Art imitating life: An exploration of the Chinese Caribbean diaspora

The Caribbean might seem like an unlikely focus for an art exhibit revolving around the Chinese diaspora. But for the curators who spent four years developing a dual museum exhibit in the US, it made perfect sense.

"We chose specific areas to visit that we know had a Chinese presence and had art… [we were] interested in covering areas where there were migrations of China," the exhibition's co-curator Alexandra Chang told CGTN Digital. "There have been historic migrations since the mid-15th century, but it wasn’t until the mid-1800 when there was a huge migration mostly from southern China – seven million Chinese at the time."

The "Circles and Circuits" exhibition explored the contributions of artists of Chinese origin in Cuba, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and beyond, thus revealing the hidden complexities of the transcultural art of the Caribbean.

"We were grateful to work with Caribbean thinkers while curating this," she said. "Not the traditional European thinking."