. Mimi’s work has been exhibited in California, Ohio, New York, and Massachusetts. Mimi also started an art collective with a friend a few years back. Photo courtesy of the artist Yolanda He Yang (she/her) Yolanda He Yang is an installation and performance artist whose practice engages labor, materiality, and social ecology through subtle and ephemeral gestures. Born and raised in a Catholic family in North China and shaped by frequent relocations in childhood, her work draws from lived experience and site-responsive research. Through residencies and projects, her practice has attuned to the material and social conditions of diverse environments, including prehistoric sites in Cairo and Luxor, a demolition and construction recycling site at RAIR (PA), cornfields at Villkulla Residency (NE), and an upcoming residency at the Marble House Project (VT). As a recently awarded 2025 MassCreative fellow, she continues to lead Behind VA Shadows, a community public art project amplifying the creative voices of frontline staff in nonprofit art museums and organizations. Photo credit: Wes Boudreau Ying Ye (叶荧) (she/her) Ying Ye (叶荧) is a bilingual, Fuzhou-born interdisciplinary and socially engaged Chinese immigrant artist whose work weaves her family’s cooking and farming traditions into site-responsive and community-based practices. Her work explores cultural identity, migration, feminism, and Asian American experiences, while addressing urban development, racial equity, and economic and food justice through art and labor. She was a selected public artist for the 2024 Un-Monument Public Ar...
