Mai Khoi and Bad Activist, free with Pitt Arts, January 27.

via mai-khoi.com

Vietnamese artist and activist Mai Khoi will perform Bad Activist on January 27 as part of Pitt Arts' Artful Wednesdays.

Bad Activist is an autobiographical performance piece, combining storytelling with state-of-the-art music performance. The narrative charts the extraordinary trajectory of Mai Khoi’s life. Khoi becomes a celebrated pop star in Vietnam. Bad Activist explores both the actual historic events of the artist’s life, as well as the subconscious dream worlds that have fueled her work.

She is also profiled in a WESA.fm piece on the 19th:

Mai ended up in Pittsburgh this fall thanks to the Artist Protection Fund, a program of the International Free Expression Project. The APF contacted Pitt’s Global Studies Center about hosting her. She was accepted into the Center’s Scholars at Risk program. While she’s not technically a scholar, “she’s really in the thick of a bunch of issues which as recent events underscore again, are just the essential issues of our political moment,” said Michael Goodhart, the political science professor who created the program.

The Pitt Arts performance begins at 12:00 pm on the 27th and will be streamed for free on Youtube.

2020 Chinese film The Rescue (紧急救援) continues in Pittsburgh through February 1.

The 2020 Chinese film The Rescue (紧急救援), which opened in Pittsburgh on January 22, will continue here through at least February 1. A synopsis, from the distributor:

A serious accident occurred on an offshore drilling platform, which may sink at any time. All members of the Transportation Emergency Response Team heads to location the moment they hear the alarm. With the time counting down, captain Gao Qian (Peng Yuxi) leads the helicopters fly into the explosion and fiercely burning fire, targeting at the platform. Together with his team member and comrade, Zhao Cheng (Wang Yanlin), Gao Qian gets into the platform in the most dangerous way with only one goal – to save the survivors…

It will play locally at the AMC Loews Waterfront and tickets are available online. The theater is located at 300 West Waterfront Dr. in the Waterfront shopping complex in Homestead (map), across the Monongahela River from Greenfield, Squirrel Hill, and the rest of Pittsburgh.

"Here's a new one for the Strip: sushi in a grocery store": (Pre-)Chaya in the Strip.

If you watch the 1996 Rick Sebak documentary "The Strip Show" on WQED you might see a familiar face setting up a stand in the Strip District. Before opening Chaya in Squirrel Hill in 2001, Fumio Yasuzawa and his wife, Jackie (pictured above), operated a stand at Sambok, an Asian grocery in the Strip District. He was photographed for a 1999 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article on local sushi offerings:

Several call themselves the most authentic. Fumio Yasuzawa's sidewalk ad reads "Tokyo trained," which is the equivalent of the UL label on electrical appliances. His devoted fans call him Yasu, and he works in what's undoubtedly the smallest space of any sushi chef in the city -- a closet-sized nook just inside the door of New Sambok Oriental Foods in The Strip.

He opened this stand in 1998, as documented by the Post-Gazette:

Here's a new one for the Strip: a sushi bar at a grocery store.

Sambok, the Oriental food store at 1737 Penn Avel., has hired a Tokyo-trained sushi chef to make the tekka maki, California roll, and other sushi and sashim specialities at the sushi bar. It's open Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. On Saturday, the big day in the Strip, it opens a half hour earlier. On Sunday, it's closed.

The chef is Fumo "Yasu" Yasuzawa, who has worked at the Hotel Kitano in New York City and the River Vale Country Club and Fort Lee Hilton in New Jersey. The New Sambok Sushi Bar, as it's called, and the chef also will come to your wedding, dinner party or whatever. Rent-a-Sushi Bar, the new service is called.

Chaya announced last week that it will close at the end of this month.

Screening and discussion of Keep Saray Home at Pitt for its APIA Month, January 26.

The University of Pittsburgh is recognizing Asian Pacific Islander American Heritage Month in January---as there is little campus activity during May---and an Asian Pacific Islander Senate has recently formed there. One of its events this month is a screening of the short documentary Keep Saray Home with a Q&A with filmmakers on January 26. A synopsis, from the film's official site:

ICE doesn’t just separate families at the border. In the outskirts of Boston, three families face the impending threat of deportation. But as refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam, they know they’ll have to fight together to stay together.

The event takes place on Zoom from 7:00 pm and is free and open to the public.

Kazuo Ishiguro with Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, April 15.

Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures will present British author Kazuo Ishiguro on April 15 as part of its "New and Noted" series.

Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her.

Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

Ishiguro’s eight previous works of fiction have earned him many honors around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and the Booker Prize. His work has been translated into over fifty languages, and The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both made into acclaimed films, have each sold more than 2 million copies. He was given a knighthood in 2018 for Services to Literature. He also holds the decorations of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan.

Tickets for the online event are $36 and include a copy of Klara and the Sun; the first 250 registrants will receive a signed bookplate.

Chaya to close for good, January 30.

Chaya, the acclaimed Japanese restaurant in Squirrel Hill, announced yesterday it will close its doors for good on January 30 2021.

"Asian Video Cultures" with Joshua Neves, January 27 at Pitt.

The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will present Dr. Joshua Neves and his talk "Asian Video Cultures" on January 27, the first installment of this term's (virtual) Asia Pop Series. A synopsis of the book whence the title of the talk comes:

The contributors to this volume theorize Asian video cultures in the context of social movements, market economies, and local popular cultures to complicate notions of the Asian experience of global media. Whether discussing video platforms in Japan and Indonesia, K-pop reception videos, amateur music videos circulated via microSD cards in India, or the censorship of Bollywood films in Nigeria, the essays trace the myriad ways Asian video reshapes media politics and aesthetic practices. While many influential commentators overlook, denounce, and trivialize Asian video, the contributors here show how it belongs to the shifting core of contemporary global media, thereby moving conversations about Asian media beyond static East-West imaginaries, residual Cold War mentalities, triumphalist declarations about resurgent Asias, and budding jingoisms. In so doing, they write Asia's vibrant media practices into the mainstream of global media and cultural theories while challenging and complicating hegemonic ideas about the global as well as digital media.

The online talk starts at 6:30 pm and is free and open to the public, though registration is required.

Mai Khoi and Bad Activist with Pitt Arts, January 27.

via mai-khoi.com

Vietnamese artist and activist Mai Khoi will perform Bad Activist on January 27 as part of Pitt Arts' Artful Wednesdays.

Bad Activist is an autobiographical performance piece, combining storytelling with state-of-the-art music performance. The narrative charts the extraordinary trajectory of Mai Khoi’s life. Khoi becomes a celebrated pop star in Vietnam. Bad Activist explores both the actual historic events of the artist’s life, as well as the subconscious dream worlds that have fueled her work.

She is also profiled in a WESA.fm piece today:

Mai ended up in Pittsburgh this fall thanks to the Artist Protection Fund, a program of the International Free Expression Project. The APF contacted Pitt’s Global Studies Center about hosting her. She was accepted into the Center’s Scholars at Risk program. While she’s not technically a scholar, “she’s really in the thick of a bunch of issues which as recent events underscore again, are just the essential issues of our political moment,” said Michael Goodhart, the political science professor who created the program.

The Pitt Arts performance begins at 12:00 pm on the 27th and will be streamed on Youtube.

2020 Chinese film The Rescue (紧急救援) in Pittsburgh from January 22.

The 2020 Chinese film The Rescue (紧急救援) will play in Pittsburgh from January 22. A synopsis, from the distributor:

A serious accident occurred on an offshore drilling platform, which may sink at any time. All members of the Transportation Emergency Response Team heads to location the moment they hear the alarm. With the time counting down, captain Gao Qian (Peng Yuxi) leads the helicopters fly into the explosion and fiercely burning fire, targeting at the platform. Together with his team member and comrade, Zhao Cheng (Wang Yanlin), Gao Qian gets into the platform in the most dangerous way with only one goal – to save the survivors…

It will play locally at the AMC Loews Waterfront and tickets are available online. The theater is located at 300 West Waterfront Dr. in the Waterfront shopping complex in Homestead (map), across the Monongahela River from Greenfield, Squirrel Hill, and the rest of Pittsburgh.

Online presentation of documentary Edo Avant Garde, January 21 with Pitt's Asian Studies Center.

The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will host an online screening of the 2019 documentary Edo Avant Garde, along with a discussion with the director, on January 21.

Edo Avant-Garde reveals the untold story of the vital role Japanese artists of the Edo era (1603 – 1868) played in developing “modern art.” During the Edo era, Japan prospered in peaceful isolation from Western powers, while audacious artists innovated abstraction, minimalism, surrealism and the illusion of 3-D. Their originality is most striking in images of the natural world depicted with gold leaf on large-scale folding screens that anticipate 20th century installation art. In groundbreaking interviews with scholars and priests, the film traces the artists' original visions to their reverence for nature, inspired by Buddhism and Shinto animism.

The event begins at 7:00 pm with an introduction by director Linda Hoaglund; the movie begins at 7:15 and is followed by a discussion with Hoaglund at 8:45 pm. The event is free and open to the public but registration is required.