The Queens Museum’s summertime staple, Passport Thursdays: International Dance, Music, and Film Series, returns for another exciting season featuring some of the many international locales that fuel Queens’ cultural and artistic vitality. This year’s adventure includes stops in Ecuador, Ethiopia, India, and Taiwan. So leave your baggage at home and bring a picnic blanket out to Flushing Meadows Corona Park for an evening in the shadow of the majestic Unisphere. There will be free artmaking workshops for families before the films start, our cafe will remain open until 8pm, and we won’t let a little rain spoil the fun, we’ll just move the whole event indoors.

Film: Go Grandriders! (Tian-Hao Hua, 2013, 80 min, Mandarin with English ST)

A group of senior citizens, many of whom learn how to ride a motorcycle for the first time, embark on what may be the most daring adventures of their lives: a 13-day tour around the island of Taiwan entirely on motorcycles. Among these 17 “Grandriders,” two have had cancer, four need hearing aids, five suffer from high blood pressure, eight have coronary heart disease, and every one of them has joint problems. However, at the youthful age of 80+, they dare to challenge themselves and discover the land they have lived all their lives from a new perspective. View the trailer here.

Performance:

Yuhan Su Band: A native of Taiwan, New York based-vibraphonist Su came to the United States in 2008 to study at Berklee College of Music. Since then, she has performed with her jazz quartet throughout the East Coast and joined the acclaimed saxophonist Greg Osby’s label, Inner Circle Music. The band will perform a set of music featuring the traditional music from different ethnic groups in Taiwan, including Taiwu ancient ballads, Hakka traditional song, and Taiwanese folk song, with Hakka singer-songwriter Yu-Wei Hsieh as special guest. Yuhan will bring a new series of compositions inspired by Chinese mythological KuaFu, a giant who decided to chase and catch the Sun.

Artmaking Workshop Guest Artist

Huang Zi-huang 黃子鐶: Born in Pingtung, Taiwan in 1961, she lives and creates art in Jhutian Township, Pingtung County, Taiwan. Huang’s Ziyou studio attempts to preserve and promote Hakka culture and craft. She created portraits and seal-engravings in the early years when in high school. She started printmaking under the tutelage of Chen Kuo-chan in 1990, and gained a better understanding of woodcut prints from printmakers Chen Chi Mao and Fang Xiang in 1991. Her first printmaking solo exhibition “I Am between Black and White” was held in Pingtung County Cultural Center in 2002. She stayed in Fangliao Art Village in 2002 as a resident artist. Through exchanges with various artists during her stay in the village, she envisioned how to bring printmaking into the field of contemporary art, surpassing its origins in craft. This involved both devising installations and arranging interactivity involving printmaking. In 2005, she held a printmaking solo exhibition “Books, Bookplates, I” that took as its theme treating prints as “art objects” and enlarged the intersection of printmaking and contemporary art. In 2014 she was invited to participate in Passport to Taiwan at Union Square in Manhattan NY. Her works has been collected by: Chimei Museum, Taiwan, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Angel Art Gallery, and Cultural Affairs Department of Pingtung County.

Co-presented with the Taiwanese American Arts Council and the Taipei Economic & Cultural Office.

Passport Thursdays is generously made possible by lead sponsor TD Bank, in addition to the Queens Museum’s official airline, Delta Air Lines, and Astoria Bank. We are also grateful for the support provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.