Honoring the Past: How Boston's Desi and Asian Communities Are Celebrating Ancestral Legacies

For Boston's Desi and broader Asian communities, honoring those who came before — through art, ritual, and shared spaces — is a deeply felt act of cultural preservation and belonging.

🎨 Pao Arts Center Opens a Sanctuary for Ancestral Memory in Chinatown

The group exhibition 'Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams,' on view at Pao Arts Center through June 19, 2026, brings together eight local artists exploring how communities carry forward ancestral legacies through multimedia works. The show was contextualized by a gathering on the Pao Arts Center balcony following Qingming, where over a hundred community members, artists, and Buddhist monastics from the Thousand Buddha Temple in Quincy chanted the heart sutra and offered fruit and incense at an altar. Curators Wenxuan Xue and Sung-Min Kim shaped the project around the concept of 'ancestors' as those who have come before, transforming the community center into what the exhibition framing calls a diasporic temple. What began as a proposed series of public performances throughout Boston Chinatown evolved into a larger, more expansive project rooted in collective mourning, celebration, and ritual. [1]

Sources: [1] Boston Art Review