Homeroom: Red Canary Song Touch the Heart

Queens-based collective Red Canary Song presents their Homeroom project Touch the Heart, whose title is a translation of the Cantonese phrase "dim sum." Mirroring the infrastructures that sustain its community, the installation presents four dim sum dining tables to illustrate stories of migration, bodily care and desire, grieving and longing, and provisions of cultural heritage. The presentation also features portraits that memorialize workers who have passed, and still lifes by artist Augustina Wang that document the personal belongings of those who remain. Red Canary Song primarily organizes around food and tea, where harm reduction supplies circulate alongside dirty jokes, and daily crisis management accompanies karaoke—together, the contributions to Touch the Heart envision methodologies for shared refuge. Red Canary Song is a grassroots collective led by migrant massage and sex workers across the Asian diaspora, and formed in 2017 in response to the death of Yang Song, a migrant Chinese massage worker killed during a police raid in Queens. Since then, Red Canary Song has expanded into a mutual aid network that foregrounds the experiences of directly impacted workers, providing groceries, cash assistance, translation services, and connection to legal support and person-first health care.