Posting a March 7, 2014 interview conducted by Heather C. Lou from the Multiracial Network's blog for their upcoming March 30, 2014 Culture Fest where I'll be talking about some of my recent paintings (they have me listed as "performing"...yikes!).
Laura Kina
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| Laura Kina, Issei, oil on canvas, 2011 |
http://multiracialnetwork.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/interview-with-upcoming-culturefest-performer-laura-kina/
As ACPA draws closer, get excited with a weekly dose of MRN
Blogs! Hope to see you in Indy soon. Whether you will make it or not, we
remain united in solidarity over multiracial endeavors!
To start us off, we have an interview from our CultureFest performer Laura Kina! As can also be found on her website (http://www.laurakina.com/) Laura
is an artist and scholar who focuses “on the fluidity of cultural
difference and the slipperiness of identity”. With subjects ranging from
Asian American history to mixed race representation, her work blends
autobiography with artwork, breaking down stories and putting them back
together. Come see her perform “Hapa Yonsei Uchinanchu” her “talk
story” about her Okinawan family history in Hawaii and her multiracial
identity while showing images of her recent oil paintings and much more!
Check her out at CultureFest on Sunday March 30 from 6-9pm in the Convention Center, as part of CelebrACPA immediately after the opening ceremony.
**
1. Where and how do you get your inspiration for your art?
2. Do you have a favorite piece of art you’ve created? Why?
[I’m going to answer both questions at once below]
My artwork usually starts out with an autobiographical impulse and
series of questions and then develops as I gather source materials and
do field research. For example, in my current exhibition
Blue Hawaiʻi,
which is on view through March 27, 2014 at the University of Memphis
Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art, I initially traveled to Hawaiʻi
in 2009 to look at community and family photos and interview elders in
my dad’s Pi’ihonua sugarcane plantation community on the Big Island of
Hawaiʻi as well as other Nisei (2
nd generation) and Sansei (3
rd
generation) from nearby plantations. I grew up in a small Norwegian
town called Poulsbo, WA and aside from my dad and my grandma Kina, I was
pretty cut off from this part of my heritage. We’d go back as tourists
and grew up eating Spam Musubi but I wanted to learn about the real
Hawaiʻi and what it means to be Uchinanchu (Okinawan).
I initially was going to collect “obake” ghost stories
Glenn Grant
style inspired by the tales I’d heard of hinotama (fireballs) shooting
into the night sky from the old graveyard that surrounded their
plantation. I also wanted to find out what the issei (first generation)
of “picture brides” immigrants lives were like. This was my own
great-grandmother’s story of having an arranged marriage and arriving in
Hawaiʻi around 1919. Her life was a mystery to me. So I saw a parallel
between these fireballs and wanted to learn about her – of things
disappearing and leaving just a trace in the night sky. But when I got
into doing the interviews I realized that the folks I talked to didn’t
see these “ghost” tales as fantastical or even spooky stories but more
akin to Native Hawaiian mythology and manifestations of the spirit world
that should be respected or that are useful for us to understand what
is kapu (forbidden or off limits). There were also humorous ghost
stories, like Kimotori the liver taker, that their parents used for
practical purposes to keep the kids out of danger while they were busy
working in the fields. Kimotori supposedly lived under a bridge and the
kids would have to race home from school over this bridge back to home.
Fear of Kimotori kept them from loitering around the water, which could
have been a risk for drowning. I also learned how impactful WWII,
military service, access to higher education, and the collapse of the
sugar industry was on their lives. My image of these kimono clad
“picture brides” was quickly replaced by stories of very tough and
resourceful women who ran underground awamori (Okinawan sake) mills to
subsidize their meager incomes as sharecroppers. They got up early and
rolled Bull Duram cigarettes and packed metal tin lunch boxes of rice,
dried fish, and pickles and headed out into the fields before the sun
rose each day.
After completing the first round of works based on this research for a solo show called
Sugar
in 2010, this eventually led to my father and I traveling together
again to Okinawa in 2012 to collect additional stories of heritage and
history. The finished series of 23 oil paintings compress time and space
between Okinawa and Hawaiʻi and capture the remnants of WWII and a
continued American military presence in contemporary Okinawa and trace
my family’s immigration from Okinawa to Hawaiʻi and the process of
assimilation and citizenship against the backdrop of larger issues of
settler-colonialism. The works are also a way to actively remember the
four family members who were killed during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.
Although it was impossible to know that I was going to cover all of this
while I was making the work, this is where the research led me – from a
fantasy of ghosts and picture brides to learning about the very real
hauntings of history and connecting to the community in Hawaiʻi and to
my extended family in Okinawa. Remembering ended up being a radical act.
My favorite painting from this series is called
“Issei”
and it is a double portrait of my great-grandma Makato Gibu Hiyane and
her mother Makato Maehira. I found the source image for this when my own
Grandma Kina died and we were working on a memorial video. I thought
the photo was of my great-grandma and I painted her here with a row of
plantation workers in the background. When I took the image back to
Hawaiʻi, aunties pointed out that I had painted a twist on the Native
Hawaiian myth of the night marchers. When I took the image back to
Okinawa, my relatives noted that this image was of my
great-great-grandma who had died during the Battle of Okinawa. It was
through this image that I began to learn the truth about what happened
to our family during the WWII. Up until this point it wasn’t something
anyone talked about. The image has gone one to be used by the
Smithsonian in their traveling banner exhibition
“I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story” to talk about plantation history in Hawaiʻi.
View the complete series and download the exhibition catalog and read
the essay “Okinawan Diaspora Blues” by Wesley Ueneten, Associate
Professor of Asian American Studies San Francisco State University:
http://www.laurakina.com/newwork2013.html
3. How did you begin your academic career in Mixed Race Studies?
This was a somewhat organic process too. I was working on a series of painting in 2002-2005 called “
Hapa Soap Opera”
and I was initially just painting friends and family of mine who were
mixed Asian and another race. Along this process I learned about Hapa
Issues Forum in California and the MAVIN Foundation in Seattle and I
started to get connected with the multiracial movement on a national
level. Before that time, mixed identity was a thing we just talked about
in our own family and we used the Hawaiian word “hapa” to name what we
were. I’d already been very grounded in Asian American arts and a
collectivized and activist identity but over the course of time I had
noticed that more and more of us in Asian American arts were in fact
“mixed” and this was something I wanted to explore in my artwork.
Eventually, of course, I had to think about mixedness beyond just “hapa”
identity and this led me to make my 2006
Loving series, which featured 10 charcoal portraits of mixed race individuals. They were all born in the years after the 1967
Loving vs. Virginia
Supreme Court Case, which overturned our nation’s last
anti-miscegenation laws. I wanted to capture who we (mixed folks) are a
virtual community in one sense but also quite disconnected. Since I had
converted to Judaism back in 1997 I was also thinking about the idea of a
minyan– with 10 being the minimum number of people you need to pray. Of
course in the Jewish context this needs to be 10 Jewish adults but I
was thinking about this in relation to what makes community. Over the
course of 2002-2006 from the
Hapa Soap Opera and
Loving series, my virtual community of subjects started to be a real community.
By winter of 2008 I found myself at a Multiracial Leadership retreat
outside of San Francisco organized and attended by Hapa Issues Forum,
iPride, MASC, and MAVIN asking what the next steps were for “our”
community. After the push for the one or more option on the 2000 U.S.
and then the nomination of President Barack Obama, there was a
collective question of what the next national project should be. There
also seemed to be a waning interest in the social support groups and
networks that were established in the 1980s and 1990s. With the growing
social acceptance of mixed race people and families, there just didn’t
seem to be as much demand to meet in groups. This experience raised a
whole new set of questions. On one hand I felt a certain homecoming to
finally find a whole community of other “mixed” people out there. I
wasn’t certain what this meant yet for Asian America and I couldn’t see
how, other than a common experience of racism, we were historically
connected. I just had a lot of questions that I couldn’t articulate at
the time but I was happy to make so many new friends but a little
skeptical about all this claim to “newness” and the “multiracial
millennium” and what the New York Time’s was calling “Generation E”
(Ethnically Ambiguous). In the art world there had already been 7+ years
of rhetoric around entering a so-called post-racial era and President
Barack Obama’s election seemed like the proof. In retrospect this was
really problematic and was happening at the same time that we saw and
continue to see Islamaphobia on the rise post-9/11.
4. What was the process of creating, organizing, and implementing the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference?
I went to this 2008 leadership retreat with my DePaul colleague Camilla Fojas. She had just published her co-edited book
Mixed Race Hollywood
(NYU Press, 2008) with Mary Beltran and I was beginning to teach a
class called “Mixed Race Art and Identity.” We were doing a workshop
activity where you put post-it notes up on a wall with where you see
yourself in five years in the multiracial movement and what you want to
work on. After everyone had their dreams on the wall, we moved out
post-it notes around to align with each other. It was out of this
activity and other theater and drawing activities that Camilla Fojas,
and Wei Ming Dariotis from San Francisco State University, and I had the
very practical idea to work towards legitimizing multiracial studies in
an academic context. Our hope was to found an association for critical
mixed race studies. We used the word “critical” from “critical race”
theory to point towards systems of racialization and used the “mixed
race” (with no hyphen) from what was being used at the time (as opposed
to “multiracial”) to define the movement.
The no hyphen comes from us
ditching hyphenated identities in Asian America. I know this is
confusing when “mixed-race” is used as a compound modifier! We sat down and hammered out a definition, which we are still using today for
Critical Mixed Race Studies:
Critical Mixed Race Studies is the transracial, transdisciplinary,
and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of
social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of
race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial
boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social
stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic
injustices rooted in systems of racialization.
But before we could found an
association we figured we should start small by organizing a conference.
We sent out a call for papers in 2009 and by the time the inaugural
conference “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies”
took shape in November 2010 we had over 200 paper submissions and 430
people attended. What was unique about this first conference is that it
wasn’t a student conference, as most large-scale meetings on
multiraciality had been up to this point. It was an academic conference
but it also recognized the movements community roots and included arts
and community programming and it drew national and international
participation. For our subsequent 2012 conference “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”,
which over 450 people attended, we sought to keep this core spirit but
wished to professionalize the process to ensure peer review but to also
create a sustainable process for the conference can keep going. Camilla
Fojas worked with an external panel of reviewers to select the papers
and I partnered with Mixed Roots Stories to organize arts programming.
We are doing this again for the Nov 13-15, 2014 conference “Global Mixed Race.”
To read in detail about the history of multiracial studies in the
U.S. and the founding of Critical Mixed Race Studies, please read the
inaugural issue of the
Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
article “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies” by G.
Reginald Daniel, Laura Kina, Wei Ming Dariotis, and Camilla Fojas.
http://escholarship.org/uc/ucsb_soc_jcmrs
5. If you had one word to use to describe your creative/artistic style, what would it be?
Archive
6. Lastly, do you have any advice to our budding artists?
Knowing your craft – not only the technical aspects but the history
too. As a painter I need to know how to paint and hopefully be damn good
at it but also really engage with the entire history of painting and
all of it’s possibilities. Work with deadlines and parameters and clear
goals but also sink yourself into research and get lost and take risks. I
also have really personally benefited from a practice where I
incorporate collaboration and accountability to specific communities.
This means my artwork is drawn from and gives back to these communities
but it also means that these groups sustain me and keep me on point.
**
Thanks to MRN Co-Chair Heather Lou for coordinating this blog post and of course to Laura Kina for sharing her time with us!
