Noguchi at Night

On Tuesday, May 3, 2022, from 7 to 10 pm, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation hosted Noguchi at Night, a special one-night music and culinary experience celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander creatives. Co-chaired by Danny Bowien, Sandy Liang, and Christine Park, the collaborative evening featured a rare solo acoustic set by Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast and a drum solo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha, with Danny Bowien, chef and owner of Mission Chinese, creating dishes to complement the performances. Suntory served up cocktails, Amy Yip of Yip Studio crafted rock cake pops, and Aēsop provided gifts.

Noguchi at Night raises essential funds to support The Noguchi Museum and its 2022 Artist Banner project. The project was launched in 2021 to stand in solidarity against anti-Asian violence and to amplify local AAPI artists’ voices through an open call for artworks displayed across the Museum’s outdoor banners. Noguchi at Night supports the second year of the project with a new artist’s banners to be installed in fall 2022.

We are so grateful to the performers and to co-chairs Danny Bowien, Sandy Liang, and Christine Park, and the host committee for their leadership and help in making Noguchi at Night a great success. Thank you all for your support—we look forward to seeing you again soon!

Japanese Breakfast

From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish: Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother’s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world. Jubilee finds Michelle Zauner embracing ambition and, with it, her boldest ideas and songs yet. Inspired by records like Bjork’s Homogenic, Zauner delivers bigness throughout—big ideas, big textures, colors, sounds, and feelings. At a time when virtually everything feels extreme, Jubilee sets its sights on maximal joy, imagination, and exhilaration. It is, in Michelle Zauner’s words, “a record about fighting to feel. I wanted to re-experience the pure, unadulterated joy of creation…The songs are about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood. They’re about making difficult choices, fighting ignominious impulses and honoring commitments, confronting the constant struggle we have with ourselves to be better people.”

Hisham Akira Bharoocha

Born in Japan, Hisham Akira Bharoocha is a mixed-race (Japanese-Indian-Myanmar), multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to being a founding member of the experimental rock group Black Dice (1997-2004), Bharoocha has played in many bands who have toured the world, including Boredoms, Pixeltan (DFA Records), Soft Circle, IIII, and Nick Zinner’s 41 Strings. He was the lead music director in pieces that were performed at prestigious venues such as the Sydney Opera House (Australia), ICP (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), Rockefeller Plaza (NY), The Museum of Modern Art (NY), and The Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), to name a few. Bharoocha is known for the large-scale drum-centric performances he directed with the Japanese experimental rock group Boredoms, called the BOADRUM series, with up to 100 drummers performing with the band at site-specific locations around the world (2007–15). Bharoocha also performed as a touring member of Boredoms at the Barbican (London), the Ruhrtriennale (Germany), and several All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals (in London, Minehead, and Tokyo). Bharoocha has collaborated on many site-specific music performances with esteemed artists such as Doug Aitken, Ikue Mori, Otomo Yoshihide, Yoshimio, and Yamantaka Eye, to name a few. His latest band, Kill Alters, has a new album out now on Hausu Mountain. Bharoocha’s latest club-oriented, solo project called YOKUBARI has upcoming releases on the UK-based label Chinabot.

Danny Bowien

Danny Bowien is the chef and cofounder of Mission Chinese in San Francisco and New York. In 2008 he improbably won the Pesto World Championship in Genoa, Italy, and in 2013 the James Beard Foundation named him Rising Star Chef of the Year. He was born in Korea, raised in Oklahoma, and now lives in New York. He was the main subject of the sixth season of the travel and food show The Mind of a Chef.