A public art installation commemorating the 1886 expulsion of Chinese Seattleites is a step closer to reality after more than 20 years in the making.
About 50 community leaders, historians and members of the public gathered on April 28 at the Wing Luke Museum for an educational open house about the Chinese American Legacy Artwork Project (CALAP). Speakers included University of Washington professor and OCA Greater Seattle board member Connie So, who presented on the history of the expulsion, the Wing Luke Museum’s civic engagement specialist Wren Wheeler, and interim executive director Kamahanahokulani Farrar, as well as Seattle FWC26 chief legacy officer Leo Flor.
The CALAP features a 14-foot bronze sculpture recognizing the anti-Chinese riot on February 7, 1886, which occurred four years after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law, restricting Chinese laborers from entering the United States and denying them naturalized citizenship. During the riot, Chinese residents were forcibly removed by a mob of 1,500, led by the Knights of Labor, and marched to the waterfront into boats to be shipped to San Francisco or Vancouver. After two shiploads, most of the Chinese were driven from Seattle.
The riot was the culmination of a decades-long anti-Chinese movement that painted the Chinese as filthy, deceitful, unassimilable and a threat to white workers’ livelihoods.
Now, nearly a century and a half later, Seattle will establish a public sculpture that recognizes and sheds light on what the website for the project calls “one of the most horrific episodes in the city’s history.”
The sculpture is set to be installed in Occidental Square in Pioneer Square. According to Wheeler, Occidental Square is a historically significant location, as it was the heart of the second Chinatown, and near where the 1886 expulsion began.
“We think [that location] is where you ought to have this sculpture, so that people know Chinese and other Asian people—and more people after that—were all being discriminated against, targeted, in an unfair manner,” So said.
Stewart Wong is the artist chosen to design the sculpture, which features three Chinese laborers on one side of a large “X,” with three mob members on the other. Wong positioned the figures like chess pieces, representing opposing sides. The “X,” he said, was inspired by the “ex” prefix in “exclusion, expulsion, and expunge.”
“I had this ‘X,’ and I thought about this division, or eliminating, getting rid of, keeping out,” Wong said to the International Examiner. “[The ‘X’] is the component that would emphasize the division between us and them.”
Above the X are a collection of weapons—batons, rifles, pistols—used by the mob to drive the Chinese out, but also used by the federal troops that were brought in for mob control.
“They were used to protect the Chinese from the mob,” Wong said. “So we understand the duality of weapons. It could be used against you or to protect you.”
Also above the X sit the scales of justice, leaning toward the mob members.
“These are to express the inequity of the time, so it’s weighted towards the mob,” Wong said.
While the art installation memorializes a violent event that happened 140 years ago, Wheeler sees troubling parallels to the present day. As a Filipina daughter of an immigrant, she said the art piece is critical during the current political moment in which non-white immigrants face violent detention and deportation, and racist rhetoric is used to turn people against them.
“There are manufactured stories about immigrants as being a threat to America,” Wheeler said to the attendees. “However, I would argue that immigrant communities, along with indigenous communities, Black communities—every group that is made to feel less, we always find a way to tell our stories.”
“Preserving history is resistance,” she added.
Seattle’s FIFA World Cup 2026 (FWC26) local organizing committee, represented at the CALAP event by chief legacy officer Leo Flor, donated $50,000 to the project last November. According to Flor, that donation then attracted two international donors: Martin Mao, a Chinese Australian who was moved by the story of the expulsion, and Li Lu, founder of Himalaya Capital and one of the student protest leaders at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, both of whom matched the FWC26 contribution and helped the project hit its fundraising goal. According to Wing spokesperson Steve McClean, the project has reached $351,000 in funding, not including funding from the City or state, or additional money pledged by other donors.
“When we get the word out there, people pay attention,” Flor told attendees. “When people pay attention and learn, I think it can cause them to act.”
The project was initiated more than 20 years ago by Doug Chin, a community historian and then-president of OCA Greater Seattle, alongside Bettie Luke, a community leader and sister of Wing Luke. The Wing Luke Museum owns and is responsible for the project, with OCA Greater Seattle and the Chinese American Citizens Alliance serving as early advocates and current members of the museum’s Community Advisory Committee. Donors include Historic South Downtown, 4Culture, the National Park Foundation, the Boeing Company, Bettie Luke and others.
Target dates for fabrication and installation are still being discussed. Wheeler said the museum is also working to develop walking tours from the museum to the sculpture at Occidental Square and curriculum to share through their education department.
“The sculpture, of course, is the highlight and the wonderful thing that we can point to, but there is ongoing work that will continue,” Wheeler said.
