IDENTITY LA Announces Award Honorees For Music, Entertainment, & Activism; Food Truck Lineup Revealed

Occurring May 12th and Headlined By Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, the Asian Pacific American Cultural Festival Will Boast a Diverse Lineup of Music, Plus Food Curated by Kogi BBQ’s Roy Choi

05.10.2018

The Announcement:

Bringing together Los Angeles for a massive food and music festival, IDENTITY LA celebrates and showcases the impact of some of the most talented and notable citizens in the city’s Asian Pacific American community. Today, IDENTITY LA announces that it will honor some of the top leaders, innovators, artists, and community activists in the Los Angeles Asian Pacific American community with an awards ceremony during the festival.

These honorees include:

Arts & Entertainment: Jon M. Chu Jon M. Chu is known for his visually stunning films, as well as his work across multiple genres, from groundbreaking digital series to commercials and live concerts.  Currently, he is preparing for the August 17th release of CRAZY RICH ASIANS, from Warner Bros. Pictures, based on Kevin Kwan’s global bestseller. The contemporary romantic comedy, with a starring ensemble led by Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Gemma Chan, Lisa Lu, Awkwafina, Ken Jeong and Michelle Yeoh, is the first studio film in 25 years to feature an all-Asian cast and represents a conscious career pivot for Chu towards films that have personal meaning for him.

Digital Pioneer: Cassey Ho Cassey Ho is an award-winning fitness instructor, entrepreneur and online personality. She is the creator of Blogilates, the #1 female fitness channel on YouTube with over 600 million video views and 4.1 million subscribers. Cassey’s unique format, POP Pilates©, which launched on YouTube in 2009, has become a live class with over 3,000 monthly classes being taught at gyms worldwide. She’s the author of the best-selling book, Hot Body Year Round and is the CEO & lead designer of her own activewear line, POPFLEX.

Musical Pioneer: Jonathan Yip Jonathan Yip from Sacramento, CA is a member of the GRAMMY® Award-winning, multi-platinum Los Angeles production & songwriting team, The Stereotypes. The Stereotypes scored two 2018 GRAMMY® wins for Song of the Year and Best R&B Song for their work on Bruno Mars’ six-times platinum, #1 Billboard Hot 100 song “That’s What I Like.” The Stereotypes took over the charts in 2017 with a string of anthems from Bruno Mars’  acclaimed 24K Magic album, which swept the GRAMMYs® and took home Album of the Year and Best R&B Album.  The Stereotypes were also nominated for a GRAMMY® in the category of Producer of the Year (Non-Classical).

Activism: Krista Suh Krista Suh is a screenwriter, craftivist, artist, activist and creator of the Pussyhat and Evil Eye Gloves. Her mission is to make the world a safer place for women and help everyone validate their own creativity, femininity, and intuition. In her book, DIY Rules for a WTF World: How To Speak Up, Get Creative and CHANGE THE WORLD, Krista shares the tools, tips, experiences, “rules,” and more she uses to get creative, get bold, and change the world. Krista is a powerful voice for doing more as she inspires others to create their own rules for living, and even a movement of their own, all with gusto, purpose, and joy.

Community Organization: API Forward Movement API Forward Movement (APIFM) was founded as the Asian and Pacific Islander Obesity Prevention Alliance, or APIOPA, in 2007. The founders were a group of community advocates who saw that Asians and Pacific Islanders were being left out of public health efforts to address the obesity epidemic, which is why our organization’s name centered obesity prevention at the time.

Presented by L.A. Councilman David Ryu, the awards will honor each recipient’s immense contributions to the Asian Pacific American community and the world at large. Previous honorees include Michelle Kwan, Far East Movement, Lou Diamond Phillips, Justin Chon, Jenn Im, Kelly Hu, Lisa Ling, A3PCON, and many others.

In addition to the award nominees, IDENTITY LA proudly announces the festival’s cuisine, presented by local food trucks and curated by Kogi BBQ co-founder Roy Choi. Packed with a diverse array of traditional Asian and Asian fusion options for festival attendees, the food truck and cuisine menu reflects Choi’s wide, yet refined palette, and comments on the influence of Asian Pacific cuisine on Los Angeles’ food scene and vice versa. Here is the list of the festival’s food trucks, with more to be added in the coming days:

• BB Kyu
• Belly BombZ
• Chinese Laundry
• Phantom Food Truck
• Pho King Awesome
• Sanook Soi 38
• Slanging Corea
• StopBye Cafe
• Seoul Sausage

Occurring on Saturday May 12th at Grand Park in Downtown Los Angeles, the festival boasts an afternoon and evening’s worth of performances by internationally renowned APA artists. Headlining the event will be Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, multi-platinum Korean-American hip-hop artist Jay Park, and acclaimed DJ duo Hotel Garuda. Presented by Comcast | NBCUniversal & Private Internet Access (PIA), organized by Pacific Bridge Arts Foundation, Wong Fu Productions/Far East Movement/International Secret Agents in partnership with L.A. Councilman David Ryu, the festival will feature additional performances from Milck, Kinjaz, The Flavr Blue, G Yamazawa, DJ Zo, and Ruby Ibarra.

Presented by Pacific Bridge Arts Foundation & the City of Los Angeles, sponsored by Comcast | NBC Universal and Private Internet Access, and produced in tandem by Asian American Entertainment Group International Secret Agents (founded by Wong Fu Productions and Far East Movement) and L.A. Councilman David Ryu (CD 4). IDENTITY LA is a FREE and open-to-the-public celebration of the city’s vibrant Asian Pacific American (APA) community and culture, highlighting the community’s history in the city and showcasing the APA community’s role in shaping the cultural and socioeconomic present and future of Los Angeles.

RSVP and get updates here | https://www.facebook.com/events/156519195036392/

IDENTITY LA
Saturday, May 6, 2017 | 5:00 – 10:00PM
City Hall / Grand Park in Downtown Los Angeles
200 North Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Check out the 2017 IDENTITY FEST recap: https://www.facebook.com/internationalsecretagents/videos/10155248380112593/

Information for all guests attending: http://isatv.com/blog/identity-la-faq/

Please contact Michelle or Gavin for more info.

The Background

Mike Shinoda is a songwriter, performer, record producer, film composer and visual artist. He is best known as co-lead vocalist for multi-platinum Grammy-Award winning rock band, Linkin Park, which has sold over 55 million albums worldwide and commanded a massive fan following, holding the title as the most-liked band on Facebook and amassing over 5.5 billion YouTube views. Shinoda is a founding member of the group, which achieved the best-selling debut of this century with their Diamond-certified album, Hybrid Theory, selling over 10 million copies in the US alone. Collectively, they sold out stadiums around the globe and earned a multitude of accolades including 2 Grammy Awards, 5 American Music Awards, 4 MTV VMA Awards, 10 MTV Europe Music Awards, 3 World Music Awards, and most recently, “Rock Album of the Year” at the 2018 iHeartRadio Music Awards for their seventh studio album, One More Light. In 2005, Shinoda launched his first solo project, Fort Minor, releasing The Rising Tied to critical acclaim, with the single “Where’d You Go,” which reached number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and accumulated nearly 10 million YouTube views to date. In the months since the passing of Linkin Park vocalist Chester Bennington, Shinoda has immersed himself in art as a way of processing his grief. In January, he released the Post Traumatic EP, consisting of three deeply personal songs accompanied by visuals that Shinoda filmed, painted and edited himself, garnering an overwhelmingly positive response, including acclaim from The New York Times, Billboard, and more.

Jay Park: For over a decade, multi-platinum, Korean-American hip-hop artist Jay Park has been at the forefront of the K-pop movement that swept through Asia, before successfully cementing his place as an independent hip-hop and R&B artist recognized worldwide. In 2013, Jay Park founded the leading independent hip-hop/urban label, AOMG, based in Seoul, South Korea. Active as both an artist and CEO, Jay founded AOMG with the intention of supporting and developing artists and producers organically, by focusing on their individual artistry first, over their commercialism. His methods have proven successful – within two years, AOMG artists have topped all mainstream music charts in South Korea and Asian regions. This year Jay Park brings the international music community together with his newly minted label H1GHR MUSIC, which houses artists from various countries, and continues to support and influence tastemakers both mainstream and underground.

Hotel Garuda, composed of DJ/producer duo Manila Killa & Candleweather, have epitomized the DIY culture of modern dance music. Scaling the online tastemaker world with an array of remixes and remakes, their versatile sound has continued to beckon attention far beyond the music forums, garnering them more than 30 million streams on SoundCloud alone. Their run of four official remixes & consecutive #1s on the Hype Machine charts have also seen Hotel Garuda accompanied by critical acclaim from Billboard, Harper’s Bazaar, and Complex. 2016 marked the release of their debut original song “Smoke Signals” and its follow-up single “Fixed On You” on PRMD Music.

IDENTITY LA is a festival & celebration highlighting Los Angeles’ vibrant Asian Pacific American (APA) culture. The festival combines music, art, and food, as well as showcases the strong future of APA’s contributions in shaping the social, cultural, and economic life of Los Angeles. May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM), a celebration of Asian Pacific Americans (APAs) in the United States. For the last three decades, the City of Los Angeles has held a series of events throughout the month to highlight the significant contributions that APAs have made to the city’s past, present and future.

Links:

RSVP and get updates here | https://www.facebook.com/events/156519195036392/

Information for all guests attending: http://isatv.com/blog/identity-la-faq/

IDENTITY LA: http://identityla.org

Roy Choi: http://kogibbq.com/

Councilman David Ryu: http://davidryu.lacity.org/

Watch the IDENTITY LA 2017 recap here: https://www.facebook.com/internationalsecretagents/videos/10155248380112593/

International Secret Agents & IDENTITY LA Social Media: http://instagram.com/ISAtv