(Misty Fujinaga, Sean Stoops, Laura Kina, Sam Kina, Ian Wan)
Oil on canvas, 72” x 48”, 2002
“Are multiracial icons the answer to national harmony? Can they really transcend centuries of conflict as revisions of the past and hopes for the future?” [1] Kymberly Pinder asks in her 2001 essay Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art.
In my Hapa Soap Opera series (2002-2004) I contemplate these questions by making movie poster-type fantasy worlds populated entirely by Hapas. “In the year 2000, there were around 2.1 million Asian Pacific Americans of mixed heritage, or what today is increasingly being called ‘hapa,’” Wei Ming Dariotis writes in her 2002 Asian Week article “The Emerging Hapa Community[2],” “Originating in Hawai’i to describe those of mixed white and Hawaiian descent, the term hapa has caught on strongly during the last decade to describe those of part-Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry.”
“Coming Soon,” the flashing movie poster marquee exclaims as racially ambiguous characters pose in an action movie landscape filled with flames. The paintings are based on actual people that I have photographed from around the United States. I am interested in the slipperiness of identity and the variety of experiences that mixed-race individuals have based on age, class, gender, race, location, and family histories. My own experiences as an Uchinanchu (a term used to identify Okinawan immigrants and their descendants in Hawaii)/Caucasian 30-something middle-class woman living as a Jew on Devon Avenue in Chicago are very different than an AfroAsian in Hawaii or a LatinAsian living in California. As buzzwords such as “post-black” and “post-ethnic” fly around the art world, I wonder how that applies to my work and why, upon meeting me for the first time, do so many people still ask, “so what are you anyway?” Race still matters…I’m just not sure what it really means.
Formally my works draw inspiration from Asian film posters as well as European history and portrait genres and American pulp art. In this pop fantasy world, my paintings reflect the present and past as they play with the ideals of the American melting pot and the anxieties and hopes surrounding the “changing face” of America.
“Hapa Soap Opera” was on view at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami, FL in 2003.
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I have kept this 2004 statement as an archive of that particular moment but the use of the word “Hapa” by non-Native Hawaiians has since come under fire as cultural appropriation. See Akemi Johnson’s “Who Gets to be ‘Hapa’?” The issues this series raised and the communities I began to circulate in following making this work led me to co-edit War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (2013) and co-founded the Critical Mixed Race Studies conference (2010).
[1] Pinder, Kymberly. “Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art.” Race-ing Art History, ed. Kymberly Pinder. New York: Routledge, 2002. 391-401.
[2] Dariotis, Wei Ming. “The Emberging Hapa Community.” Asian Week 31 October 2002: 35-37
(Mike Benson, Jason Kuwayama, Erin Woods, Cara Yi)
Oil on canvas, 48” x 72”, 2003
(Joe Kina, Isabel Cernada, Amanda Ross-Ho)
Oil on canvas, 48” x 72”, 2003, Private collection, Dallas, TX.
(Ann Marie Lickteig, Justin Frolich, Margaret Erdmann)
Oil on canvas, 72” x 48”, 2003, Private collection, Dallas, TX.
(Joey Nakayama, Robert Karimi, Jef French)
Oil on canvas, 72” x 48”, 2003
(Yayoi Winfrey & Evanity)
Oil on canvas, 48” x 72”, 2003
(Sarah Macaraeg, Eric Byler, Camilla Fojas)
Oil on canvas, 72” x48”, 2004
Private collection, Dallas, TX.
Oil on canvas, 48” x 36”, 2004
Private collection, Dallas, TX.
Oil and enamel on canvas, 48” x 36”, 2004
Private collection, Chicago, IL.
Digital inkjet print in rear-lit movie poster marquee with flashing lights,
35” x 50” x 4”, 2003
Digital inkjet print in rear-lit movie poster marquee with flashing lights,
35” x 50” x 4”, 2005
of Hitomi Soga and Charles Jenkins (movie poster version)
Digital inkjet print in rear-lit movie poster marquee with flashing lights,
35” x 50” x 4”, 2004
