Interview: Building visibility, equity, and impact for Asian Canadian artists

Just launched: Scott Neigh of the Talking Radical Radio podcast recently interviewed CanAsian Arts Network’s community growth consultant, Shawn Tse, about how CAAN can help Asian Canadian artists organize and grow as an engaged community. Shawn provides background as well as an update on CAAN – how we got here and where we’re headed. He also talks about the challenges faced by Asian Canadian artists and discusses CAAN’s commitment to decolonization and reconciliation. A great primer on the CanAsian Arts Network. Have a listen!

Questions Shawn answered:

1. How did you go about engaging with the community in order to assess what Asian-Canadian artists need?
2. What work was involved in going from this understanding of need to actually establishing the CanAsian Arts Network?
3. What are some of the key features of the platform that implement the vision you had developed?
4. What’s your sense of the community’s response to and uptake of the platform so far?
5. What have you been doing to get word out about the platform?
6. What are the paths that you see connecting the functionality of the platform and the things it brings to the community around visibility and connection to the larger challenges that Asian-Canadian artists experience in terms of, you know, their work, and the broader arts community, and the Canadian context as a whole?
7. What can you say at this point about the kinds of changes consistent with but going beyond the goals of the CanAsian Arts Network that need to be made by arts funders and by mainstream arts organizations?
8. What does the network have coming up in 2023?

We thank Scott Neigh for inviting Shawn to speak about the CanAsian Arts Network on the Talking Radical Radio podcast. You can read Scott’s write-up and listen to the episode over at Media Coop. You’ll find the full transcript of this episode at https://talkingradical.ca/2023/01/04/transcript-building-visibility-equity-and-impact-for-asian-canadian-artists

To discover more podcast episodes by Talking Radical Radio and the ways that you can listen go to talkingradical.ca. You can sign up for email updates or follow the Talking Radical Radio podcast on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, SoundCloud and other platforms. Scott Neigh is a writer and media producer based in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of two books of Canadian history published by Fernwood Publishing. Read his full bio online.