Museum of Chinese in America

Dirk Westphal is an Ohio-born artist and currently lives with his family in New York City. Here, he discusses moving to New York in the early 1990s after graduating from college. He eventually settled into a commercial loft-style studio on Centre Street, a locale he identifies as a sort of mixed community of industrious artists and manufacturers. Westphal said that much of his art was a personal reaction to his surroundings, the Chinatown community – his fish photographs, for example, were inspired by the goldfish sold by street vendor shops. Westphal also spoke of his experience as a non-Chinese speaker buying chickens from the Grand Street Poultry Market. Having seen many of the supply stores he regularly frequented in the nineties close, Westphal has turned to the internet instead—it is more efficient, he said, but it also eliminates the element of inspiration through wandering. Westphal also vocalized his opinions of change and the use of the term “gentrification,” saying that while it is often given a negative connotation, he believes that without the “constant renewal and decay that goes on, [New York] wouldn’t be a big, thriving city.”