Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice

Book launch, signing, panel discussion, and reception. Known throughout his lifetime as the “undisputed, unofficial Asian American photographer laureate,” the late photojournalist Corky Lee documented Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for fifty years, breaking the stereotype of Asian Americans as docile, passive, and, above all, foreign to this country. Corky Lee’s Asian America is a stunning retrospective of his life’s work — a selection of the best photographs from his vast collection, from his start in New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s to his coverage of diverse Asian American communities across the country until his untimely passing in 2021.

Join Asia Society for the New York launch of Corky Lee’s Asian America a seminal work that traces Lee’s decades-long quest for photographic justice, following Asian American social movements for recognition and a remarkable documentation of vital moments in Asian American history and a timely reminder that it’s also a history that we continue to make.

Speakers include David Henry Hwang, a Tony- and Grammy-Award-winning writer for stage and screen, whose works include M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Aida, FOB, and Soft Power; Akemi Kochiyama, a Harlem-based community builder, writer, scholar-activist and co-director of the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project; Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Stay True and staff writer, The New Yorker; and Mae Ngai, co-editor of Corky Lee’s Asian America, is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and professor of history at Columbia University, and author of The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021); and Chris Kwok, Chair of the Issues Committee, Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY).

Copies of Corky Lee’s Asian America will be available for purchase at the event.