LOS ANGELES – With health care non-profit organizations like Asian Pacific Health Care Venture (APHCV) losing hundreds of thousand dollars in funding from the state and federal sources this year, the community health clinic looked for other ways to maintain its level of services to the Asian-Pacific Islander communities that it serves.
On Tuesday, September 1, APHCV unveiled the APM (Asian Pacific Male) 2010 calendar, which features 12 Asian American men in various degrees of semi-undress with each model representing a month of the year. The photographs were taken by Jeff Shang, a Los Angeles-based photographer and artist, and a visiting professor and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sheng holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine, along with a graduate emphasis in Asian American Studies. He received his BA from Harvard University, magna cum laude, in 2002.
"There is a common theme between what APHCV does and what this calendar is trying to promote," declared Kazue Shibata, executive director of APHCV. "The purpose of this calendar goes beyond supporting APHCV. Equally important is that it is promoting the visibility and true beauty of Asian Pacific men in the United States," Shibata said.
Shibata relates that when she arrived in the US 27 years ago there were no Asian men or Asian Pacific men on television. "I didn’t see any of them in mainstream American magazines, and I thought it was very strange," Shibata shared. "The images that I saw were strange-looking, heavily made-up Asian men, and some Caucasian men pretending to be Asian men."
Shibata said that the APM 2010 calendar promotes and really helps people recognize that "there are many good-looking Asian men walking around." She said the calendar is promoting inclusion by including Asian and Asian Pacific men into mainstream American media and television. Profits from the sale of the calendars will go to APHCV.
Photographer Sheng said the calendar was a 100 per cent voluntary project, and he thanked the models and everyone who donated their time to the project. The photographs were all shot on location: in the desert, the beach, in downtown Los Angeles at night, and other California locations.
The idea for the calendar came from Jason Peers, one of the producers, who realized that there was a need to come up with a calendar that features Asian-American men, who are sons of Asian-American parents that are unlike commercials and advertisements produced by some American companies.
The producers made a call for models, and Sheng revealed that the response was overwhelming. "At first I was a little worried that we would not find 12 willing participants in the Los Angeles area," Sheng revealed. "We got countless responses."
Sheng made the casting call in his LA studio, and in two days some twenty models showed up. The diversity was incredible, according to Sheng. There were models from Cambodia, Thailand, China, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines. However, the producers were unable to get a model to represent South Asia. Representing the Philippines was Darren Domingo, a client of talent manager Oliver Carnay. "We had bodies that are tanned and toned, bigger, muscular guys, and I think that was very important," Sheng commented.
"We lost some $100,000 (in funding), but we have put together some money by shifting cost structures so that we could maintain our level of services," reveals Shibata of APHCV. "There had been some minor changes in terms of services, but not a whole lot. We hope that we could sustain ourselves during the next couple of years because this budget situation is not going to improve very much," Shibata lamented. "It is going to be a challenging year."
The APM 2010 calendars are $15 each and are available at the APHCV clinic in East Hollywood, Amazon.com and other outlets. n
( www.asianjournal.com )
( Published on September 9, 2009 in Asian Journal Los Angeles p. A4 )
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