1997 Golden Ring Awards

The 1997 Golden Ring Awards were held on Saturday, October 11, 1997, at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, at 7:30 p.m. This black-tie, star-studded event featured Asia America's top talent from all the arts in a star studded extravanganza honoring excellence in Asian American Arts.

This year, twelve honorees will be recognized for their work and achievements in promoting and creating Asian Pacific Arts. AAAF's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Anna May Wong Award of Excellence will also be awarded.

This year's honorees include actor Russell Wong (Vanishing Son, Joy Luck Club, the new Charlie Chan film due out in September from Miramax) director John Woo (The Killer, Broken Arrow, Face/Off ) and performance artist Brenda Wong Aoki (Mermaids ). Here's the complete list of honorees (with bios!). Special guests and entertainers include author, poet and performance artist Justin Chin (Bite Hard ), recording artist Jocelyn Enriquez, Atlanta, Georgia band Shaking Babies and classical violinist extraordinaire Rachel Kim.

Major event sponsors include AT&T, A Magazine and Tai Seng Video Marketing. Other sponsors include United Airlines and the Sumitomo Bank of California. Media sponsors include Asian Buying Consortium (ahem!), Filipinas Magazine, KTSF 26, YOLK Magazine and the San Jose Mercury News.

In 1995, the Asian American Arts Foundation set out to meet its first mission: to create greater awareness and consciousness of the need to support the arts and provide ongoing financial support to help support the work of Asian Pacific artists and arts organizations. AAAF believes that it is important that for our community to take a proactive approach to defining the history, culture, image and life experience of Asian Americans by investing in our artists and arts institutions. One way to meet these goals was to speak out in favor of supporting the arts- the other was to show the importance of arts by creating a show that recognized the achievements of artists- and this is how the Golden Ring Awards came to be.

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