Laura Kina’s 2019 painting “Ufushu Gajumaru (Giant Banyon Tree), Valley of Gangala, Okinawa, Japan” is on the front cover and her “Holding On” series is featured in an article by Ryan Buyco “Finding New Routes”: Visualizing an Oceanic Okinawa in Laura Kina’s Holding On (2019) in the Spring 2023 issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

Ryan Buyco, “Finding New Routes”: Visualizing an Oceanic Okinawa in Laura Kina’s Holding On (2019), Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Vol. 9, (Spring 2023): 189–214. DOI: 10.1353/vrg.2023.0008

Referring to “Ufushu Gajumaru” Buyco writes, “This painting, and Laura Kina’s Holding On series in general, is significant for its ability to awaken a particularized meaning of Okinawan culture that unsettles the geographical rootedness of Okinawa in the context of the diaspora.”