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I’m saddened to hear about the passing of Corky Lee from COVID-19. You may not have heard of him, but he was a radical photographer who probably did more than anyone else alive to document Asian America over the last half century.
We got dinner with Karen Zhou & Peter Kwong 10yrs ago in Flushing. He was one of the first Asians I’d met who were my parents age but born in America, bohemian, new left Chinatown New Yorkers. I’m Asian American, he said, so I’m a 100% authentic fake.
Another thing people don’t realize is a central flash point of the Asian American Movement arose from protests against police brutality. On 26 April 1975, the police thrashed a man named Peter Yee for a minor traffic issue.
A photo of Yee turned up on the front page of the NY Post and 2,000 Chinatown residents took over the streets and pelted eggs at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, perceived as sellouts to the cops.
The photo is a baroque frieze of gestures, bustling with horizontal action. One of Yee’s friends & a cop look right. Yee holds his head, wounded like a martyr in Caravaggio. You may have guessed this photo was one of Corky's—one time that art actually activated movement politics.
Streetwise, sarcastic, slight air of a gumshoe: he was a kind of organic intellectual in our current age when politics and reality itself can often seem virtual, a dematerialized video game played on Twitter. We weren’t close friends but he was ubiquitous.
A few years after the Yee photo, he was snapping the protests around Vincent Chin, murdered in a hate crime that feels all too relevant for our moment of white revanchism.
The abundance of his work makes him look like an Asian Am Forrest Gump at every moment of Asian American history.
Grace Lee Boggs.
Japanese American redress.
Miss Saigon.
But thousands of people had their school assembly, open mic, or community pot luck snapped by him too.
Grace Lee Boggs.
Japanese American redress.
Miss Saigon.
But thousands of people had their school assembly, open mic, or community pot luck snapped by him too.
What strikes me is Corky's improbability, the improbability of a Pan-Asian coalition. He was perpetually present, which was a way of saying that he belonged, that he’d document you as an act of solidarity, even through difference. Here’s his photo of a Sikh protest after 9/11.
I think the last time I ran into him when I was at City Hall. Maybe AAWW was getting an award? I saw him standing on the street outside, snapping pictures of elderly women protesting evictions outside.
(Photos from The Asian American Movement by William Wei and Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment ed. by Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu. The Peter Yee and Sikh protest photos I grabbed from the world wide intertubes. Alan Chin took the one of Corky & a very tired looking me)
