About this Event
Join Wing On Wo herbalist-in-residence Kimberly Chou Tsun An, along with special guest Walter Bosque, for a Tai Chi class and gathering in Columbus Park on Saturday, October 4, from 2-3:30 pm. This event will draw connections between community medicine and healing traditions, spanning from Uptown to Chinatown. We’ll practice Tai Chi led by Sifu Walter — a beloved teacher, radical health worker, licensed acupuncturist, and Young Lords Party elder who has been bringing acupuncture and Tai Chi to underserved communities for more than 45 years — followed by a conversation and an ear seeds demo (non-invasive acupressure treatment). Kim will also be sharing Chinese medicinal teas, blended with herbs sourced from local shops.
All welcome!
ABOUT Kimberly Chou Tsun An
Kimberly Chou Tsun An is an artist, community organizer, and cultural worker based in Brooklyn, NY, with roots in Taipei, Taiwan, and Detroit, MI.
She practices folk herbalism inspired by traditional Chinese medicine and other Asian healing traditions, interwoven with popular Western herbalism and plant wisdom indigenous to Lenapehoking / New York / the Northeast — an evolving, adaptive form of “Asian American herbalism,” to lovingly borrow language from herbalist and teacher Erin Masako Wilkins.
Her work involves engaging community — whether old friends and comrades, or new neighbors and collaborators — through hands-on plant and herb workshops, altar-building, zine-making, and more; in exploration of how we humans can better be in right relationship with each other, other beings, plants, and land. Relationships, just like growing (food, medicine, or, as Grace Lee Boggs would say, our souls), are a time-based medium!
She is an acudetox specialist, trained in the five-point ear acupuncture protocol first developed in the 1970s by members of the Young Lords and Black Panthers as a form of radical community care.
ABOUT Walter Bosque
*bio is courtesy of Mott Haven Oral History Project.
Walter Bosque was a member of the acupuncture collective at the Lincoln Hospital Detox program that developed the now widely practiced National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA) protocol. This important community work was prominently featured in the 2018 “People’s Detox” and 2020 documentary film ‘Dope is Death.’ He was one of the first American students to graduate from the Quebec Institute of Acupuncture in 1977, and the first Puerto Rican to be licensed to practice acupuncture in the state of California in 1979. This year marks 45 years that Walter has been bringing acupuncture and Tai Chi Chuan to underserved populations in New York City. Now retired, he continues to volunteer and participate in free community clinics and programs throughout Puerto Rico and New York City with SAPP collective (Salud y Acupuntura Para el Pueblo), New York Harm Reduction Educators (HYHRE), Friends of Brook Park, and Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWB). In 2021, he became the Treasurer of the reinvigorated Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA), an organization that originated in 1979 to continue the more revolutionary work begun at Lincoln Detox after the radical origins were suppressed.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Columbus Park, Baxter Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
