Exploring AANHPI Identities Through Visual Art

By Georgia Achilles

Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) diasporas extend across the globe, leading the AANHPI identity to be incredibly diverse, and ever-changing. The understanding of racial and ethnic identity carries with it traditions, histories, questions, and feelings which are expressed most effectively through art. The artists highlighted below use elements of their cultural identities as means of resistance, reclamation, and expression, ultimately showing their viewers what an AANHPI identity means to them.

Lehuauakea is a Native Hawaiian artist from Pāpaʻikou, Hawaiʻi. They work across various artistic mediums with emphasis on the use of kapa. Kapa is a textile made from the bark of the wauke tree, and has been a vessel of traditional art across the Pacific islands for centuries. The process of making kapa is both laborious and delicate, and often learned and perfected through apprenticeship. The style in which Kapa is made and decorated varies across islands and cultures, and was historically suppressed by colonial rule. Lehuauakea’s Hawaiian style Kapa is marked by intricate geometric patterns, variety in color, three-dimensional movement, and is entirely plant-based. Their perfection and expansion of intergenerational, landbased artistic practices serves as a means of reclaiming and protecting the Native Hawaiian identity.

Shahzia Sikander is a multidisciplinary artist who works in mosaic, ink, gouache, sculpture and photography. Born in Lahore, Pakistan under the Ziaul-Haq military regime, she emigrated to the US when she was twenty two to pursue her B.F.A. Her use of the traditional Pakistani art of miniature painting brought a new perspective to the universities she attended, launching the practice into popularity. Her style is influenced by traditional Pakistani patterns, clothing, history, and folklore. By utilizing her Pakistani culture as a means of expressing diverse messages and experiences, her artwork sparks dialogue and appreciation for intersectionality and the South Asian identity.

Maya Fuji is a self-taught artist based in the Bay Area. She works primarily in acrylic on wood, but often incorporates textural elements such as airbrushing, rhinestones, and glitter. She emigrated from Kanazawa, Japan to northern California as a child, splitting much of her time between the two countries. Her work explores her identity as an Issei (first-generation) Japanese-American, and multiracial woman. Her paintings serve as commentary on the Multiracial and Asian-American experience and question how ethnic and racial identity is retained and changed over time. Her use of dimension, focus on the female form, and comfortable domestic scenes are reminiscent of traditional Japanese woodblock prints. Her subjects, however, are depicted in vibrant color, with modern accessories, and with cartoonish, feminine, faces. Though women take up most of her pieces, Fuji cleverly hides Japanese yokai and Kami within domestic scenes, adding a playful nod to Japanese folklore and religion. Note the small characters running across the blue floor and in the window in the first two pieces. Her iconography, color, subject, and composition meld the traditional and contemporary, the physical and spiritual, and the American and Japanese identities.