Touch the Heart
Red Canary Song

Greater New York

MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens, NY
March 2026 to August 2026

Press Release

As part of Greater New York 2026, 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.

Belongings (Still Lives)
Augustina Wang

For “Touch the Heart” for Greater New York 2026, MoMA PS1.

Belongings (Still Lives) is a series of paintings and drawings created by Flushing born-and-raised artist, Augustina Wang. For this project, Wang worked directly with migrant massage workers and painted their belongings, anonymously seeking to document their life stories— their presents, their pasts, and their futures– through their objects.

As immigrant American communities continue to survive under mounting pressure, Belongings (Still Lives) explores how social existence is defined through the material. Objects reflect the history one belongs to, the labor one engages in, the aspirations one wishes to fulfill, and they offer a view into the lives of immigrant Americans. Named after the tradition of still-life painting, Belongings (Still Lives) also suggests “life in stasis”, where these paintings create a space to meditate on the past and boldly imagine the future.

Belongings (Still Lives) is made possible (in part) with public funds from the Queens Arts Fund, a re-grant program supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts.