About the Exhibit:
The AARC is the only pan-Asian city-funded cultural center in the United States, owing to the efforts of our generational forebears who advocated for the visibility of real Asian/Asian American experiences. Throughout much of American history, representations of Asians/Asian Americans have been, for the most part, rooted either in fear or otherness. Members of the AAPI+ community have been seen as exotic, sensuous, luxuriant, or threatening; or have been touted as a 'model minority' in the fraught racial politics of post 1965.
But throughout popular culture, Asian Americans have begun to reclaim the narrative momentum and convey their own stories about their history, their identities, and their values. This exhibit explores themes of AAPI+ community, historical recurrence, and the dynamic nature of personal and public cultural narratives.
This exhibit, which honors AAPI+ artists across the nation on its tenth anniversary, is meant to reflect the processes by which communal and collective memories are formed through the synthesis of individual experiences. It replicates the formation of culture by storing physical tokens of personal intentionality and feeling in a shared space. This exhibit serves both as an emblem of our connected Asian American experiences and our community's ongoing relationship to the AARC.
Meet the Artists:
Kamonchanok Phon-ngam
Kamonchanok Phon-ngam (born.1986) is a Thai artist living in New York City. She earned her BFA from Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi in 2008 and completed her MFA from King Mongkut’s Insititute of Technology Ladkrabang in 2013 in Bangkok, Thailand. At universities, she developed a sharp eye for abstract imagery and a knack for physical artwork making simultaneously.
Her comprehensive approach to artwork exploits both mix media and fabric focusing on conceptualism and the issues of life in New York City. The impressionistic and abstract creations are deeply inspired by way of life and all its varied aspects.
As an enthusiast of both eastern and western artistic cultures, Kamonchanok creates her masterpieces with the combination of traditional drawing and collage of indigenous materials. In order to create the concepts, styles, and the unique artworks, interaction of color, shape, and form in the natural world gives her inclusive viewpoint on the arts favoring and draws upon these elements in the environment as a whole.
Her artwork's collections has shown at, National Art Museum of China, Beppu Art Museum Oita (Japan), and other several Art exhibitions in Thailand and foreign countries since 2007 up until now.
Dan Lynh Pham
Đan Lynh Phạm is a Vietnamese American artist and illustrator born in Vietnam and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She completed her B.F.A in Studio Arts at Oklahoma State University and uses a variety of art mediums, including watercolors, sculpture, and digital art. Phạm's work focuses on her ongoing fascination with her identity, socialization, and the construction of culture. Her work aims to redefine what it means to be an Asian American woman and examines her upbringing in midwest America. Phạm has received awards from juried exhibitions such as Oklahoma Visual Artist Coalition's Momentum exhibition and featured in xPlicit Asia Magazine, Germany's first online magazine to celebrate AAPI Culture and Arts. In addition, she has exhibited solo shows in Oklahoma and Texas, and her work will be a part of Oklahoma Contemporary Art Center's upcoming exhibition.
Bella Cheng
Bella Cheng (b. 1999, Austin, TX) currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. Her work is multidisciplinary, spanning from two-dimensional media like drawing and painting to new media of video and performance. She has exhibited her work and performed in venues such as the Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX), Co-Lab Projects (Austin, TX), and UMLAUF Sculpture Garden + Museum (Austin, TX). Cheng earned her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin.
Renee Lai
Renee Lai makes drawings, paintings, and sometimes videos. She is based in Austin, TX. Lai's work explores the idea of barriers and how they serve as a metaphor for many other things-- private property, ownership, belonging, security, fear. Painted in a thin, translucent way, Lai’s barriers are minimally and elegantly constructed, letting the surface and a few marks carry much of the painting’s energy.
Lai is also the co-founder of The Art Local, an online art school taught by professional artists and professors for the serious art lover.
Lauren Hana Chai
Lauren Hana Chai is known for contrasting her traditional Korean upbringing with her modern American life and including a personal story or cultural narrative to accompany each piece. As the first in her family born in America, she was raised by her South Korean grandparents in Hawaii. She moved across the Pacific to San Francisco to study at the Academy of Art University. After some time following the technique-based curriculum, Lauren says she relished breaking the rules and mixing abstract elements into the work. Her current series places side by side traditional elements, such as Korean folk art and Buddhist temple architecture, and modern elements such as interracial relationships or sexually charged figures. She has been featured in NBC News, KBS World Radio, Houston NPR, and the Honolulu Star Advertiser.
Zoë Watts
Zoë Watts, who goes by Zo, is a metalworker and builder from Yulin, Shaanxi. they grew up in austin, Tx and have exhibited at the Piano Craft Gallery in Boston, as well as several Texas art institutions, including the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio.
Zo currently resides in Boston with their cat, pandan, where they teach woodworking and work as a gallery teacher at the institute of contemporary art. their free time is spent outdoors and cleaning up glitter.
Katie Gee Salisbury
Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of Not Your China Doll, a new biography of Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Believer, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” She also writes the newsletter Half-Caste Woman. A fifth-generation Chinese American who hails from Southern California, she now lives in Brooklyn.
Ms. Cashmere
Ms. Cashmere, aka Vanessa Atienza, is an Austin-based artist born in San Jose, California. She works with mixed media in many forms including poetry, collage, songwriting and production, and collaboration through community archival work. Mixed media presents a tangible parallel to reflect an array of mixed lived experiences including identity and spirituality. Her work centers themes of love, healing, and transcendence and is rooted in the belief that every individual can heal the world through first healing themselves and extending vulnerability to empower others.
Hiromi Stringer
Hiromi Stringer is a US-based Japanese artist. Currently, she is a Senior Lecturer of interdisciplinary, drawing and painting at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Stringer received multiple awards including the 2019-2020 Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship, the 2022 Dedalus Foundation Funds for Past fellows and Awardees, a grand prize for Eyes Got It!2014, the 2019-2020 Blue Star Contemporary Berlin Residency Program/ Künstlerhaus Bethanien International Studio Program, Berlin, Germany, the 2021 Summer Arts Faculty Residency program at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, Saugatuck, MI and the 2024 Vermont Studio Center residency, Johnson, VT. A resident of the San Antonio area, her works are in public, corporate and private collections in Japan and the US.
Jennifer Seo
I was born in Florida, grew up in Los Angeles, and currently live and work in Washington. I make drawing-sculptures of passed everyday objects. I received my MFA in Painting and Drawing from University of Texas San Antonio in 2020. I graduated Baylor University in 2014 with a BFA in Painting, and worked for Karl Umlauf from 2013-2017. While in Los Angeles I studied at artist So Moon Kim's Hagwon from 2004 to 2005.
I recreate objects found from old family photographs as delicate paper sculptures. As I look through the photos, I pick out common objects that those in the scene would have had the most interaction with. My making process is intentionally repetitive and careful. This meticulous labor elevates the handmade objects through the time and care spent producing it. While making these objects I have time to consider these lost moments, making space for quiet reflection. The limiting characteristics of paper emphasize the replicated-ness of the realized object and I am interested in this preservation that deconstructs the original. I find the accessibility and fragility of paper very poetic.
Recreating these objects is a study of my family that I have always felt disconnected from, but cherish. The ghostly visual of the sculptures produces a sense of preservation and loss. These sculptures are an exercise for locating my Korean American perspective. As I make the work, I project myself into experiences I was not always present for. These objects are identifiably hand activated because I want the viewer to be able to recognize that action and insert themselves into an imagined scene with the work, participating in my attempt to connect.
Rakhee Jain
Rakhee Jain Desai (b. Mississauga, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist working in textile/fiber, painting, sculpture and installation. Rakhee's South Asian identity informs both her subject matter and techniques with a particular focus on immigrant identity, belonging and place.
Rakhee has exhibited in the USA, Singapore and Portugal. She was selected as a featured artist for the Imago Mundi Benetton Foundation - representing Singapore’s contemporary art in the 21st Century & Beyond. She was the first cohort recipient of the Tempo2D program by the City of Austin Art in Public Places. The Batik mural named ‘A Place To Call Home’ is now on permanent view at the Austin Bergstrom International Airport. Rakhee is also a recent alum of The Contemporary Austin’s Crit Group program.
As a part of the Red Thread Collective, Rakhee has been commissioned by the City of Houston to create ‘‘Folding Stories’ suspended sculptures that celebrate the history and multicultural diversity of Alief, a neighborhood in Southwest Houston.
Community engagement and the preservation of craft are also integral to Rakhee’s practice. She often integrates ethnic craft methods such as Batik, a wax resist technique from Indonesia. She sees ancient craft methods as a way of storytelling - a snippet from the past carried into the present. And further, she views combining modern materials, both soft and hard as an apt way to weave the memories of the past with the hopes for the future.
Vy Ngo
Vy Ngo is an Austin based visual artist, who draws influences from her life as a Vietnamese-American, a physician, mother, and observer of the human condition. Born to refugee parents in rural Pennsylvania, her passion for the arts was overshadowed by cultural expectations, an interest in the sciences, and the desire to serve others. After establishing a career in medicine, Vy finally came back to her creative self and began painting in 2015. Her prolific and dedicated studio practice has led to solo exhibitions and group shows in various public art spaces and galleries across the country. Her work has also drawn attention from various publications and media, such as Tribeza, Austin Woman, and PBS Arts in Context. Whether it be representational work to create a dialogue about identity, culture, and political issues, or abstract and conceptual work based on memories, neuroscience and human emotions, her body of work is as diverse as her life.
Manik Nakra
The paintings, drawings, and installations of Manik Raj Nakra take on the possibility of addressing the ancient world as his own. A world of teeming jungles where four headed leopards perch on old world ruins and silver teethed monkeys pray for our salvation. Nakra’s work applies a contemporary lens onto Indian iconography, colonial anachronisms, artifacts from early civilizations, and the mythologies of ancient cultures to explore themes such as power, lust, ceremony, and self-sabotage. These themes, handled with striking graphics, pattern, and stark compositions, illuminate the historically rooted, but contemporarily relevant narratives on imperialism, ritual, and mankind’s relationship to nature.
His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Texas and San Francisco, participated in The LINE Residency in 2020, and was included in his first institutional museum show at The Contemporary, Austin Texas in 2021.
Teruko Nimura
Teruko Nimura (b. 1978, based in University Place, Washington) creates drawings, sculptures, site specific installations, pottery, public artworks and multi-layered community engagement projects that invite discovery and introspection through experiential connection. Her Japanese and Filipino cultural heritage is a foundational lens for her explorations of collective memory and trauma, identity, motherhood, and the climate crisis. Her work considers the body and its presence within the contextual specifics of the spaces they inhabit. With repetition, multiples, and labor as a gesture of love, she celebrates the flaws and vulnerabilities of objects made by hand. An emphasis on process and a fascination with the felt language of diverse and humble materials resonates throughout her multi-disciplinary practice.
Teruko received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from UT Austin. She has exhibited in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. She was an OX-Bow School of Art Fellow, a mentee artist in the Austin’s LaunchPAD (Public Art Duo) program for emerging public artists, featured in the 2017 TX Biennial, and the New York City Highline’s multi-city exhibition “New Monuments for New Cities”. Since relocating to Washington she was a Tacoma PARC (Public Art Reaching Community) artist, featured in the 2021 Bellevue Bellwether Arts Festival, the 2023 BIMA Spotlight Juried Exhibition and “Scanning the Room” at Vashon Center for the Arts. She was a nominated artist for Tacoma’s “Artists in the Archives”, a 2023 Rockland Artist Resident, and will serve as Artist in Residence for Tacoma’s Environmental Services from 2024-25.
Beili Liu
Beili Liu is a visual artist who creates material-and-process-driven, site-responsive installations and performances. Liu's current research focuses on the complex ecological, political, and environmental concerns facing the Circumpolar North and the urgency of the climate crisis on a planetary scale. Liu states, "I am called to visit the Arctic, a place that embodies the sorrows and hopes of our shared planet." Working with commonplace materials and elements such as thread, needle, scissors, feather, salt, wax, and cement, Liu manipulates their intrinsic qualities to extrapolate complex cultural and environmental narratives. As Kay Whitney wrote about Liu's work in Sculpture Magazine: "Liu's installations leap from obsession and repetition to something profound and expansive, merging the personal with the political...these remarkedly ordinary materials emphasize the disjunctive pairing of subtle beauty and cultural narrative."
Liu has exhibited extensively across the globe, in locations including Norway, Finland, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, France, Belgium, Poland, Austria, China, Taiwan and across the United States. She has presented solo exhibitions at Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norwegian National Art and Culture Museum; Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Museo di Villa Bernasconi, Como, Italy; Elisabeth de Brabant Art Center, Shanghai, China; Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco, CA; the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, TX; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX; and Women & Their Work, Austin, TX, among others. Significant group exhibitions at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; New Orleans Art Museum, LA; Grand Rapids Museum of Art, MI; Asian Art Week, NYC; Asia Society Texas Center, Houston, TX; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA; and internationally at the Hamburg Art Week, Germany; M.K. Ciurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania; Zhejiang Museum of Art, China; Hexiangning Museum of Art, Shenzhen, China; Musée de la Dentelle in Caudry, Montrouge, France; Asian Art Week, London, UK; and Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, Kraków, Poland. Liu has created public artworks in Beijing, Jilin and Shanghai, China, Bremerhaven, Germany, Taiwan, San Francisco, CA, Dallas and Austin, TX.
Liu has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2022-2024); the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2022); the Fulbright Distinguished Arctic Chair Award (Norway, 2021-2022); the Fulbright Finland Inter-Country Grant (2022); the Brian Wall Grant for Sculptors (2022); NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship (2021-2024); the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016); the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant through the Museum of Southeast Texas (2014). In 2018, Liu was honored by the Texas Legislature as the Texas State Artist in 3D medium. Liu received the Distinction Award at the Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2011), and a San Francisco Mayor’s Award (2008) for her contribution to cultural exchange.
Liu participated in artist residencies at the Hafnarborg Museum of Art, Iceland (2024), Arctic Circle Artists and Scientists Residency, Svalbard, Norway (2023), the Spitsbergen Artists Center, Svalbard, Norway (2023), Seed lab and Polar Lab at the Anchorage Museum of Art, Alaska (2023), the Franconia Sculpture Center, MN (2023), Djerassi Foundation, Woodside, CA (2023, 2006), the Joan Mitchell Center (2019), Studios at MASS MoCA (2019), Facebook Headquarter AIR (2018), Roman Witt Visiting Artist Residency, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2015), Fundación Valparaíso, Spain (2009), Fiskars AIR, Finland (2007), and Art Farm, NE (2004).
Liu’s work has been featured by PBS Arts in Context series, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Art Papers, ArtSlant, Artillery, The Huffington Post, Climate Progress, Public Art Review, Sacchi Review, UK, Helsinki Sanomat News, Finland, Morgenbladet, Norway, China Daily, Yishu, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Hamburg Abendblatt and Vita (Life) Magazine, Italy, among others.
Born in Jilin, China, Beili Liu now lives and works in Austin, Texas. Liu received her MFA degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2003). Liu is the Leslie Waggener Endowed Professor in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Liu served on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Museum Panel (2019), and her teaching has been endorsed by a UT Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award (2011), selected across the nine institutions of the University of Texas System.
Amar Gupta
I shoot primarily greyscale, large format photography. I also run a skate shop called EVRYNG, and my photo studio is currently located at Contracommon in Bee Cave, Texas, just outside of Austin. Abstract connections are what I seek in my photography—a collection of colors, lines, shapes and forms that tell a story which can not be conveyed by words.
Ben Aqua
Aqua was born in Brooklyn, New York. They studied graphic design at the University of Texas at Austin, where they developed their first solo music and performance art projects, ASSACRE and MVSCLZ, while organizing several DIY/avant-garde art and music events throughout Austin with the collective Totally Wreck Production Institute. Shortly after completing their degree, they began documenting their eccentric peers in photographic portraits involving "totally nonsensical, zany situations in beautifully/bizarrely decorated spaces