Walking, Mapping & Queer Diasporic Imaginations

ACC Reflection Session | July–December 2025

Kenneth Wong See Huat

My Curatorial Lens

My curatorial practice exists at the intersection of queer art, Asian diaspora narratives, cultural landscape studies, and socially engaged art. I approach these fields not as separate domains but as overlapping territories where bodies, memories, and geographies converge.

Walking serves as my primary methodology—a practice rooted in psychogeography that transforms movement into a tool for sensing, observing, and mapping the invisible architectures of memory and identity. New York City became more than a location; it evolved into a living archive, a teacher, and a testing ground for new ways of thinking about place and presence.

At the heart of my work lies an ongoing question: How do bodies, food, grief, and land become maps? This inquiry guides my exploration of how marginalized communities inscribe their presence onto urban landscapes, creating alternative cartographies that resist erasure.

Queer Art Footprints

Fire Island

Explored queer ecologies and developed embodied fieldnotes in this historic sanctuary space. The island's landscape holds generations of queer history, where nature and identity intertwine in profound ways.

Leslie-Lohman Museum

Engaged with exhibitions centered on queer embodiment and materiality, examining how artists translate intimate experiences into visual language that speaks to collective memory.

MET and Wave Hill

Studied works addressing gender, bodies, and intimacy across contemporary and historical contexts, tracing how queer artists have claimed visibility within institutional spaces.

New Film Fest, Off-Boradway, LES Queer Art Walk

Developed a queer memory walk mapping movement through LES, and Greenwich Village—tracking sites of intimacy, resistance, and community-building.

Key Insight: Queer presence functions simultaneously as archive, visibility, and tenderness—a triple framework for understanding how marginalized communities persist and flourish.

Publications & Talks


Medium Article (Oct 2025) :
Queer Embodiment as Archive and Praxis

A reflection on queer bodies, memory, and artistic practice as living archives, published on Medium.

RUANG-Art Journal Article (Dec 2025):

From Extraction to Kinship: Queer Ecologies and the Relational Technologies of Southeast Asian Art

Tracing how Southeast Asian artists and communities transform histories of extraction—plantations, labour, land dispossession—into practices of kinship, care, and queer ecological imagination.



Pratt Institute Talk (Nov 2025)
Art as Social Cartography: Tracing Communities in Malaysia's Everyday Landscapes

This talk explored how walking, storytelling, and place-based research create social maps, drawing on various projects:

MuseumNext Talk (Dec 2025)

Forecasting Museums Through Community, Memory & Food

From Edible Memorials to Digital Cultural Mapping

This talk will reveal how edible memorials and digital village projects can guide museums toward futures grounded in community memory, care, and relational imagination.



Bangsar Heritage Walks

Mapping oral histories and everyday urban rituals in Kuala Lumpur.

Siamese Reversed

Exploring food, memory, and the last Siamese House in Pulau Tikus, Penang.

Jenjarom New Village

Community cultural mapping and youth narratives in Selangor.

Asian Diaspora Foot Prints

Asia Society, Asian Art Archives, China Institute of America, Serica Institute

Each Institutes advance Asian and Asian American visual culture—through exhibitions, archives, research, and performances that amplify Asian voices on global and community stages.

Think! Chinatown

Deep engagement with Think!Chinatown’s community-led cultural programming—observing how food, craft, and neighborhood storytelling strengthen Chinatown’s collective memory and support diaspora identity.

Governors Island TAAC (Taiwan)

Learned how TAAC at Governors Island supports artists-in-residence and conducts tours to Dia Beacon and nearby studio spaces.

IAAC (Indo-American Arts Council)

Gained insight into how IAAC organizes its gala dinner fundraising and carries out the Indian Art & Literature Festival.

Central Understanding: Diaspora is not static displacement but dynamic movement—an ongoing process of negotiation, adaptation, and re-rooting that creates new cultural forms.

Face-to-Face Encounters

The most transformative aspect of my fellowship emerged through direct human connection. These encounters moved beyond networking to become genuine exchanges that reshaped my thinking and opened unexpected pathways.

Curatorial Dialogues

Jeannie Tang of NYCU offered invaluable insights into institutional practice and contemporary Asian queer art programming. Herb Tam at MoCA NYC shared their deep knowledge of Chinatown's cultural ecology.

Academic Exchange

Delivered a talk at Pratt Institute on Art as Social Cartography, sparking rich discussions about community-engaged practice and the ethics of representation. More on other artist talks in various scale and venues etc.


Fellow Connections

Shared meals, funs, and conversations with ACC fellows created a network of mutual support and creative exchange that extended far beyond professional development.

Personal Hospitality

From Daniel’s Halloween party to Thanksgiving with Kyle and Sagi, these encounters demonstrated that the ACC and I House fellowship also builds real networks of support and human connection.

"These encounters didn't just inform my work—they fundamentally shaped the trajectories I now imagine for my future practice."

Research-Related Visits

New York's cultural institutions became my extended classroom—spaces where I could observe how exhibitions structure bodies, histories, and materials. Each visit contributed layers to my understanding of curatorial practice and the politics of display.

Major Museums

  • MoMA's contemporary collections
  • The Met's encyclopedic approach
  • Whitney's American perspectives
  • Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center's land art narratives

Specialized Institutions

  • Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadephia
  • Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring
  • Shelburne Museum, Burlington
  • The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington

Ecological Sites

  • Staten Island
  • Fire Island
  • Governors Island


Chinatown, LES & SoHo Fieldwalking

Regular walking practice through these neighborhoods transformed them into readable texts—layered with migration stories, economic shifts, and resistance strategies.

Core Discovery: NYC functioned as a living archive of landscape and memory, where every street corner holds multiple histories waiting to be read and honored. More yet to covered in Jackson Height, Flushing, and State Island.

Non-Research Wanderings

Not every moment was dedicated to research—and that proved essential. These wanderings without agenda taught me about restoration, slowness, and the importance of simply being present without productive purpose.

Central Park & Bronx Zoo: Collected small joys like souvenir hats, watched animals with childlike wonder, breathed in green spaces.

Coney Island Off-Season: Found unexpected beauty in industrial heritage and the quiet stillness of an empty amusement landscape.

Cold Spring: Discovered solitude and slowness in this Hudson Valley town and Upstate, a necessary counterpoint to city intensity.

Casual Wanderings: Gaps between meetings and events, Fire Island and Burlington's leisure moments, getting deliberately lost (including gay bars).

"Wandering was restoration and grounding—teaching me that gentleness is as important as ambition in sustaining creative practice."

Personal Moments & Creative Nourishment

Guided Studio Visits, Art Openings & Performances

New York’s cultural pace became its own form of nourishment. I moved constantly between exhibition openings, artist talks, and curator walkthroughs—sometimes crossing boroughs in a single evening to catch what mattered. These encounters with artists, ideas, and communities sharpened my thinking and kept my practice porous and alive.

Day Trips & Cross State Excursions

Beyond the city, day trips to places like Staten island and Governors Island, and overnight excursions for performances or site visits, offered a different kind of clarity—space to observe landscapes, rituals, and communities with fresh eyes. Each journey, whether spontaneous or planned, fed back into my research on diaspora, memory, and place-making.

These moments fueled the creative energy for deeper work, reaffirming that curatorial practice is shaped by lived experience as much as by formal projects.

Residencies, Grants & Fellowships Applied

Between October and December 2025, I prepared applications for numerous opportunities that would extend and deepen the work begun during my ACC fellowship. Each application required articulating my practice for different contexts while maintaining core commitments to community, care, and critical engagement (more to be listed).

KADIST Paris Curatorial Fellowship

Curatorial research linking land, labour, and postcolonial ecologies, expanding from The Plantation Plot.
Develops a transnational exhibition framework connecting Southeast Asia with Global South discourse.

Tate Modern Brooks Fellowship

Explores queer ecologies and gendered environmental histories across modern and contemporary art.
Bridges my Southeast Asian research with Tate’s collection through writing and public programs.

Getty Library Research Grant

Advances “Echoes Across the Archive,” tracing queer and diasporic memory in Southeast Asian visual culture.
Uses Getty’s archival holdings to examine intimacy, migration, and postcolonial image-making.

Dora Maar House Residency

Writing residency for “Echo Map,” mapping queer memory through walking, landscape, and sensory narrative.
Uses Ménerbes as a contemplative base to develop long-form curatorial and literary work.

Art Omi: Writers Residency & Albee Foundation

Develops long-form essays on queer Asian art, diaspora, and cultural landscape narratives.
Combines criticism, memoir, and curatorial reflection into a unified book manuscript.

Hodder Fellowship in Lewis Center for the Arts

Echo Map maps queer ecologies and migrant memory across Princeton and the Mid-Atlantic, unfolding as a tactile atlas, installation, and geolocated audio-walks.

Craft Research Fund

A transoceanic study tracing how craft carries memory, care, and belonging across immigrant and Indigenous communities in D.C., Chicago, and Hawai'i.

Habitat Foundation Grant

Focused specifically on the Clan Jetties of Penang—documenting threatened waterfront village communities and their cultural practices.

Harry Ransom Center Fellowship

A curatorial inquiry into how Southeast Asian queer and diasporic identities are shaped and reimagined through colonial, postcolonial, and archival traces.

Future Plans

Carrying ACC Forward

My ACC fellowship planted seeds that will continue growing long after this reflection session. The relationships formed, methodologies developed, and questions raised now shape the next phase of my curatorial journey. What follows represents not definitive plans but evolving commitments—directions I'm moving toward with intention and openness.

Publishing Long-Form Essays

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Essay exploring intersections of queer art and Asian diaspora narratives in New York's contemporary art scene.

Granta Magazine, Art Forum etc

Reflective piece on walking as curatorial methodology and the politics of psychogeographic practice.

Additional Venues: Hyperallergic, American Literary Review etc

Proposals in development for other cultural criticism and curatorial studies publications.

These essays will synthesize research conducted during the fellowship while making space for vulnerability and uncertainty—acknowledging what remains unresolved alongside what has clarified.

Develop NYC Collaborations

The connections made during my fellowship are beginning to crystallize into concrete collaborative projects. These partnerships represent opportunities to contribute meaningfully to New York's cultural ecosystem while remaining accountable to the communities whose stories I engage.

Leslie-Lohman Museum/ Asian Art Archives/ Visual AIDS/ ApexArt

Developing programming around queer cartographies and embodied archival practices.

MoCA NYC/ SERICA institute/ China Institute of America

Exploring exhibitions that center Asian American and diaspora narratives through participatory methods.

Think!Chinatown/ Gotham Park Foundation

Community organizing and cultural preservation initiatives grounded in neighborhood knowledge. Public space programming connecting ecology, memory, and cultural landscape studies.

The Asia Foundation

Opportunity to reconnect during the mid-year Luce Scholars meeting in Penang (Jan 19–24, 2026).
Continues to foster cross-border leadership, cultural understanding, and long-term networks.


Advance Malaysian Heritage Work

Clan Jetties Preservation

The water village communities of Penang face existential threats from development pressure and climate change. My work focuses on participatory documentation that centers resident voices and traditional ecological knowledge.

This involves oral history collection, architectural documentation, and advocacy for community-led preservation strategies that respect cultural continuity rather than imposing external heritage frameworks.

Youth and Digital Cultural Mapping

Working with young people in Jenjarom, Kopisan, and other villages to develop their own mapping practices—recognizing them as knowledge holders rather than passive subjects of research.

These initiatives combine digital tools with traditional knowledge systems, creating hybrid methodologies that honor intergenerational wisdom while embracing contemporary creative expression.

Carry Forward ACC Values & Gratitude

Beyond specific projects and applications, my ACC fellowship instilled values that will guide all future work. These aren't abstract principles but lived practices that require ongoing cultivation and accountability.

"The gift of this fellowship wasn't just time and resources—it was permission to imagine my practice otherwise, to fail generatively, and to build community across difference."

Care

Centering care in curatorial relationships, recognizing work happens through tending connections.

Listening

Practicing deep listening, creating space for others to articulate experiences on their own terms.

Humility

Approaching communities with humility, acknowledging limits and learning from diverse perspectives.

Gratitude to ACC

Expressing deep gratitude to the ACC community, staff, fellows, Joty, and New Yorkers for their invaluable support.

The Walk Continues (continuing engagement…)

This presentation captures five months of movement, but walking doesn't have endpoints—only pauses where we stop to catch breath and look back at the trail behind us before continuing forward.

The maps I've made are incomplete by design, acknowledging that cartography is always partial and positioned. The questions I carry forward remain open, inviting ongoing dialogue rather than definitive answers.

Thank you for walking with me through this reflection. I look forward to the paths we'll cross in the future, the stories we'll share, and the maps we'll make together.