At April’s San Francisco Art Fair at the Fort Mason Centre’s Festival Pavilion, artists, curators and gallerists made a strong engagement with Asian and Asian-American identity at a moment when anti-immigrant rhetoric continues to divide the US.

In a city where close to 35 per cent of the population identifies as Asian, the 14th edition of the annual fair became a space where Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voices were not only vocal, but central, said fair director Kelly Freeman.

“We looked around and saw these incredible AAPI voices and thought, ‘Let’s start talking about that,’” said Freeman, who is also vice-president of event operations and partnerships for Art Market Productions, the organiser of this and other fairs.

“More than ever, we need to celebrate every voice. For me, what we can do is to really focus on the strength of the immigrant population that makes up this city, and a huge part of the country, and highlight the unity and strength of that community.”

The message was loud and clear in the curated group exhibition commissioned by the fair, as well as in a pop-up design store featuring more than 70 Asian diaspora artists and brands.

The group exhibition was called “Da Da Daam”, a play on a Cantonese expression meaning bold and audacious that also references the Dada art movement that developed in the aftermath of World War I. It was organised by Hoi Leung, a curator at the Chinese Culture Centre of San Francisco (CCC), in collaboration with the San Francisco Chinatown exhibition space Edge on the Square.