Lunar New Year Parade

NYC's Lunar New Year Parade and AAPI Heritage Parade are among the city's largest annual celebrations of Asian American and Pacific Islander culture, citywide events covered every year by outlets like ABC7. Daikoku NYC curates a vehicle lineup within them.

The city's biggest cultural parades rarely had space for the AAPI car community to show up on its own terms. Cars appeared as spectacle for the crowd, not as something carrying the community's own story.

Built and curated Daikoku's presence in the Lunar New Year and AAPI Heritage Parades, coordinating a vehicle lineup where each car carries a piece of the community's own story rather than just filling a slot.

MotorTrend profiled the work directly in Built Not Bought: How Stan Yeung and Daikoku NYC Drive Car Culture and Community Forward, which covers the AAPI programming this parade presence sits inside.

Chelsea News covered the AAPI Heritage parade taking Sixth Avenue in One Sunday, Two Parades. The Drive has profiled Stan Yeung and Daikoku separately, tracing the line from noticing NYC's car meets were "too narrowly focused" to building a community that is inclusive of all. Time Out New York has featured the parade presence, and press photographers shooting the Lunar New Year Parade for AP News have filed images of the lineup.

The clearest measure is not a clipping. Five years in, Daikoku is in these parades as an organiser and curator rather than an entrant, which is a different thing from being invited to drive in one.

Representation inside an existing civic tradition is a different design problem than building one from scratch. The parade already had an audience and a stage. The work was making sure the AAPI car community actually appeared on it as itself.