Critical Ambiguity: The Performance of Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown,2017– 2018

As the first community-based arts center in Boston’s Chinatown, Pao Arts Center invites further discussion about the intricate relationship between art, gentrification, and the building of minority communities. Based on the data collected in a year-long research project, this article examines Pao Arts Center’s performance in its inaugural year, 2017-2018. Using performance studies methods and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, I argue Pao Arts Center takes on a layered performance of critical ambiguity. The center’s spatial relationship to Boston’s inner city embodies a specific urban history that has produced and shaped the Chinatown community while its artistic practice performs a pan-Asian identity based on an open interpretation of Chineseness.