“Nicole and I have crossed paths a few times over the last few years serendipitously, and I was curious to learn more about them given our shared background in landscape architecture. SSSAD was the perfect opportunity to connect to learn more about their perspective and creative inspiration across their public-sector work, design research, and artistic practice.”
- Jenn

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This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Jenn Low (JL): Hello, this is Jenn Low and Nicole Cheng for Storytelling Spaces of Solidarity in the Asian diaspora. Hi, Nicole.

Nicole Cheng (NC): Hi, Jen. How are you?

JL: Good. How are you doing?

NC: I’m good. Should I introduce myself here?

JL: I’d love for you to have a self-introduction. Go for it!

NC: Okay! I currently work as an urban designer and planner at New York City Department of Transportation, and I’m also an artist. I am of Chinese descent, and I’m also queer.

JL: Awesome. Love to also ask you a quick question before we get into some deeper questions. We met a few years ago, I think probably at a Landscape Architecture Foundation event. So I know that you’re a landscape architect too, and I’d be curious how you found your way to landscape architecture.

NC: Landscape architecture—So I studied environmental studies in undergrad and became more interested in designing the urban environment through an internship at MASS Design Group. I looked to continue that after being forced to leave the US in 2019 and had a short stint as a landscape designer in Singapore prior to actually getting a graduate degree in the field. However, without paper qualifications, the only landscape designer jobs that were available to me were working on resort planning and luxury residential spaces. And so that, coupled with the fact that one of my partners still lived in New York, incentivized me to find a way back here. Environmental studies plus art equals maybe landscape architecture? (laughs)

I applied for urban planning degrees, forestry degrees, and landscape architecture. And that’s kind of how I found myself doing landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. I graduated from that program in May 2023.

JL: Awesome. And you are an artist as well, and I would love to hear more about your work as an artist too. Can you tell me more?

NC: Yeah, so before I studied environmental studies, I actually came to the US for art school at the Rhode Island School of Design. After two years there, I realized that I basically couldn’t really—I couldn’t stomach the toxicity of the student environment. There were a lot of mental health issues across the student body and there was very little support from the administration. I also found that faculty there were very uncritical of the Eurocentricity of their curriculum, and quite frankly, pretty racist. I had to come to terms with confronting racism and colonialism in the minutia of everyday America. After two years I was like, okay, I can’t be at a cultural institution that can’t be critical of this and examine this for themselves.

That, and going to art school, really destroyed my ability to connect to a creative process. So for many years I continued to make art, but I wouldn’t acknowledge myself as an artist. And I think my parents were pretty relieved at the subsequent choices I made to study something more concrete like environmental studies. And landscape architecture, even though they didn’t know what that was, they were like, “You’re going to an Ivy League school! I can talk to my friends about you now.” (laughs)

So I’ve only really been able to be confident in calling myself an artist in the last year or so, even though I’ve been making art this whole time. And right now the kind of art that I’m interested in really tries to help me with understanding my identity, understanding things that I think can’t be answered through design or at least design in the way that is paid for today. What does it mean to be of Chinese descent? What does it mean to cultivate an identity that’s not defined by nation states, and what does it mean to cultivate an identity that is queer? As in, can you truly embody and move in the world in acknowledgement of relations and ancestry outside of blood relations?

It took me a really long time to feel like these kinds of explorations were relevant or were important enough. I think going through so much school, there’s a lot of needing to qualify why you have a personal interest if it’s not an interest that is expressed by the institution that you’re going to—or, as Stefano Harney has said, “All interests are White.” Everything I presented at school had to be qualified within a longer arc of history and have this sort of bulletproof logic to justify its study.

So it took me a really long time to call myself an artist. I think any serious inquiry into the self involves larger issues of climate, of social justice, and I think leads to a re-imagining and fundamental shift in understanding of these larger issues. But the people who feel empowered most often to look at the political through the personal are people who are supported by the political.

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JL: Definitely. Given those challenges—and I can definitely even think about my own experiences also just going to design school and just not feeling like this was the space for me in many different directions, I think either within or beyond art school, how and where did you find those spaces that you felt comfortable that you could explore and continue to do the work that you do—creatively?

NC:  I think a lot of it has to do with knowing that school’s temporary. (laughs) So I have two partners. One of them is an artist. They’re also an art professor who ironically now teaches at Rhode Island School Design. And my girlfriend is a musician, and she’s also a piano teacher. And I think having two intimate relationships, both people who have overcome different kinds of obstacles to hold onto and grow their creative practices and also teach, has given me a lot of emotional support as I understand how to create that space for myself. One of the things that my partner, Steve, would often remind me of is that sometimes it’s easier to not dismiss the curriculum that’s being given to you, so that you can learn the most from what people know instead of fighting people into giving you knowledge that they simply do not have.

Which is difficult to do in the moment. But after three long years of going to UPenn, I found the most generative studio was the one that I spent the least time on. And I think that comes very difficult to people in design school where there is this culture of just pulling all-nighters and working as much as possible. And that being the road to getting acknowledged. I won’t say success (laughs); I think it’s more just getting acknowledgement. I think that design school attracts a lot of teacher’s pet types and then creates a toxic environment where everybody’s really vying for attention rather than focusing on personal development and study. (laughs)

When I explain design school to people who are out of the industry or are not designers, I say design school to me is where they take the fervent energy of artists but couple it with all the trappings of capitalism. So you just get these rooms of people who feel so much passion and have so much energy and devotion to doing something but get wrung through this machine and molded to the interests of the studio professors. Studios were used either to pick out fresh talent or as free research labs for professors’ companies.

JL: Yeah, definitely a lot to reflect on, especially since you went to two pretty significant universities of a very particular point of view as American universities. Given those challenges too—and not despite of—I’d be curious too—even before that you landed in grad schools or just art school or thereafter—where have you found spaces, community, places that reflect your identity, how you’ve grown up, all of the above? How have you been able to navigate that?

JL: This is going to be really embarrassing to confess, but it’s the only—it’s what is true. I think we were talking about this in our conversation before. I found community on the internet, but not just any internet, specifically through fan fiction. When I first wrote fan fiction, I was around ten or twelve. The act of writing into a narrative that someone else created is how I like to think about it. It was also the first time where I encountered like, oh, characters can have relationships with each other that are not deemed like “canon” (makes air quotes) by the original writers, which also meant that a lot of the relationships could be queer. And I think that was the first time where I understood that there can be—you can have a really rich inner world that grows your own understanding of yourself while being counter to what’s happening around you.

JL: I love that. Is there examples of the fan fiction that you’ve written too that—

NC: (laughs) Oh gosh, no. Only my sister remembers for emergency blackmail reasons. (both laugh)

But I think honestly, it wasn’t so much what I wrote within fan fiction. I would reproduce, actually, pretty heteronormative and cheesy romance narratives in my own writing. But I consumed a lot of alternate narratives. So I think at that point I wasn’t comfortable with really writing out what I wanted, but I was very comfortable consuming other people’s imaginings.

JL: So, currently, I know that you have some projects going on outside of the regular work day. You’re a Forefront fellow. I would love for you to tell me more about the work that you’re doing in that and how that is grappling and exploring issues of Asian identity, history, or similar themes.

NC: Right now I am doing this year-long fellowship at the Urban Design Forum. And I’m working on a team project tentatively named “Lifelong City,” where we’re thinking about what it would be like for older adults to live in New York City in 2060, aka what is it like for us right now in our twenties, thirties and forties to age in the city?

The more that I’ve been in this fellowship the more I’ve realized aging is not about becoming old overnight. Becoming an older adult, it’s a becoming. Aging is a process, and everybody ages differently. It is through understanding aging as a process that I am beginning to articulate speculative futures. One of the ways I am doing this is through planning these collective creative aging workshops at SAGE, which is this national affordable housing nonprofit that advocates for queer and trans older adults. Remembering the past can be a very stressful and frustrating thing for older adults as a result of dementia and other things, so deemphasizing imagination across time is important to keep things open, free, and creative.

And then because I felt really strongly about exploring what that would also mean for my Chinese identity, I’m writing a series of short stories that think about and paint a picture of what Chinatown, specifically Manhattan Chinatown, will look like in 2052. And that is in response to an open call by the writers of this book called Everything for Everyone. This novel is a series of fictional oral history interviews with a bunch of different people who’ve seen New York transform into a series of anarchist communes. A specific Chinese narrative that they wrote is why I feel like I need to write these stories—I guess kind of the way that I approached fan fiction when I was ten or twelve.

The backdrop for all of this is the passing of the Internment Act in the 2030s, where all Chinese-identified people are thrown into camps across the country. And one of the people that the book interviews is from California, gets interned, escapes to China, but because of horrible working conditions there and sort of cultural alienation, plus nationwide rebellions kicked off by the 2046 Xinjiang insurrection, finds a way to then return and returns to Flushing. Not Manhattan Chinatown, but Flushing, and starts a commune there.

I found this narrative talked about the Chinese diaspora in this way, which reinforced this idea of alienation, having to leave and having to return, rather than imagining Chinese diaspora in the US being able to resist in place. And so the short story series tries to imagine what that would be like within this world, within this future.

I mean, we’re seeing this now with people, Chinese nationals having their student visas revoked; undocumented immigrants from Asia and from China being deported, which I feel like is something that is under-reported relative to other immigrant narratives at the moment, but it’s still happening.

And so before Trump was inaugurated, when I first read this book last year, I was like, Oh, that’s not possible. This is not going to–Chinese people aren’t going to be interned. That’s just not something that is on the horizon. And I think the way that this current federal administration has attacked immigrants and anyone really that they think goes against their agenda, has made the Internment Act more tangible. And so it has made it more important to really imagine a future where somebody like me can plausibly resist all this that’s happening and find a way to stay rather than a way to leave.

I haven’t fully fleshed these stories out yet, but it’s been really interesting to talk to other people of Chinese descent and understand what their own relationship to Chinese American history is. I didn’t know that in California, for example, the reason why some Chinatowns have underground tunnels is because they used to be sunset towns. Having a different understanding of the literal architecture of Chinatown and how that’s related to the history of alienation and surveillance—it’s just been something that I’ve been thinking about. Is that something that you knew about—sunset towns?

JL: Can you tell me more? I don’t think I even knew about that—the sunset towns?

NC: Somebody I work with here at DOT told me about them; they’re from LA—and I think maybe also just closer to West Coast, Chinese American history. I will confess the only page that I landed on after our conversation was Wikipedia, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think Antioch, California, was a sunset town, which is in the Bay Area, and there’s a series of underground tunnels there. Part of the reason why they had that is because sunset town laws there applied to Asians. And I only knew of sunset towns as a way to surveil Black people. I didn’t know that there were towns where those same laws were used to surveil Asians.

JL: Oh, I had no idea either. And that was across different Chinatowns too?

NC: I’m not sure. So because I didn’t land much further than Wikipedia—that’s the other thing about Chinatown is there’s so much misinformation.

Reading the book and watching the TV series Interior Chinatown made me so much more aware of just how little illuminated history there is. At least that feels Googleable, which at least for me is sort of a shorthand for accessible nowadays. I don’t know if I did more research in archives and libraries if I would encounter something different, but if you Google Manhattan Chinatown, very quickly you’ll just encounter sensationalist white narratives of TikTok videos, short videos of people being like, Oh, did you know that Chinatown, Manhattan Chinatown, used to be a place of extreme gang violence? Et cetera, et cetera.

This is very similar to what Interior Chinatown was getting at. The characters are just living their regular lives running the Chinese restaurant in LA Chinatown, and in response to police investigations into local gang violence they’re like, Wait, what? What gangs? What are you talking about?

Something else that has been really important to me and thinking about this is reading this book by Rasheedah Phillips, Dismantling the Master’s Clock. In it they write about research at CERN, paralleling a concept of time in quantum physics to Black diasporic understandings of time. They counter what is defined as “the unidirectional arrow of time” from, like, how placing a cup of coffee on the table can only go from hot to cold, through Black diasporic conceptions of ancestral time. One of the examples they give that I keep thinking about is how when a child is born, the birth of this child and the life that this child lives literally reshapes the life that their mother and their grandmother lived before them, because they get to reframe and retell their ancestral stories through their life experience.

And Youngmi Mayer does this super—I don’t know if you know who Youngmi Mayer is—she’s a half-white, half-Korean comedian. She just wrote this book I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying. It’s really amazing where she basically tells the story of—I think it’s a really good display of this sort of understanding of time through an Asian, Asian American lens. And at the one woman show that she then translates her book into that I recently saw with a friend at Joe’s Pub, she cosplays as her grandmother and then her mother, and then has somebody play her sixteen-year-old self, and then she plays herself.

And just the way that she is able to—if you can think about it as this is a sort of time travel. I am still having a hard time getting my mind around it, but it’s like you’re literally reshaping the narrative of your ancestors through living your own life. In thinking about immigration and documentation specifically, my great-grandmother, from what I understand, only had paper documentation of her name and her birth as an adult when she immigrated from South Africa to Singapore. Because before then, her documentation was just her relation to her father and then to her husband. She didn’t need documentation outside of that because as a woman—or even a name—her whole identity was just about her relationships to men. And I just think about her, and then me now, as somebody who not only doesn’t have to—I can break from that. My documentation, my ability to move is not tied to my dad or being married.

JL: That really makes sense though. And also this documentation piece and what’s valuable and not valuable about your identity and your story too is very cyclical. And I also connect to it in the fact that you’re—for myself, I’m retracing and trying to uncover things that I think have been erased or not erased intentionally but not being something that even family members have been like, Eh.

NC: Yeah, exactly! Especially working as a government worker now, I often have to think about how you identify informants or what meaningful community representation feels like. I’m not going to be able to cite this right, but Timothy Morton writes a lot about this in ecological theory where instead of the whole being larger than the sum of its parts, they actually advocate for a rethinking where the part is actually richer and larger than the whole. And how do you acknowledge that and operationalize that when you’re working in the public sphere?

Something that was really difficult for me: So I helped curate a series of artists to paint these murals along Park Row, connecting the financial district and Chinatown. Being able to be part of those conversations where we’re curating the artists that get to represent what it means to define an entrance into Chinatown exposed me—I have a lot of feelings about it, but essentially I was kind of surprised at how the community, the working group that was formed to represent local interest, voted for artists that I think really reduced what Chinese identity is—going for what I would see as “sellable” Chinese identity. So noodles with chopsticks, and everybody’s around the table, and there’s a dragon there. At one point I was just like, If I see another dragon, I’m just going to be so fed up with this. (laughs)

Luckily, while the working group was reduced to one vote, there were multiple Chinese people on the curation panel, and I think that was the only way that we got more nuanced artists to the table. Even though we still ended up with a couple of dragons.

JL: I love that quote that you just said too. I feel like it’s really impactful. Thank you so much, Nicole.

“I was kind of surprised at how the community, the working group that was formed to represent local interest, voted for artists that I think really reduced what Chinese identity is—going for what I would see as “sellable” Chinese identity. So noodles with chopsticks, and everybody’s around the table, and there’s a dragon there.”

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Posted April 16, 2026