Artist Statement

I am a painter in love with saturated color, light, textile patterns, and emotional landscapes who travels time with my diverse communities to remember the past, critically reflect on the present, and dream the future. My research-based studio practice is focused on Okinawan diasporic identity and draws inspiration from personal and ancestral narratives, photographs of my everyday life and travels, family and community photo albums, archival research, and oral history. Contemporary Asian American art, Asian American studies, Critical Ethnic studies, Critical Mixed Race studies, feminist/queer theory, and Okinawan studies form the nexus for my intersectional scholarly research, publications, and projects.

The subject matter of my recent artwork includes painting my journey through breast cancer and coming out during the pandemic in “Over the Rainbow, One More Time”; decolonial Okinawan and Hawaiian landscapes in “Holding On”; illustrating a children’s book about the history of hajichi tattoos; and illustrating an Asian American artists’ cookbook. My “Uchinanchu” textile series engages Okinawan diasporic communal identities. My obsession with blue is evident in my “Blue Hawaii” series about my family history as Okinawan immigrant sugarcane plantation workers in Hawaii and in the nostalgic polycultural street signs from my former Chicago South Asian-Jewish neighborhood that make up the “Devon Avenue Sampler” textile works. I have explored portraits in my “Daily News” series featuring other Asian American artists, in my ongoing portraits of my child in “The Midori Project,” as well as in older works on mixed-race such as “The Hapa Soap Opera” and “Loving” series.

Biography

I am a queer, mixed-race Uchinanchu artist-scholar, breast cancer survivor, and Vincent de Paul Professor at The Art School at DePaul University in Chicago. I was born in Riverside, California (Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, Serrano territory) in 1973 and grew up in Poulsbo, Washington (Suquamish and Port Gamble S’Klallam territory) before moving to Chicago (traditional lands of the Three Fires Confederacy–Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa national as well as the Ho-Chunk, Myaamia, Menominee, Illinois Confederacy, and Peoria). I received my BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994 where I studied under painters Michiko Itatani and the late Ray Yoshida and my MFA in Studio Art in 2001 from the University of Illinois at Chicago where Kerry James Marshall and Phyllis Bramson were my thesis advisors.

My artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums including the Chicago Cultural Center, India Habitat Centre, India International Centre, Japanese American National Museum, Mingei International Museum, Nehuru Art Centre, Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum, Rose Art Museum, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Spertus Museum, and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience. My artwork is in public collections at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum, The Smithsonian Archives of American Art, DePaul University School of Music, Heiwa Terrace, and the Mingei International Museum. 

I am a 2022-2023 Public Voices Fellow through OpEd Project at DePaul University and a 2020 Art Matters Foundation Grantee. Through 3Arts, I am a 2022 3AMP artist, 2021 Make A Wave artist, a 2019 Joan Mitchell Center Fellow, a 2018 3AP Project awardee, and a 2013 Ragdale Fellow. My illustrated children’s book Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos, written by Lee A. Tonouchi (Bess Press, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Skipping Stones Honor Award for Multicultural and International Books.

Wei Ming Dariotis and I co-edited War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013). Jan Christian Bernabe and I co-edited Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017). I am a curator for the Virtual Asian American Art Museum – a digital humanities project led by New York University in partnership with the Smithsonian and Getty Research Institute; co-founder of the Critical Mixed Studies conference, journal, and association; and I serve as a series editor for The University of Washington Press for the Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture book series. Yasuko Takezawa and I co-edited a special issue of the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas journal Vol 6. Issue 1-2 (July 2020)- “Trans-Pacific Japanese Diaspora Art: Encountering and Envisioning Minor-Transnationalism.” Chang Tan, Tina Chen, and I co-edited the special issue 8.2 of Verge: Studies in Global Asias – “Visualizing Asias: Interventions in Asian and Asian Diasporic Art” (Fall 2022). In 2023, The Virtual Asian American Art Museum published my co-edited/illustrated cookbook Word of Mouth: Asian American Artists Sharing Recipes. An expanded print edition of the cookbook is forthcoming from University of Arkansas Press in 2025.