Showdown Chinatown: How a Regular's Idea Became a Hip-Hop Festival

Ken lives in the neighborhood and has been coming here for years.

When it is slow we talk. He drinks Orion, a pint at a time, and has done for as long as I have known him.

One of those conversations was about wanting to put on a breaking event.

Why That Landed

I did some breakdancing in middle and high school.

I am not going to overstate it. I was not good and I have not done it in decades. But it means that when somebody starts talking about a breaking jam, I am not nodding politely from the outside of it. I know what he is describing.

So we talked about that idea for a long time, over more than one of those pints.

Who Ken Is

Ken Ji moved to New York in 2016 and had stepped away from breaking by then.

Between 2020 and 2023 he documented something like two to three hundred protests. Then he reconnected with the culture through the Hip-Hop 50th anniversary events here and Freestyle Session in Mexico, and came out of it wanting to give something back to his own neighborhood.

What he wanted to build was a festival that put the Chinese and Asian contribution to hip-hop where people could see it. That thread runs from the 1970s kung fu films through Grandmaster Flash to Wu-Tang, and it is not a stretch anyone has to reach for. It is just not usually said out loud in Chinatown.

Becoming A Sponsor

As the plan came together we decided to back it.

TEN TEN came in as fiscal sponsor, which is the part that makes an event like this legally and practically possible and which almost nobody sees. Ayaka's team carried that.

The first Showdown Chinatown happened in 2024, and it worked. Big turnout, real names from the scene, the whole thing.

What We Got Wrong

We did it on a hot summer day.

That was a mistake, and it was ours as much as anyone's. Concrete in Chinatown in the middle of summer is not where you want to ask people to dance all afternoon, or stand and watch.

Year two moved to a Saturday in September and it was immediately better. Bigger too: more dancers, more artists, close to double the prize money, and the competition opened out from breaking into rocking, writing and DJing.

The Truck

Pressure Paint brought a 25-foot box truck and it became the backdrop.

ShiroOne, who is a dear friend of ours, painted it. He has shown at Juraku too. He is one of a list of writers who worked that event, alongside TurtleCaps, BelowKey, Zero Productivity, Kosuke James, Bom5 and Born.

That truck is the thing that moved it from a breaking jam to a festival. You can put on a great jam in a parking lot. A 25-foot mural rolling in changes what people think they turned up to.

Year Three

We would like there to be one.

Nothing to announce, and it is not our event to announce anyway. But two of these have now happened, the second was better than the first because everyone paid attention to what went wrong, and that is usually how a thing keeps going.

Ken is still in most weeks. Still Orion.

More of the people we work with.