The 25-year-old Lan Su Chinese Garden, a landmark in Portland’s Old Town/Chinatown, is planning a major expansion on its neighboring Block 24, transforming the space that’s now home to a few parking spaces and not much else into a lively cultural center that would include classrooms, meeting rooms, an art gallery, demonstration kitchen, banquet facilities, performances spaces, and, in its outdoor spaces, plazas, greenhouses and gardens.

“Just as the opening of Lan Su transformed Old Town nearly 25 years ago, we believe this expansion will transform how we serve the community for generations to come,” Elizabeth Nye, Lan Su’s executive director, said in a Feb. 24 announcement. “This expansion would allow us to welcome more visitors, host larger school groups and create exhibition spaces showcasing the richness of Chinese culture and the AANHPI [Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander] experience.”

The expansion would greatly deepen Lan Su’s impact on the neighborhood and the city, providing a center of cultural activity to go with the beauty and serenity of the garden itself. Lan Su has engaged an architectural team including Gene Sandoval of ZGF, who recently completed the redesign of the Portland International Airport, to prepare a conceptual plan.

The garden is planning a fund-raising capital campaign. It estimates the cost at $34 million and is aiming to complete the expansion by 2030. Prosper Portland, the former Portland Development Commission, owns Block 24 and hasn’t yet decided whether to sell it to Lan Su, Tatum Todd reported in The Oregonian/Oregon Live.

For more details, read Tatum’s well-reported story here.

“A Song in Movement”

A Song in Movement, a new documentary film about Japanese-American artist, musician, and activist Nobuko Miyamoto, will be shown in Portland, Salem, and Eugene during the first week of March. In the film, directed by Quyên Nguyen-Le and co-directed by Tadashi Nakamura, “(a)fter decades of groundbreaking cultural work that unites communities and sets the bar for Asian American storytelling, Miyamoto reflects on a life that has bridged coasts, industries, families, and history,” according to the VC FilmFest (now known as the Los Angeles Asian American Film Festival) in L.A.’s Little Tokyo, where A Song in Movement premiered in 2024.

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The film’s Oregon screenings:

• 7-9 p.m. March 5: Reed College Performance Lab, Performance Art Building, 3017 SE Woodstock Blvd. Portland. The evening will also include a Q&A with Quyên Nguyen-Le, Nobuko and musician Derek Nakamoto, and a book signing of Nobuko’s Not Yo’ Butterfly.
• 7-9 p.m. March 6: Ford Hall 122 — Smullin Film Studies Center, Willamette University, Salem. The evening will also include a meet-and-greet with students and a Q&A with Nobuko Miyamoto, musician Derek Nakamoto and  Director Quyên Nguyen-Le.
• 6 p.m. March 7: Opening night of DisOrient Film Festival, Art House Theatre, Eugene. Nobuko Miyamoto and Derek Nakamoto will also give a musical performance at the film festival’s opening night performance at The Shedd Institute, 9-11 p.m.
  

… about those missing public statues …

Portland architecture and preservation writer Fred Leeson, in his most recent Building on History column published Feb. 24, gives a good update on the status of public monuments torn down or destroyed during the city’s 2020 and ’21 political protests following the murder of George Floyd.

“After a few years of near silence about several Portland monuments toppled or damaged during political protests dating to 2020, encouraging news is beginning to unfold after discussions with citizens, historians and artists,” Leeson writes.

He follows up with reports on the status of several damaged statues — the South Park Blocks’ Abraham Lincoln; the nearby Teddy Roosevelt; George Washington (in limbo, with a new site to be determined); “Promised Land,” the statue of a pioneer couple and their Bible-holding son, which is being deaccessioned; the anti-Black-newspaper editor Harvey Scott, whose statue will not return to Mt. Tabor Park; and York, the Black slave on the Lewis and Clark Expedition whose temporary statue replaced Scott’s: The statue was damaged beyond repair, but Leeson reports there is considerable interest in creating a new one and finding a good location to place it.

In a separate phone conversation, Darion D. Jones, assistant director of the Portland Office of Arts & Culture, said that the Lincoln statue, which originally was expected to be refurbished by the end of March, was more damaged than its conservator realized, and its completion date is now uncertain. The same conservator will be working on the Roosevelt statue, which is expected to take a minimum of 18 months to complete after the Lincoln statue is finished. Officials in the Oregon town of John Day have expressed interest in receiving the “Promised Land” statue, Jones added.

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Leeson goes into more detail about the ongoing process of deciding who and how public statues of prominent people should be displayed, and what sort of texts should accompany them: Read his full column, Progress Update on Historic Statues, here.

Washington County losing its history?

Beset by financial troubles, the Five Oaks Museum, formerly known as the Washington County Museum, shut its doors at the end of December and furloughed all of its employees. It appears unlikely that it will revive, Samantha Swindler writes in an extensive story for The Oregonian/Oregon Live.

“Without a financial bailout – which seems unlikely – it will permanently close, museum board leaders said,” Swindler writes. “The historical collection will revert to the ownership of Washington County, which is discussing ways to disperse most of the items.”

The museum, at Portland Community College’s Rock Creek Campus, includes about 100,000 items that would need to find new homes. Read Swindler’s complete report here.