CHINATOWN ORANGE PROJECT

“Chinatown Orange” = Commodity: 50YR 18/650, Bright & Lively series by Glidden Paints

Chinatown Orange was a semi-permanent billboard project engaging residents, business and organizations in Philadelphia’s Chinatown to collectively share their wish for completion of the city’s first Chinatown Community Center, which had been promised for many years.

We developed a highly visible yet ultimately ephemeral project in the form of a color field mural covering the entire surface of a parking lot next to the future site of the Philly Chinatown Community Center using Glidden’s own Chinatown Orange.

Our intentions were twofold:

- reclaim space in Chinatown through highly visible means
– reclaim the meaning and representation of the color Chinatown Orange

This dialogue opened up questions about the universality of the seemingly similar challenges that multiple Chinatowns face throughout the United States. At some level there IS one universal challenge, one of perception—that one color (or definition) can uniformly describe all Chinatowns or Chinese or Asians. Chinatown Orange suggests that the root of many challenges facing the Chinatown in Philadelphia, as well as around the U.S. is the very concept of Glidden’s Bright & Lively Series “Chinatown Orange” color.