A Celebration of the All the Art Coming to SF’s Chinatown
Portsmouth Square, the park known as Chinatown’s living room, isn’t looking very welcoming these days. The iconic pedestrian bridge that once stretched across Kearny Street from the Hilton is gone. So is the park’s playground, its trees and benches. Fenced in and under construction, the square won’t reopen until 2028.
It’s not the only site in the neighborhood where work crews now outnumber residents. The Chinatown public library, a 1921 Carnegie building, will soon close for a planned 30-month renovation. And seismic upgrades to the Chinatown Public Health Center are already underway. What tempers all this disruption is the knowledge that when each of these sites reopens (better, safer), it will be graced by new public art from a lineup of talented local artists.
In Portsmouth Square, that includes an entryway sculpture by Cathy Lu and a tile wall from Jenifer K. Wofford. At the public health center, a mural by Elaine Chu and Marina Perez-Wong (aka Twin Walls Mural Company) will wrap around an exterior corner; another mural by Vida Kuang will enliven a waiting room. And Christine Wong Yap is creating images for a series of archways in the library’s grand reading room.
Good news all around, but that would usually be that. We’d have to wait for years to mark the reopenings, glimpse the public artworks, and hear from the artists involved. Instead, on Saturday, Sept. 12, these artists will be present for a meet-and-greet event at the Grant Avenue storefront of the Chinese Culture Center (CCC).
It’s one stop on what the San Francisco Arts Commission, CCC and Chinatown Media & Arts Collaborative (CMAC) are calling “A Day of Public Art in Chinatown,” a mini-tour of artists and artworks across three neighborhood venues.
The day starts at 11 a.m. at Chinatown-Rose Pak Station, where New York-based artist Tomie Arai will lead visitors on a tour of her monumental glass exterior and downstairs platform installation.
Then, at the station’s entrance at noon, Ariana Martinez-Cruz will unveil a large-scale temporary monument to the city’s Latino and Chinese garment workers. As one of the SFAC’s Shaping Legacy artists, Martinez-Cruz has been conducting workshops and gathering stories for months, all while fabricating an impressive sculpture out of metal, cloth and thread. (A commemorative patch and tote bag giveaway will take place 1–4 p.m.)
The third stop may be the most exciting: The historic Empress of China building, recently purchased by CMAC as a future cultural campus, will open its doors to the public for the first time since it shuttered in 2016. A community open house curated by Summer Mei Ling Lee returns to the idea of “Chinatown’s living room.” With Portsmouth Square closed, Lee has organized the building’s first floor into a series of intimate spaces where artists, historians, performers and other nonprofits can hold court. While the building will be open 11 a.m.–4 p.m., a ceremony and performances begin at 1 p.m.
Lee’s program includes plenty of hands-on and celebratory elements, including crowd-sourced images from decades of family celebrations at the Empress of China banquet hall, a shadow puppet show from ShadowLight Productions and a human embodiment of “The Empress” by Maggie Wong. Also, the Grant Avenue Follies.
Permanent, full access to all of Chinatown’s public and community spaces may be months (or years) away, but events like this prove there are still plenty of ways to fill the streets with art.
A Day of Public Art in Chinatown takes place Sept. 12, 2026, 11 a.m.–4 p.m. at the Chinatown-Rose Pak Station (934 Stockton St.), CCC Art Center & Design Store (667 Grant Ave.) and Empress of China (838 Grant Ave.).