Ten Thousand Things

Ten Thousand Things is running at the Wing Luke Museum in the Chinatown-International District, and it's one of those shows that stays around for a while—it opened March 7, 2025, and runs through spring 2027. The exhibition is curated by Shin Yu Pai, an award-winning public radio podcast host and former Seattle Civic Poet, and it looks at the everyday objects that shape identities, histories, and cultural narratives. It's an Asian American cultural lens on the things we keep and the stories they carry.

The show grew out of Pai's own time cataloging artifacts at the Wing Luke while she was a museology graduate student, and it expands her public radio podcast of the same name, which KUOW Public Radio at the University of Washington originally commissioned and Wonder Media Network has produced and distributed since 2025. The exhibition pairs extraordinary objects, like a bronze vial filled with Ganges River water, with the ordinary ones we might overlook: a hand-crafted kapa cloth, a cherished abacus, or a well-worn walis tingting broom. It's that contrast—the sacred next to the mundane—that does most of the work.

There's an interactive side to it, too. A rotary phone hooked up to a recorder invites visitors to leave their own stories about a personal object, and the museum refreshes the show with new items over time, including some from visitors. So it's not a static display; it changes as more people add their own pieces to the conversation.

You can find it at the Wing Luke Museum, 719 S. King St., Seattle 98104, running from March 7, 2025, through spring 2027.