The Amp’s Top Stories of 2024
By A4 Staff
January 13, 2025
News
Happy 2025, Amp readers!
We are thrilled to share the five most popular stories published in 2024. In our second year, we published 49 essays, profiles, reviews, and interviews that reflected the brilliance of AAPI art and culture.
From a survey of AAPI in hip hop to winding meditations on the feedback loops of art and life, in particular, 2024’s top stories capture the myriad ways artists and writers in our community have and continue to create a more expansive cultural discourse.
We hope you continue to support our work by reading, sharing, contributing, and donating. Thank you for taking part in our shared story!
1.
Honoring the 50th anniversary of hip hop, in the final weeks 2023, Eric Diep traced the wide-ranging impact of AAPI artists on the genre over the decades and considered where these intersections of identity and music find themselves today.
Rekstizzy, Dumbfoundead, and Danny Chung at the Head in the Clouds, New York Artists Welcome Event. Photo by Jackie Lee/BFA.com.
2.
Diana Seo Hyung Lee sites “Moving towards Home: Art for Palestine in New York City 1989 & 2024” at Subtitled NYC as the departure point for a deeply personal meditation on the ways in which we bear witness. Like the exhibition, Lee’s essay folds time and space to trace echoes of solidarity, questioning how we ought to live with cycles of such monumental, unconscionable loss.
Installation image of “Moving towards Home: Art for Palestine in New York City 1989 & 2024” at Subtitled NYC. Photographed by Garrett Carroll. Courtesy of Subtitled NYC.
3.
Amber X. Chen profiles actress Shirley Chen whose nuanced, compassionate approach to her recent roles as rage-filled, insecure Asian American teenage girls in Sean Wang’s upcoming feature Dìdi and Amy Wang’s Slanted are making her one to watch.
4.
Caroline Cao spoke with Charles Yu, writer of the National Book Award-winning novel Interior Chinatown, on his process of adapting his surreal fiction into a dizzying television series starring Jimmy O. Yang.
From left to right: Jimmy O. Yang as Willis Wong and Ronny Chieng as Fatty Choy in Interior Chinatown.
5.
Melissa Kim identifies the overwhelming tendency for content from the greater Asian diaspora to be mistakenly lumped in with AAPI media.
Poster for Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 film, Parasite.