Berlin
Asia
Arts
Club
Asian Berlin is booming. And not just in certain neighborhoods, but everywhere: sushi and pho everywhere; yoga, judo and jiu jitsu from kindergarten to the office to senior citizens' clubs; K-pop and Gangnam Style in dance clubs; exhibitions and pop-up events in every neighborhood ... It's so self-evident that we hardly notice it anymore: the arts of Asia are blending into Berlin's lively amalgam of creativity. The special thing is that many artists of Asian origin are often active in several cultural fields at the same time: they are novelists, painters, musicians, filmmakers, dancers and poets, graphic designers, performers and sculptors, food designers and fashion designers and much more - simultaneously, side by side, interconnected. In 2021, the Vietnamese friends of our association suggested creating a suitable stage for this and giving these cross-genre phenomena the attention they deserve - the Berlin Asia Arts Club was created to regularly present Asian Berliners and their arts. At the instigation of the Berlin Asia Arts Clubs we also realized a three-week festival in 2023 that provided a suitable stage for this scene and its specific artistic themes with all their potential. (Its events can be found in the ARCHIVE. More than eighty Asian artists from Berlin were active in our club with this festival alone). The program, like our Spring Awakening 2024 jointly designed by our curators and their friends - concepts, ideas and suggestions in our club come from the Asian Berliners and their friends themselves.
The BERLIN ASIA ARTS CLUB offers an open stage for Berlin's Asian artists and the arts and all those interested in them – without pigeonholes and blinkers, in direct encounters and discoveries with a workshop and dialogue character. Our club focuses on the interrelationships and discourses of the local Asian and Asia-related cultural scenes of the influential but often exoticised artists and arts of the Far East in our city: here they themselves have their say. While the younger artists in particular have increasingly joined together in artistic initiatives in recent years, networked with each other and become more visible, our club aims to bring together artists of all generations and the wider Berlin public. AMong the initiators of the Berlin Asia Arts Clubs the scientist and translator Dr. Đăng Lãnh Hoàng, the writer, painter and youtuber Võ Thị Hảo, the poet and painter Phạm Kỳ Đăng as well as the gallerist and culture producer Lutz Längert. The team of the Berliner Literarischen Aktion e.V. and its partners with a wide range of practical experience in the field of Asian-European cultural exchange – for example with the intercontinental art project U(DYS)TOPIA (2010), the Jakarta Berlin Arts Festival (2011), the project FERNOSTBERLIN (2019) or the Middle East Union Festival (2021) and much more – forms the organisational basis for a format designed jointly with the Asian Berlin art scene: direct partnership-based collaboration between all artists and experts as well as open dialogues with active audience participation are the basic principles of our deliberately multicultural, strictly non-commercial club. Mutual respect and recognition of different identities and positions, equal rights and solidarity with one another are the basis for our international series of events for and from Berlin, which is open to all languages, genres and audiences.
>> BERLIN ASIA ARTS CLUB:
A non-profit project of the Berliner Literarischen Aktion e.V.
GFunded 2023 with the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, 2022 and 2024 by the Kulturamt Treptow Köpenick and 2025/26 by the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.
Designer, artist and cultural mediator. Founder of the design studio "Studio Wu 無" with a focus on "Intercultural Design".
Đăng Lãnh Hoàng is a scientist, author and translator from Vietnam. He came to the GDR as a chemist in the late 1980s and was a research associate in Berlin and Rostock until 2014.
Hang Thi Yen Hoang, born and raised in Vietnam, is a translator and interpreter.
Martin Jankowski is a Berlin-based writer, directs various international cultural projects and festivals.
Lutz Längert is a Berlin-based cultural worker, long-time producer of art and cultural projects, and program coordinator of Moving Poets Novilla.
