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 towering over the Manhattan skyline with a traditional Chinese boat passing beneath it. That painting East meets Westit was made in 1951 by Dong Kingman– one of the most important American watercolors 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 abandoned among construction debris. She survived because Roslyn Gamielan alumna of Kingman’s at Hunter College and a regular at the restaurant, she knew what she was looking at and refused to let it go.
One of Gamiel’s conditions to donate East meets West was that whatever institution held it had to display it, and the work went on for years at the Brooklyn Public Library. But when the library underwent renovations in 2022, it removed the mural with no plans to reinstall it. Gamiel and her family began looking for a new home and when they consulted her Elaine Kingmanthe artist’s widow, as to where the work should go, recommended MOCA.
“It’s such a monumental work by such an important American artist that we felt we had to take it on, and that meant committing to exhibiting it.” Tam coat of armsthe museum’s chief curator and senior director of programs told the Observer. East meets West arrived at MOCA at a transitional moment for the institution, which acquired its building at 215 Center Street, on the border of Chinatown and Soho, in 2024, and is now in the midst of renovations, working out how best to use the five floors it does not yet occupy.
The museum was founded as the Center for Community Studies (or New York City History Project) in 1980 by Jack Chen AND Charlie Lainot as a philanthropic project with great institutional support, but as part of a community’s effort to save its history in a period of transition. Tchen and Lai had seen a generation of Chinatown immigrants retire, close their businesses or move away, and instead of moving on, “a lot of people would just shut down and shut down,” according to MOCA’s president. Michael Lee. Boards, personal belongings, and business records were being thrown out along with everything else, and the founders began to collect what they could.
Two years later, they set up their first exhibition on Chinese laundry, in a public library. Laundromats 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 seen any kind of exhibition where their lives were displayed in that way,” Lee said. “People talked about how grandmothers would walk up the steps of the library with their canes and see that their lives and contributions to the country were being recognised.”
Initially, there were no plans to turn the Center for Community Studies into a permanent museum. Rather, the plan was to collect materials and eventually turn everything over to a larger institution like the New York Historical Society or the Museum of the City of New York. The organization arranged meetings with those institutions, but none wanted what was gathered. “Nobody 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 institution changed from a temporary project to something that they wanted to establish as a permanent institution for that neighborhood.”
In 1986, the Center for Community Studies secured permanent space in the old PS23 school at 70 Mulberry Street, along with other local organizations. A rotating exhibition schedule took shape, along with a long-term permanent show called “Where is Home?” And then for a long period after that, the collection just grew. According to Tam, for several decades, the answer to any donation from the community was almost always yes: “People who lived in the neighborhood started to think of MOCA as a place where they could bring their relatives’ belongings or businesses they were involved with, but whether there was enough space to take care of everything and enough staff to document everything started to become a real concern.”
Today, MOCA holds more than 80,000 cataloged artifacts, and by Tam’s count, the real number is significantly higher. About 30,000 of them have been digitized and made keyword searchable through the museum’s online database, including oral histories in English, Taiwanese, Cantonese and Mandarin dating back to the 1980s. And the collection continues to reveal new surprises.
A community member once salvaged decades of photo negatives taken by a local newspaper photographer who documented Chinatown almost daily from 1975 to 1985. “We’ve had a photo of Chinatown every day for a decade,” Lee said, adding that a National Historic Records and Publications Commission grant is funding the slow work of cataloging and digitizing those images. A visiting clothing designer, looking through the museum’s textile holdings, told staff they were sitting on one of the country’s most important clothing collections, connected to specific, prominent families whose histories the museum had not yet explored. And there are sculptures created by Chinese-Americans who were arrested during the Clinton administration. “A boat carrying a number of undocumented Chinese immigrants from China—it became known as the Golden Enterprise—came into New York and immigration officials wouldn’t let it dock,” Lee explained. “One of the detainees was an artist and to pass the time she taught all the other prisoners how to create sculptures out of tissue paper and whatever materials they could get their hands on… It’s more common now to arrest immigrants, but at the time it was shocking and the US government held them for a long time. You can see exactly what they did to pass the time.”
Then there is the story of the Moy family. A historian researching the museum’s holdings tagged a photograph of a grave, and a relative of the person buried there found the photo on MOCA’s website and reached out. This connection led to a book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolutionpublished in March 2026, chronicling a family whose story includes a member who worked as a radio host for Nazi Germany. “It’s really important that every item we bring to the collection has these living narratives behind it,” Lee said, “so we can show the broad arc of how different Chinese people lived in this country.”
MOCA’s purchase of a building in 2024 spawned what the museum calls MOCA Rising. “We are renovating the entire building, but what is being opened to the public is the first three floors,” a trust board member. My name said the Observer. “That project will start in the fall, and then there’s an even longer-term project to do a more complete renovation.” McKinsey & Company is currently helping to determine how the space is divided between permanent exhibitions, rotating performances, community events and education. Su emphasized, however, that she and a member of MOCA’s advisory board Jessica Wang are not awaiting the realization of future plans to position the museum as urgently needed at the present moment.
The expansion is happening as the history that MOCA holds became, in a very literal sense, current events. In June, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Nationality Clause guarantees citizenship to anyone born on American soil, a constitutional protection that exists because of a case brought by a Chinese-American who was barred from re-entering the country of his birth. “His nephews didn’t even know he was part of that case,” Lee said.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as anti-Asian violence and rhetoric spread, the museum responded by mounting an exhibit called “Response,” gathering stories of harm and mutual aid in real time and juxtaposing them with a long timeline of anti-Asian politics and violence that stretches back generations. “What we wanted to do was create a safe space for people to reflect and share,” Tam said.
In addition to its physical expansion, MOCA has filled its board with people whose instinct is to meet audiences where they already are. 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 might not necessarily think of themselves as museum visitors, but care deeply about identity, culture and community.” Su, who joined at the same time, described wanting a “home for all different kinds of Chinese-Americans, in terms of the generation that they are, whether they just came as immigrants or been here for five or six generations, whatever dialect they spoke or spoke in their family.”
The museum, in recent years, has adopted a multifaceted social strategy. “We’ve brought in a lot of incredible influencers and cultural leaders who have organically shared about the museum because they loved the experience,” Wang said, though she was careful to define the goal in terms of relevance rather than reinvention. “The goal is not to make MOCA a trend, but to give the museum a new platform to connect with people and help people understand why this matters.”
MOCA’s most Instagrammable moments, along with initiatives like an annual program with nearby Yung Wing PS 124 and the museum’s searchable database of artifacts, are just another way to get people engaged with the museum’s massive collection. “We did a story about a menu from a restaurant in New York City from maybe 60 or 70 years ago, and young people found it really interesting,” said Su, describing the museum’s approach to social storytelling as taking material from the past and “packaging it in a more digestible, fun way for the new generation” without losing what made it worth preserving in the first place. She pointed to growing engagement among Gen Z audiences both online and at events as evidence that the approach is working.
Underlying it all is the argument that Chinese-American history is not a special interest. It’s an immigration story, a civil rights story, a labor story, and a story of who becomes an American and under what conditions — themes that will resonate with many people in our current moment. “We want to be the institution, nationally, where people can come and learn about our history,” Lee said. “Chinese Americans is more than one story—there’s such a variety of different paths that people took to get here.”
“So much of the Chinese American experience has either been simplified or stereotyped or left out of the broader American story,” Su said. “MOCA gives us the space where our story can be told with depth and humanity. And it connects generations—it honors the sacrifices of earlier immigrants, while also creating space for us to tell a more modern story through identity and belonging.”
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