Show your Pride in Chicago's queer Asian community here in the heart of Chinatown ✨

Presenting the second annual ✨👲💕Yellow Peril Drag Show 👯🌈✨

Saturday, May 30 | 6:00 - 9:00 PM | FL4

Join our Pride Kick-off Party to celebrate and show love to our queer Asian community right in the heart of Chicago’s Chinatown.

Space is limited. Ticket includes food, beer, and one specialty cocktail. While you're here, you can explore Language of Abstraction after-hours on FL1.

Dress code: 💃🌈🪩✨

This event is 18+

Join us for Pride March in Chinatown: Learning about APIDA LGBTQ+ Organization Invisible to Invincible (i2i), a special conversation on the history, visibility, and future of queer Asian American community organizing in Chicago. This program brings together current Core member Liz Haas (they/she) and former Core member Nebula Li (he/him or they/them) to share the story of Invisible to Invincible (i2i), a grassroots APIDA LGBTQ+ organization dedicated to advocacy, visibility, cultural presence, and community care.

The discussion will trace the founding of i2i and reflect on the social and cultural conditions that made the organization necessary. Speakers will share memories and experiences from organizing and marching in Chicago’s Chinatown and Argyle Lunar New Year parades, moments that created visible queer APIDA presence within community and cultural spaces. The conversation will also look toward the present and future of i2i, discussing ongoing challenges, evolving community needs, and visions for future organizing, collaboration, and support networks. This event offers an opportunity to learn more about the intersections of Asian American identity, LGBTQ+ advocacy, public celebration, and community-building in Chicago.

Invisible to Invincible (i2i) is a community-based organization that celebrates and affirms Asian, Pacific Islander, & Desi Americans (APIDA) who identify as LGBTQ+ in the Chicago area. i2i’s work since 2005 has included working toward making Asian spaces more affirming of LGBTQ+ folks, immigrant and refugee justice, reproductive justice, racial justice solidarity work, family acceptance of LGBTQ+ Asians, visibility, and wellness. Currently, i2i organizes progressive educational programming, support spaces, and social events, both virtual and in person. We focus on community activism, primarily around queer, trans, racial, and immigrant justice.

About the Panelists

Liz Haas (they/she) is a Core member of Invisible 2 Invincible (i2i) (2025-present, 2018-2021). Liz has nine years of experience in nonprofit development working with organizations involved in immigrant rights, worker rights, voting rights, reproductive justice, and gender justice; they are currently the Development Director at Arise Chicago. Liz is also a playwright and theater maker who enjoys bringing their Asian American and queer identity into their work. Liz loves speculative fiction and deckbuilding games.

Nebula Li (he/him or they/them) is a former Core member (2012-2014) of Invisible 2 Invincible: Asian/Pacific Islander Pride of Chicago (i2i) and current volunteer leader organizing with Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago. He has over a decade of experience working as an immigration lawyer and has been active in the immigrant rights movement since 2011, which includes working with the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum (NAPAWF) and National Asian National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) to fight for comprehensive immigration reform in 2014. He also helped bring i2i into the campaign against the opening of a paramilitary law enforcement training facility (the #NoCopAcademy Campaign) in 2018. Nebula loves cats, cooking, and being outside.

This event is part of a Pride Month event series presented in collaboration with the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, the Heritage Museum of Asian Art, and Invisible to Invincible (i2i).

In a society governed by patriarchal norms, how did two women in early modern China manage to forge a marriage together?

Join us for a night of storytelling, where we reanimate a 17th queer Chinese opera: The Fragrant Companion 憐香伴. 

The event opens with a vivid oral retelling of the story, with its original arias reimagined in new poetic translations in English. From there, we turn to the visual world of the play, exploring woodblock prints and other historical materials while discussing the rich performance culture of early modern China that brought such stories to life. We will also reflect on the opera’s themes and legacy, tracing how this remarkable tale has been reinterpreted across time and media. The evening culminates in a live demonstration, featuring selected scenes and excerpts that bring the emotional and theatrical power of the opera into the present.

Synopsis:

The opera takes place between two witty and pretty women: a newly-wed wife named Cui Jianyun and a girl called Cao Yuhua. These two female protagonists exhibit incredible agency throughout the story: drawn to each other at first sight, the two women immediately express their admiration for each other through an exchange of poetry; by the end of their second encounter, they have already performed a secret wedding ceremony and pledged to be together forever––in this life and all future lives, as their vows say; then, in the rest of the play, the lovers successfully plot a marriage between Cui’s husband and Cao so that the two could accompany each other forever under the façade of being wife and concubine.

About the lecturer:

Yiwen Wu is an artist-scholar, who’s currently a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, in the joint program between Theater & Performance Studies and East Asian Languages & Civilizations. Her research centers on early modern East Asian performance culture, with a special interest on translations and adaptations of classical works on modern stages. As a theater practitioner, her credits of original puppet plays include Sattva (Special Recognition Award at the 2024 Wuzhen Theater Festival), The Story of Lady Li (Recipient of Jim Henson Foundation’s Artist Grant), and Living Rock (Nasty, Brutish, & Short at the 2024 Chicago International Puppet.

Explore the rich, complex, and often hidden histories of sexuality in Chinese art through this engaging program led by expert and enthusiast Wendy Chuwen Xiao. Centered on the visual language of traditional Chinese erotic painting and its resonances today, the session invites participants to consider how desire, intimacy, and the body have been represented, imagined, and interpreted across time.

About the Lecturer
Wendy Chuwen Xiao is a researcher and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of art history, material culture, and the history of sexuality in early modern China. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in History and Art History in 2022, and her M.A. from Harvard University in Regional Studies—East Asia in 2024.

Her research focuses on how objects generate and mediate fantasies of desire, with particular attention to visual, textual, and sensorial forms that challenge normative understandings of gender performativity and sexual morality. In her M.A. thesis, she examined an eighteenth-century Qing dynasty erotic album, arguing that its idiosyncratic visual language suggests it may have been produced for a female audience, offering new perspectives on viewership and agency in historical erotic art.

Alongside her academic work, Xiao maintains an active artistic practice, creating illustrations and paintings that reflect her engagement with image-making, narrative, and the expressive possibilities of form.