Artist Daphne Xu Captures Story of Busing in New Greenway Exhibit
- Daria Mohan Zhang
- 3 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Chinese Canadian artist and filmmaker Daphne Xu uses a camera to trace people of diaspora, and recently, she’s set her sights on Boston’s Chinatown, spotlighting “displacement and belonging, erasure and myth.”
Xu’s new project “Boston Busing in Chinatown, 1975,” a photographic installation, just opened early this month along the Greenway, near the Chinatown Gate. The photo exhibit of aluminum prints highlights Chinese immigrant mothers who in 1975 organized and used boycotts to demand equal and safe educational rights for their children in Boston Public Schools. This photo exhibition is part of a multimedia public art project, the Immigrant History Trail. Xu has been working on this project in Boston Chinatown since 2020.
The year 2025 was the 50th anniversary of Boston’s desegregation initiative. The photos are a celebration of the success of those mothers and educators half a century ago, she said, and her aim was to create public awareness about this history in Chinatown – to “speak to the ongoing fight against gentrification and displacement of working-class immigrant residents, all of whom have stories and life experiences that are a part of the city’s history.”
The idea for the project celebrating Chinatown's history came up in conversations during meetings for a community-led master plan for the neighborhood. The late neighborhood activist and architect Tunney Lee was there.
“I went to his office at MIT, excited about looking into the neighborhood's photographic archives and showing them to a wider public,” Xu told Sampan over an email exchange.
Born in 1992, Xu is herself part of the diaspora she documents. Her parents moved to North America from China in 1989. Xu said that cultures and translation of languages have been lifelong interests. “The Chinese diaspora and its neighborhoods are where I come from.”
Xu first joined the Chinatown Art Brigade in New York City in 2016. There, she learned about art as a tool for elevating voices and creating moments of agency.
“Art is inherently political,” Xu wrote. “Different mediums engage the senses and the emotions that (go) beyond just conveying information. Art can hold space for communities that have often been left out of the official record.”
She said she has been obsessed with photography since childhood. She started by carrying a digital camera and taking photos of her classmates at school. Artists and filmmakers that she admires, such as Agnes Varda and Tsai Ming Liang, have influenced her art. And so have her family members and friends.
Recently, she made a short film named “Notes of a Crocodile,” which she shot in Cambodia in 2024, about “a queer Chinese woman searching for her ex-lover.”
She said her parents wanted her to become a doctor or lawyer, but that now they are proud of her artwork.
“My mom goes to all my screenings in Toronto.”