Herb Tam

Opening our exhibition of Ed Young’s life and work @mocanyc on Thursday, May 14. Looking back to October 2024 when we first saw, and were blown away by, the work in person. He created picture books for children filled with great ideas about art making and delectable moments of craft. We weren’t able to show a lot of the sketches he made of 60s NYC street scenes and so many great book projects, so showing them off here. I’m very honored that his daughters, Antonia and Ananda, entrusted us with this project. And I’m grateful for the team that put the show together: Nick Zheng, Curatorial ProjectsManager; @liz.lizhi on tai chi research and accordion book mounting; @studiobettywang with graphic identity; @qianfan on translation; @wetdreamsneverend as sounding board; and the amazing crew of art handlers.

Happy birthday ✨ @wetdreamsneverend ✨ Lu was in her element this trip we just barely made it back from! I’m happy we got to see a different kind of world in a reflection of our very own. I’m happy she brought us to the mountain by train, bus, and soggy shoes. She finally got some rest. Or the rest finally got to her. She insisted on a slower, throwback approach to getting around. Insisted on buying subway tickets with spare change from a previous trip. The journey to wherever was the point. I get it now. I was happy we were able to see her mom and dad. It was during this part of the trip that I was reminded how clever, tough and nurturing she is. She gets it from them. She drove us all around Shenzen and Guangzhou, a driving environment so punishing that you wouldn’t even want to turn up your playlist for fear of distraction. Lu led us everywhere, shouldering the burden of being planner, driver, interpreter, food orderer. She made it all happen, somehow. It was stressful no doubt. The night before we were to fly back we all got sick. On the drive back from a delicious Yunnan dinner, Lu was queasy at the wheel. She kept driving anyway, fighting away convulsions to heave and following navigation directions with half-shut eyes. She pulled up to the hotel with the car still running and disappeared into the bathroom. I got sick next, and I’ll spare you those details. But it got so bad that Lu pulled me out of my abject crouch next to the toilet and into a taxi to the emergency room. She’s feeling like hot trash too at this point by the way. From there, all I could really remember was her wrangling administrators, nurses, doctors and me in an intake process that made everyone sort of hate each other. All the beds were taken, saved for those in dire need. She eventually argued one open for me one, and for herself she found 3 consecutive metal seats of the regional bus stop variety. She sat there for hours with her IV, coming to check on me every so often. As I’m writing this, we’re at home and Lu is sleeping. I’m thinking how wondrous it is that she keeps adding new moves to her bag, pulling them out when we needed them most. Happy birthday! I love you ❤️

📕📕A book is an object, a span of time, and a container of community life. With that idea, and a curiosity about how it takes form, we interviewed the editorial team behind FLOATER, a book born from a close-knit community, @chinatownbasketballclub ,built through basketball, art-making, and, above all, the simple act of gathering and playing together. 🏀🏀We talked about how something as immaterial as shared moments became a physical book. Read the interview via the link in bio!

Happy new year! Thankful to have gotten through 2025 and for time spent with people I care about in places that felt like home.

Happy Christmas CBC families! Slowly sharing the moments captured by Autumn Classic photo team. Digging into subtle friendship and cares came through the game of basketball. So Sanctuary. First up: 1-9 @dustin_lin_photos 10: @charliefranco 11: @siennaaayan 12-19: @tensorbodega 20: @a_____liu Love you all🫴🏽❤️🫳🏽 Lu Herb and CBC

Please join us for the launch of our newest publication @printedmatterinc : A Suspension of Outcomes: FLOATER — Book Launch, Discussion, and Signing with Chinatown Basketball Club. (Link in bio) Tuesday, December 9, 6–8pm Printed Matter, Chelsea — 231 11th Ave, NYC About the event: Celebrate the release of CBC’s first book, FLOATER: Blurring Basketball Lines, with a panel discussion featuring contributors @_catangui @alxzhg @chiarina.chen @dustin_lin_photos , moderated by CBC co-founder @wetdreamsneverend and @herbtam , with an introduction from the FLOATER book team (@squeezesour @lin000nnn and @xinyuan_qu ). The conversation will explore each contributor’s relationship to CBC and basketball, and how their creative practices—spanning design, photography, and writing—shape the group’s evolving aesthetics. Audience Q&A to follow with a shooting contest to win prizes from a special set of FLOATER poster print! Presentation supported by special @thehighlineguy Free and open to all. No RSVP required. You can also find CBC at these upcoming December events: 🐘Dec 6–7 (Sat & Sun), 12–6pm — Apex Holiday Market @apexforyouth , Pig Beach BBQ, 35-37 36th Street, Astoria, NY 11106 🐬Dec 9 (Tues), 6–8pm — Printed Matter (Book Launch) 🐙Dec 13 (Sat), 10:30am–3pm — ICP Holiday Market @icp 🦜Dec 13–14 (Sat & Sun) — Joining Squeeze Sour at Pioneer Works Press Play Book Fair @pioneerworks poster design by @xinyuan_qu

13min late Happy 9th year! Photos of Herb and Lu taken by Lu and Herb:) home 2025

@wetdreamsneverend ‘s distinct vision of basketball for @chinatownbasketballclub : competitive but open, cute yet intense, experimental and accessible, low-key locked-in (see our book “Floater: Blurring Basketball Lines” for more on this). The Autumn Classic 3x3 Tournament and MiniMarket is the full, glorious manifestation of that vision, but to actually make it happen, Lu has become a master organizer and planner. She’s brought together her mom’s uncanny ability to read people with a no-fear mentality to try things in a feelings-forward management approach. It works like a MF. In the past few weeks, Lu’s been on the grind non-stop, unseen labor of love, nitty gritty spreadsheets, handcrafts, late-night communications with fabricators and designers, working on any and all surfaces to bring what happened yesterday at Columbus Park into full blossom. It was the 3rd year of this magical, exuberant gathering of unlikely people and expressions. Thank you for opening up new ways of being in basketball, art and life!

Few physical copies of CBC new book arrived! Floater: Blurring Basketball Lines, only available to purchase at Columbus Park on Sunday Oct 19th during AC tournament! 11-6pm （first come first serve) But Pre-order is arriving Oct 26th! Get your copy of this piece of history! :) link in bio still works! FLOATER: BLURRING BASKETBALL LINES, CBC first book that celebrates our past 5 years 2019-2024 visual culture, with essays contributed by @herbtam , Lu Zhang @wetdreamsneverend , Reef (Harith Liew) @meguadogaaaa , Sean Catangui @_catangui , Alex Zhang @alxzhg , Chiarina Chen @chiarina.chen and Dustin Lin @dustin_lin This book documents the basketball aesthetics, philosophies, and personal narratives that have emerged from CBC’s weekly runs at New York’s Columbus Park since 2019. The book traces how CBC has cultivated collective creativity over five years of collaborative poster art, graphics, and events—addressing questions such as: Is there an alternative, distinctly Asian (diaspora) way of experiencing basketball? Could there be a basketball aesthetic rooted in Asian (diaspora) that exists outside mainstream basketball culture? Designed by Xinyuan Qu @xinyuan_qu . Co-published by linlin Plum @squeezesour . In anatomy, a FLOATER refers to tiny specks or shapes that drift across one’s field of vision—never fixed, always in motion. More broadly, the term describes something that remains suspended, either on the surface of water or in the air. In basketball, a floater is a short-range, high-arching shot above the reach of a taller defender. In many senses, floater suggests a suspension of outcomes—full of possibility, hovering just out of reach. The book is made possible with support from TRF. 《浮》 這本書記錄了唐人街籃球俱樂部（CBC）自2019年以來，在紐約哥倫布公園每週舉行的籃球活動中呈現出的籃球美學、哲學與個人敘事。通過梳理CBC過往五年間集體設計的海報（其中包括平面設計，視覺藝術以及活動實踐中的影像作品），本書追問是否能夠透過這種集體的創造力，探尋存属于亚洲（离散）群体的篮球体验方式？是否在篮球的主流文化之外，存在著由亚洲（离散）经验形成的篮球美学？

It’s a long time coming one! 🪼 FLOATER: BLURRING BASKETBALL LINES. CBC first book that celebrates our past 5 years 2019-2024 visual culture, with essays contributed by @herbtam @wetdreamsneverend @meguadogaaaa @_catangui @alxzhg @chiarina.chen @dustin_lin_photos Please join us at @icp Photobook Fest Sunday, October 5, 3:30pm International Center for Photography, 84 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side Book Talk: Imagining an Alternative Basketball Aesthetics Floater: Blurring Basketball Lines documents the basketball aesthetics, philosophies, and personal narratives that have emerged from CBC’s weekly runs at New York’s Columbus Park since 2019. The book traces how CBC has cultivated collective creativity over five years of collaborative poster art, graphics, and events—addressing questions such as: Is there an alternative, distinctly Asian (diaspora) way of experiencing basketball? Could there be a basketball aesthetic rooted in Asian (diaspora) that exists outside mainstream basketball culture? Panelists: Lu Zhang and Herb Tam of Chinatown Basketball Club @wetdreamsneverend @herbtam Xinyuan Qu (designer) @xinyuan_qu Moderated by Lin Wang of linlin Plum @lin000nnn @squeezesour (co-publisher) In anatomy, a FLOATER refers to tiny specks or shapes that drift across one’s field of vision—never fixed, always in motion. More broadly, the term describes something that remains suspended, either on the surface of water or in the air. In basketball, a floater is a short-range, high-arching shot above the reach of a taller defender. In many senses, floater suggests a suspension of outcomes—full of possibility, hovering just out of reach. The book is made possible with support from TRF.

Gearing up to open @kipx ‘s hapa.me: 25 Years of the Hapa Project @mocanyc , a collective and highly personal effort at defining mixed race or multiracial Asian Pacific Islander identity. In 2001, Kip began photographing mixed race people across the country and inviting them to hand write responses to the question: What Are You? The answers are filled with humor, wit, emotion, and criticality. He caught up with some of the original subjects recently and asked them to respond again. The result is the hapa.me exhibition where we get to see how people have changed physically and in terms of their own sense of who/what they are. It’s a soulful and generous meditation on how we define ourselves through language. Opens Thursday, September 25, 2025. Hit me up if you wanna come through and check it out! Graphic design by the talented @xinyuan_qu . Big thank you to my colleague Nick for coordinating and installing the exhibition so beautifully and gracefully. Massive thank you to Kip Fulbeck for entrusting us with your work and story!

Last week of “Magazine Fever: Gen X Asian American Periodicals” @mocanyc closing Sunday, August 31. Featuring: A. Magazine, AsiAm, AsianWeek, Audrey, Giant Robot, Hyphen, Jade, KoreAm, Rice, Transpacific and Yolk, along with Bridge, Getting Together and Gidra. Big thank you to all the founders, editors, contributors and readers for helping us tell the story of what it meant to create Asian American magazines in the multicultural era, at the height of print media’s power. @jasontomme just wrote an incisive think piece in @villagevoice (link in bio) about several exhibitions, including Magazine Fever, and their connection to organizing work—a perspective I hadn’t considered before. Long live rigorous art criticism!