The 2015 explorAsian Festival is celebrating the National Asian Heritage Month from May 1 to 31 with festivities all over Metro Vancouver.
This year’s event was launched at the Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver campus as part of SFU’s David Lam Centre for International Communication and the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society (VAHMS) partnership. The event took place last May 2nd with Vancouver City Mayor Gregor Robertson, B.C. Minister of International Trade Teresa Wat as guests of honour with featured performances by Iranian and Japanese artists.
One of the highlights of the festival is the official launch of the Miguel and Julia Tecson Collection at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA).
The explorAsian 2014 Community Builder Awardees Dr. Miguel and the late Julia Tecson, one of the first Filipino families who settled in Vancouver in the 60s, donated over 350 archaeological and anthropological objects from the Philippines and nearby countries to MOA in 1997.
The 2015 festival also features a rich mosaic of events, including Persian Poetry in Motion, and on May 19, a night of exotic music, graceful dance, and inspiring poetry at the Vancouver Public Library, The Sensationalists at the Cultch from May 12-16, and Director Yuya Ishii’s Our Family on May 26.
Established in 1997, the National Asian Heritage Month was designed to launch a national festival hosted by individual communities across Canada, with a goal to address the concerns that a growing Canadian Asian population were not proportionately represented in the metropolitan arenas of artistic and cultural life.
For the past 18 years, the VAHMS has introduced various Pan-Asian artists and cultural groups to the Canadian audience. The explorAsian Festival has become a major platform in bringing together artists from across Metro Vancouver’s culturally diverse Pan-Asian communities to showcase their wide range of cultural and artistic endeavours.
ExplorASIAN continues to evolve to meet the needs of our multicultural society and serve as the driving force that helps our Pan-Asian Canadian cultural communities progress to a higher level of awareness, inclusivity, integration and participation in the mainstream of Canada’s artistic and cultural community.
For the full calendar of events, please visit the explorASIAN website: www.explorasian.org.
Dr. Miguel Tecson showing the assorted ceramic and porcelain dishes on display at the Museum of Anthropology. Photo by Emmy Buccat.
