Book Talk | Floater by Chinatown Basketball Club w/ Herb Tam & Eugene Kim

Pre-purchase your copy of the featured title to guarantee your signed copy! This helps ensure that everyone who wants a book goes home with one, in case we sell out at the event. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

FLOATER: BLURRING BASKETBALL LINES, Chinatown Basketball Club's first book that celebrates CBC past 5 years (2019-2024) unique blend of competitive basketball and aesthetic experimentation, with essays contributed by Herb Tam, Lu Zhang, Reef (Harith Liew), Sean Catangui, Alex Zhang, Chiarina Chen and Dustin Lin.

Through documentation of its graphic production and critical texts, FLOATER offers a collective, de-centered, and Asian approach to re-imagining basketball aesthetics, a space dominated by corporate expressions of aggression, masculinity and elitism. It traces how CBC has cultivated collective creativity over five years of collaborative poster art, graphics, and events—addressing questions such as: Is there an alternative, distinctly Asian (diaspora) way of experiencing basketball? Could there be a basketball aesthetic rooted in Asian (diaspora) that exists outside mainstream basketball culture? 

In anatomy, “floater” refers to tiny specks or shapes that drift across one’s field of vision—never fixed, always in motion. More broadly, the term describes something that remains suspended, either on the surface of water or in the air. In basketball, a floater is a short-range, high-arching shot above the reach of a taller defender. In many senses, floater suggests a suspension of outcomes—full of possibility, hovering just out of reach.

ABOUT CHINATOWN BASKETBALL CLUB

CBC was created by artist Lu Zhang and curator Herb Tam in 2019 with a core group of artists, musicians and designers of Asian descent. 

Through weekly pick-up hoop gatherings, fundamental Sunday School workshops, Annual Autumn Classic 3X3 Tournaments, themed mini-tournaments, and many creative projects we dream up and make, Chinatown Basketball Club lives out a hoops ethics of openness, competitiveness, friendship and creativity.

For us, the basketball court is a home, a studio, a workshop, and a place of belonging.