Kayan Cheung-Miaw's "This Asian American Life," now up on the Asian Art Museum's Lui Art Wall on Hyde Street, depicts Chinatown through the eyes of a child — and through the hands of an organizer who helped win a $4 million settlement for restaurant workers.

On Hyde Street between McAllister and Grove, on the Asian Art Museum's Lui Art Wall, a cook sits on a curb between shifts. Cigarette ends on the pavement beside him. Above him, a bus driver raises a hand to a passenger. These are two panels from Kayan Cheung-Miaw's mural "This Asian American Life," the latest commission in the museum's rotating public art series. It runs through September 28.

Cheung-Miaw is a comic artist and a labor organizer. Through the Chinese Progressive Association, she worked the 2014 campaign for workers at Yank Sing, the dim sum restaurant on Rincon Hill, and helped win a $4 million back-pay settlement for 280 employees. The cook she painted on that curb is drawn from life: her father was a restaurant worker who smoked a little too much, she told Mission Local.

The mural doesn't set out to document Chinatown as destination — the parade route, the gateway arch. "It's not just dragons and lanterns," she's said of her approach. What the panels capture instead are the smaller observations: the smell of noodle soup, a wild poppy wedged into a sidewalk crack, a redwood leaf, a bee. These details come partly from her six-year-old son, Jiakai, who appears in the mural and whose habit of stopping cold for interesting insects and unexpected flowers shaped the register of the whole work. "He's the one who pays attention and notices those things and teaches adults to pay attention," she told Mission Local.

Cheung-Miaw grew up in Hong Kong, moved with her family to New York at 10, and came to the Bay Area after college in 2006 — drawn to what she's called the "mecca of Asian American movements." She's now in North Carolina, still organizing in a state where the minimum wage sits at $7.25. The mural on Hyde is not her first Chinatown wall: in 2018 she painted "Home" there, a piece that folded in laundry lines, a cook on break, and a reference to the Yick Wo Supreme Court case that established equal-protection rights for noncitizens.

The Lui Art Wall sits on the museum's facade facing the Civic Center plaza — the No. 27 bus passes it on its way to the Mission. The panels are visible now. They'll be up through the end of September.