On the relationship between text and image in the work of Kapulani Landgraf.
80 _ ARCH ! VE OF P ! L ! NA
Through historical archives and n , pepa, K - naka voices trace a narrative map that tighten threads of solidarity with Palestinians.
)0 _ WHEN MAR ! MET CHUCK
Two lawyers and activists deftly navigate the vicissitudes of love, marriage, and community while striving to uphold justice and equality.
SPECIAL SECTION: STYLE
(06 _ ROCKET’S ASCENT
Rocket Ahuna skirts the boundaries of aloha wear with his buzzy, eponymous fashion label.
((6 H ! GH PASS ! ON
Taylor Okata and Ben Perreira of Passionfruit are bringing high fashion home.
(26 _ THAT’S SO TUTUV !
Colleen Kimura’s unabashedly maximalist designs are being celebrated by a new generation of local fashion acolytes.
EXPLORE
(38 _ PORTLAND
Kai Gaspar
(50 _ CURRENCY
Coins
(56 TRA ! LS
N- Ala Hele
LIVING WELL
(.0 _ MOLOKA‘ !
Kealopiko
(82 _ LO‘ !
K-ko‘o ‘Ōiwi
ART & DES ! GN
CULTURE
SOC ! ETY
SUSTA ! NAB ! L ! TY
STYLE
POL ! T ! CS
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O N THE COVERS
Reflecting the dynamism of stories in every edition, our new issues are released with multi-cover runs to express the kaleidoscopic and shifting landscape of the islands. L to R: 1. Leiolani Faurot in an original Rocket Ahuna dress in Honolulu; 2. New York-based stylists Taylor Okata and Ben Perreira of Passionfruit; 3. Textile designer Colleen Kimura of Tutuvi at her home.
Images, L to R, by:
2. and 3. Brandyn Liu
1. Nani Welch Keli‘iho‘omalu
KULEANA
‘Āina... it’s also the old word for ‘ohana, for family. And that’s because it was recognized that the land is us.”
Kahealani Acosta BS, Tropical Plant & Soil Sciences, UH Mānoa, 2019 Current master’s student in Tropical Plant & Soil Sciences
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KRISTIANA KAHAKAUWILA is a writer of Kanaka Maoli, German, and Norwegian descent. Her childhood was spent in Long Beach, California, with frequent visits to Maui to spend time with her paternal family. After earning an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, Kahakauwila moved to O‘ahu and worked as a wine steward, college English instructor, and freelance writer. She is the author of two prize-winning books set in contemporary Hawai‘i: Clairboyance (HarperCollins 2024), a middle grade novel, and This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth 2013), a collection of literary fiction. Since 2020, Kristiana has taught at the University of Hawai‘i at M-noa and now serves as the director of the creative writing program. Kahakauwila interviewed Hawai‘i Island-based Zoë Eisenberg on her latest film and novel on page 28. “Interviewing Zoë was an opportunity to talk about the landscape of art-making in Hawai‘i and the amazing ways artists support one another here,” she says.
‘IHILANI LASCONIA is a Kanaka ‘Ōiwi student, artist, and organizer from Waim-nalo, O‘ahu. As an activist and transnational feminist, Lasconia’s work is centered on ending patriarchal violence through decolonization and anti-imperialism. She is a doctoral student at the University of Hawai‘i at M-noa in the Department of Political Science. Her research looks at historical and contemporary connections between Hawai‘i and Palestine. Her first piece for Flux, co-written with D. Kauwila Mahi, explores this topic through Hawai‘i’s archives on page 80. As a creative, Lasconia explores the mediums of poetry, rap, and spoken word. She is an artist instructor at the Honolulu Museum of Art through Soundshop, a youth hip-hop program led by local MCs, breakers, and DJs. Her craft is rooted in the geopolitical landscape of Hawai‘i and her experience being queer and Native in the 21st century. When not hitting the books or the streets, Lasconia can be found tending to her lo‘i in He‘eia.
WILL MATSUDA is a Japanese American photographer and writer based in Portland, Oregon, where he was born and raised. Across both mediums, his work focuses on his culture, his family, and the environment. Matsuda’s images and bylines have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, and The New Yorker, among many other publications. His works have been exhibited internationally by Aperture Foundation and Yancey Richardson Gallery. On his first assignment for Flux Hawaii, on page 138, Matsuda photographed Kai Gaspar, a Kanaka ‘Ōiwi poet, in Portland on an unseasonably hot day in May. “I loved how Kai and his husband Kasey leaned all the way into our shoot,” he says. “I could tell they had prepared for hours when I arrived–they baked cakes, brought out a wine decanter, even a fake lobster. The table was set. I just had to show up!”
CHRIS ROHRER is a photographer born and raised in Honolulu. After dabbling in an array of subjects in multiple community colleges, Rohrer attended the University of Hawaii at M-noa. There he found his passion in the experimental and nostalgic nature of film photography. He went on to earn a BFA with a focus in photography. During his time at UH M-noa he helped form the Analog Sunshine Recorders, a collective which included like-minded photographers from the photography department. Their mission was collaboration and perpetuation of photographic film and related chemical processes. Since college, Rohrer has taught photography within the University of Hawaii system, but now spends most of his time working as a freelance photographer. For fun he prints in his home darkroom, and plays with his dog. For this issue, Rohrer created images for the profile on Barbara Pope, on page 42, and the maps on Palestine in the Hawaiian Mission Houses’ archives on page 80.
“ I like surrounding myself with people who are really smart and capable and talented
so I can learn from them. I believe the best idea wins. ” — Zoë Eisenberg
On paper colored like the sea, Hawai‘i’s “island rose,” Princess Victoria Kaw!kiu Ka‘iulani Lunalilo Kalaninuiahilapalapa Cleghorn, penned her name in black ink. The “V” in her English name arcs gracefully, like a wave about to curl onto short and wispy letters which are like bumps on the ocean. The princess settled for the shortened version of her name, Victoria Ka‘iulani, but added “of Hawaii” as a declaration of her heritage and place as the rightful heir to the Hawaiian monarchy. Below her signature is the date “September 1891,” when she was 16 years old and studying in England. Her handwriting is feminine and well formed, symbolic of the princess’ renowned beauty and her education.
The cover page of Ka‘iulani’s autograph book is an archive of meaning, and it is
Sovereign Signatures
BY
ROHRER
only the beginning. In 1991, The Friends of ‘Iolani Palace received the book from a descendant of Kai‘ulani’s half-brother, Thomas Alexander Kaula‘ahi Cleghorn. Inside, historians discovered around 40 pages of autographs, sketches, and notes from people she had met, collected between 1883 and 1896 at home and abroad.
In the 19th century, the trend of autograph books reached America from Germany, where it had originated. While the blank-paged books were initially used by students for exchanging signatures, like today’s yearbooks, in America they became canvases for celebrity signatures. Fans of Walt Whitman or Washington Irving sought the prized signatures of their favorite authors for their autograph books. Ka‘iulani’s position as Hawaiian royalty allowed her to use her autograph book in both ways. Many of the writings found in her book came from famous persons she had socialized with. According to ‘Iolani Palace historian Zita Cup Choy, “[The book] says she treasured her friends and people she met and had them sign her book so she could remember them.”
Today, the autograph book informs us that Ka‘iulani’s social circle stretched
around the globe. In 1889, the 13-year-old princess left her widowed father, Archibald S. Cleghorn, (her mother, Princess Likelike, had died two years prior) for several years of schooling in England. There she studied art, history, literature, physics, and the ways of a distinguished Victorian woman. In 1893, she took a month-long hiatus to America to
plead against the overthrow of the Hawaiian government. She delivered a moving speech to the New York press, saying, “I, a poor, weak girl, with not one of my people near me and all of these statesmen against me, have the strength to stand up for the rights of my people. Even now I can hear their wail in my heart, and it gives me strength.”
While we only know generally of her travels, the signatures in her autograph book suggest that she met many dignitaries while abroad. The scrawling, lopsided handwriting of Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg takes up an entry in the journal dated 1896, when the prince was 35 years old. The autograph book also contains the layered, similar signatures of two sisters a couple years older than Ka‘iulani, Anna and Sophia Römer, and their mother, Celine Römer, who were of a Baltic-German royal family of painters.
On one page dated March 1893, when Ka‘iulani was in New York having delivered her moving plea for the Hawaiian Kingdom, there lies a beautiful, curving signature, barely legible, beneath a drawn musical score labeled “Allegretto.” It’s possible that the signature belonged to Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist and composer. He was most likely on a recurring musical tour in America when he met the princess.
Other pages contain talented sketches, some only marked by initials: a stork prodding a child in a basket down a moving river; daisies arranged into the letter “K”; a scene at a riverbank where a tower sits among pine trees. A curved stalk bearing blooming cherry blossoms. A watercolor stretch of beach with white
caps on a blue horizon, drawn by Edward Cli ord, an English aesthete best known for his portraits, who visited the leper colony in Kalaupapa on Moloka‘i and met Father Damien.
The entry perhaps most prized by scholars is by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Scottish novelist, best known for his works Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, had stayed in Honolulu during the months prior to Ka‘iulani’s departure for England. In that time, Stevenson befriended the young princess and her father, who was a fellow Scot. As her farewell gift, Stevenson wrote a poem in Ka‘iulani’s autograph book: “Forth from her land to mine she goes, / The island maid, the island rose…”
It is this image of the youthful Ka‘iulani that we hold today. We imagine our princess, who died too soon at the age of 23, playing in the garden of her Waik#k# residence, ‘Āinahau, among the p#kake and peacocks she so loved. But in the pages of her autograph book, we are given evidence of her maturity. There we see a diplomat on track to become a great matriarch. With every foreign signature, the princess moved Hawai‘i toward a better future.
KAWANANAKOA, EVA PARKER, AND ROSE CLEGHORN ROBERTSON AT AINAHAU, HER WA I K Ī K Ī HOME, C I RCA 1898. I MAGE FROM THE HAWA I ‘ I STATE ARCH I VES.
1 The Hilo-set story follows Jess and Ren, a pair of co-dependent besties in their 30s, as they navigate their friendship following a one-night stand and an unexpected pregnancy.
2 Another Hilo-set narrative with messy characters confronting the challenges of adulthood that centers on 29-yearold Misha gets involved in an eyebrow-raising romance with an 18-yearold high schooler, who thinks she’s a fellow senior from another school.
Storied Spaces
FOR YEARS, ZOË E!SENBERG HAS SUPPORTED !NDEPENDENT F!LMMAK!NG !N HER EAST HAWA!‘! HOME. NOW, A BOOK AND FEATURE F!LM DEBUT BR!NGS HER CREAT!VE WORK !NTO THE SPOTL!GHT.
TEXT BY ! MAGES BY
_ KR ! ST ! ANA KAHAKAUW ! LA _ ANDREW R ! CHARD HARA
In the lm industry, it’s common to nd multi-hyphenates such as writer-producer-director. Zoë Eisenberg, who does indeed inhabit these titles, boasts several more: novelist, aerialist, small business owner. Since moving to Kalapana in 2013, in the Puna region on the island of Hawai‘i, Eisenberg has seen her work flourish. She has produced 10 films, including Keli‘i Grace’s Ala Moana Boys and Erin Lau’s Inheritance, which was awarded the best Made in Hawai ʻi short at the 2022 Hawai ʻi International Film Festival. For the past few months, she’s been traveling to promote two projects: her debut novel Signi!cant Others1 and her solo feature length directorial debut Chaperone 2, which premiered this year at Slamdance and brought home the Grand Jury Award for Breakouts. With a primarily Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander cast helmed by a Hawai‘i-based crew, Chaperone is special for another reason. It was developed in two di erent Creative Lab Hawai‘i incubators: the Producers Immersive in 2019 and the Directors Intensive in 2021. It was also created with the support of Hawai ʻibased groups such as Hawai ʻi Women in Filmmaking, ʻOhina, and Sight and Sound. As such, it’s a lm supported by a diverse
network of independent lmmakers and creatives, illustrating the possibilities of the creative arts on our islands.
More importantly for Eisenberg, she has helped others realize those creative possibilities. In 2018, she co-founded the Made in Hawai‘i Film Festival, which featured cinema made in and about the islands in support of Hawai‘i’s independent lms and lmmakers, and served as executive director until its closing in 2023. She also co-founded Aerial Arts Hawai‘i in 2017, a collective and production company for queer and allied East Hawai ʻi circus and burlesque performers that produces experiential circus acts across Hawai ʻi. In 2021 and with the growth of AAH, she opened The Airhouse, an event space and training studio in downtown Hilo that has become a hub for unique forms of self-expression in her island home.
I spoke to Eisenberg via Zoom, as she headed to another lm festival featuring Chaperone. She was missing her quiet home and craving some solitude but little downtime is in her future. Coming up, she has a second book on the horizon, a feature-length script for Ty Sanga of Kūmau Productions, and the lming of Wanle, a short lm adapted from one of the stories in my collection This Is Paradise.
In our conversation Eisenberg and I talked about the place of Hawai‘i, community-building, creating complex female characters, and what’s bringing us joy.
Kristiana Kahakauwila: You’ve had a fantastic 2024 thus far, with your novel Significant Others dropping in February at the same time that Chaperone was premiering. What did it feel like to debut two huge projects?
Zoë Eisenberg: I started both these projects in late 2018 to early 2019. I didn’t choose the release for either of them. Your publisher chooses the book release, and the lm release was based entirely on what festival we got into. So, it was pretty surreal to be working on these two projects for so long and then have them appear in the world at the same time. To the outside it might look like, where did this come from? But for me I’ve been here in the jungle for the last ve years trying to get these out.
In some ways it’s even been more than five years for your career as a novelist. You wrote your rst novel in 2012 before you began producing lms. How did that happen?
I nished my rst novel in 2012, but it didn’t sell to an editor. I think this was because I was — and still am — growing my craft and coming into my own voice. I’m actually reworking that manuscript now, and it’s been interesting to approach the same story with over a decade of experience between drafts. While I was working on the earlier version of that novel, I started dating the lmmaker who would eventually become my husband. He wanted to direct a lm but didn’t have a script, so I wrote him one, and from there I began writing screenplays in tandem with ction, and stepped into producing and directing in order to get our work made. Screenwriting is a wildly di erent craft than ction. It’s much more structured, and it took me some time, and several lms, to understand the rules. Now that I
am engaging with both mediums at once, they are often in conversation with each other. Incorporating screenplay structure into my ction has de nitely helped me become better at developing plot; I imagine this is why my ction is now nding a home.
Both Significant Others and Chaperone are set in Hawai‘i, and the politics of place play at the edges of these works. What’s your relationship to place, and to the place of Hawai‘i?
My grandparents retired to Waik#k#, so I spent summers visiting them. And then my mother moved to Puna, where I now live, when I graduated from college. So, the simple answer is I ended up here by following family.
But it’s more complex than that. I’ve never been so inspired by a place. I’ve never felt so creatively nurtured by a place. But I also know that a lot of settlers come here and are inspired and feel nurtured, and that poses a lot of questions. As I’ve been here, I’ve found myself being a lot more community focused than I ever was in the past and I think it’s because it’s important for me to be generative here, not only in my own work but in what I’m giving back to this place so that I’m contributing and not just taking. One way is creating community and trying to help other people in this place feel seen and re(ected.
I’m so glad you’ve brought up community. One of the hallmarks of your career — or, rather, careers — is your ability to gather and support others. What does community mean to you? And how did you come to a career that’s centered on community making?
A large part of it is service. I found spaces that I felt like had a hole in them and I could see myself lling that. When I moved to Kalapana, I got into circus arts pretty much immediately because I found this amazingly talented group of circus artists.
PREV I OUS: E I SENBERG AT H I LO’S FAMED PALACE THEATER, WHERE SHE ALSO SHOT PART OF HER FEATURE F I LM, CHAPERONE
A lot of them are professionally trained. They live with their families or are farmers or stay-at-home moms, but they’re still training and, at the time, had nowhere to perform. I’m a producer so I knew I could help with that, I could get us performing.
It’s very similar with lm. The lm community has grown so much in the last 12 years. When I rst moved here, I had a hard time nding community and tapping in, and I knew I couldn’t be the only person struggling to connect with other lmmakers. So, I asked, “How can I help to get us all together?”
And that’s how Made in Hawai‘i Film Festival3 got started.
How would it have been di erent if you had been in Honolulu instead of on the island of Hawaiʻi?
In Honolulu, I think I would have been able to join other communities easier. Hawai‘i Filmmakers Collective started in 2014. Around that same time, HIFF started their Made in Hawai‘i program where they wanted to really focus on Hawai‘i-made films and our local
creatives. So, it was in the zeitgeist. Other people were thinking and feeling the same thing.
There are a lot of Hawai‘i-born creatives who want to stay home and work and don’t want to have to move to LA or New York or any other lm hubs. And they’re very talented, so there is this community-driven initiative to make sure that Hawai‘i can be a sustainable place to work. This is also how we’re going to ensure that Hawai‘i stories are being told by and about the people who actually live here.
3 Other notable alumni include Ciara Lacy’s This Is the Way We Rise and Alika Tengan’s Molokaʻ i Bound
One thing I admire about your novel
Signi cant Others is that you trace how love changes. Often a story will focus on the lead up to a big love, or the aftermath of a break, but it’s rare to have a story that traces a full arc of before and after and sustaining beyond. So, I’m really interested in how you write love.
Love for me looks di erent than love looks for a lot of people, and I’ve learned that slowly throughout my adult life.4 I know now that the way I develop and pursue friendships is a lot more romantic, and by the word “romantic” I mean an expression of love. My friendships tend to be more romantic in terms of my attention on people and my focus and my celebration of my loved ones, even if it’s not a romantic love. I also don’t view the end of a relationship as a failed relationship. I think that’s because I have three parents. My stepmother has been in my life since I was twelve. Her relationship with my father is so beautiful, and her relationship with my mother is beautiful, too. I’m really a)rmed that my parents had a beautiful love for 25 years, and then went on to have other beautiful loves. And I bring all that into my work.
I’m interested in the intersection of love and desire. Your stories feature complex women who are making choices often against their best interest but out of this incredibly strong desire, one that borders on need.
We’re all trying to get our needs met. That looks di erent for di erent people. And we don’t always realize what we’re doing while we’re doing that. I nd myself drawn to stories about women who are trying to achieve some kind of control through secrecy. In Significant Others, Jess is engaging in deceptive behavior because she’s scared. In Chaperone , Misha is engaging in deceptive behavior because it’s been so long since she’s felt seen. The only way she thinks she can be seen is through pursuing this relationship that is duplicitous and problematic.
And on a story level, how do you think about consequences? Because you write beautiful and complex consequences.
I have always been the person my friends tell their secrets to. I think I’m able to hold that space for my characters, too, where I’m not judging them. So that allows me to not handhold the audience or make overly moralistic story arcs. All of our choices have consequences, and I love following that domino e ect, but I don’t always feel that a character needs to learn or grow. I view Signi!cant Others as a comedy because the characters grow and change whereas Chaperone is a tragedy because the character doesn’t.
You’ve co-written, with Alison Week, a new screenplay that’s set to begin lming this summer. I’m pretty excited about this short lm because it’s an adaptation of one of my stories and because you’re working with a number of women I admire, such as director Lisette Marie Flanary and producer Camille Muth. How is writing an adaptation di erent from working on your own original screenplay?
The Wanle short script was the easiest script I have ever written because the story was there and the structure of that story is really great. So, thanks for that. (Laughs.) It wasn’t only that it was the easiest writing process I’ve ever had but it also was the best received script I’ve ever written. It’s placing in so many contests, and the accolades for the project are stacked, which surprised us — not because we don’t think this project is a knockout, but because the birthing process had been so comparatively easy. When I co-wrote the short with Alison, the hardest thing for us was to go through the original story and pull out only certain scenes because the short has to be so short. Now we’re deep into expanding the short script into a feature, and that’s very di erent because we need to expand Wanle’s world beyond what is already in the short story.
4 Eiseinberg got the idea in 2018 while reflecting upon the female friendships of her 20s and early 30s. “Because the relationship was platonic, I would have no real way to mourn them because I didn’t have a model for what I was going through,” she said in an interview with the Hawai ʻi Review of Books.
Filmmaking strikes me as incredibly collaborative. Writing a book, for me at least, is so solo. When you’re collaborating, how do you make sure you hear your own voice? And when you’re solo, how do you stay connected?
Fiction is my rst love, and it’s what I spend the most time doing, but it’s isolating. It takes so long to see any fruit from your labor, particularly if the fruit looks like published work. If I didn’t have circus and lm, which are both more social and collaborative, I would be a lot less happy. In terms of voice, directing is still relatively new to me. Chaperone is the fourth lm I’ve directed but the rst feature I’ve directed by myself, so it’s still new to me to be like this is my voice, this is my vision. Also, I like surrounding
myself with people who are really smart and capable and talented so I can learn from them. I believe the best idea wins. Thus, for directing at least, it’s about bringing on people who respect my voice and like my vision and want to support my learning and growing. Sometimes it takes awhile to nd who those people are.
It’s been a joy to talk with you. Can you tell me what’s bringing you joy right now?
This conversation! But also, it’s great to have Chaperone in the world because so many people had pivotal roles in making it. To have it get into Slamdance 5 To have it truly be an underdog but go on to win big. This is great for many different people, not just me.
For our producers, and our actors, and the folks who helped nance it and put a lot of faith in it. It feels like a project that was made by many in the community, so it’s a joy to see it succeeding.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
5 An annual showcase of emerging and indie talent that is famous for launching the careers of Christopher Nolan and Lena Dunham.
NAV
I
D S I NAK I I S AN ART I ST AND WR I TER FROM TEHRAN WHO CURRENTLY L I VES I N LOS ANGELES. H I S DEBUT NOVEL, MEDUSA OF THE ROSES, WAS PUBL I SHED I N AUGUST 2024.
Persian Epics, Internet Dreams
FROM TEHRAN TO LOS ANGELES AND THEN HONOLULU, THE ART!ST AND WR!TER NAV!D S!NAK! D!SCUSSES SELF D!SCOVERY, ALTERNAT!VE ARCH!VES, BR!DG!NG ACHES, AND THE CRAFT OF A CLEVER STORYTELLER.
TEXT BY ! MAGES BY
In the realm where thoughts (eet, gardens stand eternal. A universal soil we can hold in our hands, as material as the passing rain. Within the pulsing sun lies a series of miracles revealing itself to you. All of them say something similar, yet distinctive. What imbues this environment of lush subtlety? The fusion of the perpetually aged with the freshly imagined? We share a parallel technological bedrock where new seeds are constantly sown in the past’s underground, the surface green with potential. Where creation exists in continuous self-discovery, we polish our jewels and let them glitter in the sun’s rays. What unfurls when all your cherished ephemera and memories converge at once? Private blog entries, lovers, and magic emerge.
Navid Sinaki’s visual storytelling beckons like a dream in progress, adorned with glitter, Easter eggs, secret sounds, and unlocked doors. It grows and regrows, abundant and charming, intertwining and superimposing the playful and unexpected upon what is familiar: a chatbox is a manuscript, a statue is a story, a person is a place. Some thoughts shrink while some catch on like a pop song you haven’t heard in 200 years.
Sinaki’s first solo exhibition, The In!nite Garden, is a queer reimagining
_ JASM ! NE RE ! KO _ ELYSE BUTLER COURTESY OF THE SHANGR ! LA MUSEUM OF ! SLAM ! C ART, CULTURE AND DES ! GN, AND NAV !
D S ! NAK !
and epic tale of the artist’s own making, exploring themes of love, desire, and storytelling roused by a fascination with the early internet, ’90s pop culture, and his Iranian heritage. A result of Sinaki’s time in Honolulu as an artist in residence at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture and Design in 2023, the short lms and faux ephemera in The In ! nite Garden , which was on view at Shangri La and Honolulu Museum of Art through June 2024, connects both venues through Persian paintings from the Zand and Qajar periods, tilework, and manuscripts pulled from Doris Duke’s home collection. To furnish The Infinite Garden , Sinaki appoints digitized manuscripts, early internet visuals, GIFs, and VHS cassette packaging. His multiplicitous assembly extends the limits of curation into a procreative place challenging one’s context within history, promoting self-discovery. From these seeds, a space is summoned for queerness within Persian mythology, where one may engage with history, technology, context, and personal identity altogether at once.
Meet me at the intersection of modern-age digital storytelling and ancient-born personal mythologizing.
Jasmine Reiko : Hi, Navid. Can you introduce yourself?
Navid Sinaki : My name is Navid Sinaki and I’m an artist and an author. I was born in Iran, but my parents left Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War when warfare increased in intensity.
I grew up in a Southern California suburb, so my childhood was a mix of ’90s pop culture and the slices of ephemera from Iran. The only cultural spot in Rancho Cucamonga was the local Barnes and Noble. I also found a home in the channel Turner Classic Movies, where I watch many old lms.
I had a simultaneous love of text, imagery, and lm that blossomed side by side.
How was your time as an artist in residence at Shangri La? How did that come about?
My residency at Shangri La was the most magical and cherished experience in my artistic career thus far. Curator Kristin Remington had come across my work through the American Muslim Futures exhibit from 2021. For that online exhibition, I showcased some early work that deconstructed old Persian painted manuscripts and reimagined them with Y2K-era gifs. Kristin and I had a particular kinship over early website design and esoteric memes. Kristin asked me if I was interested in a digital residency at Shangri La. With it came keys to the kingdom: a site visit, during which I was able to peruse the staggering collection of art and artifacts that Doris Duke surrounded herself with. I had a magical amount of access in a way no other cultural space would allot a (edgling artist: trips to the archives to handle delicate books and manuscript pages, and ample time exploring the tilework that makes the museum a unique paradise. There were no limits or parameters, no censorship or limitations. I was allowed to produce a body of work of my own desire.
I was so moved by my experience at Shangri La for many reasons. I knew I wouldn’t be returning to Iran any time soon, since my work is queer AF and homosexuality is criminalized there. But through Doris Duke’s former home, I was able to explore art and artifacts I’d never be able to see because of my inde nite estrangement from my birthplace. There is a sense of longing with knowing I won’t go back, but I was suburbanized early on. My identity was something other than purely Iranian or purely American. Self-exploration was the name of the game, I just needed to create the rules.
Iran wasn’t the site I wanted to explore. A person can be a place. I wanted to document how I felt, my version of my identity
without heavy value judgments of good, bad, better, authentic, or imposter. There was no cohesion to my early work that mashed up Persian miniatures and the early internet. I just enjoyed the thrill of emptying old artifacts of human gures, and adding early aughts gifs to them. I felt like the early internet was its own manuscript, programmed not painted. Also, I had been told by a relative that Islamic art was iconoclastic (anti-figural representation), but quickly learned this was a fallacy. Rather, some of the work (depending on intent and location) was aniconic. Visual depictions varied depending on space and context. Why not turn a
painted landscape into a beaded wonderland? Why not erase and insert? I wanted to nd a space for my queerness and also for my imagination.
I am inspired by your re-telling of Persian epic tales. Activating charged, meditative spaces to witness queer stories reveal themselves, framed by
FROM THE INFINITE GARDEN, EXH I BI TED AT HONOLULU MUSUEM OF ART, AND AT SHANGR I LA, A CENTER OF THE DOR I S DUKE FOUNDAT I ON.
a type of digital that is considered outdated. How do ancient spaces and objects hold immediate stories?
I’ve only recently come to terms with my diasporic identity. I used to feel a sternness to “carrying the torch of culture,” which was counterproductive. Just because I didn’t speak Farsi (uently and my squiggly Persian handwriting is at an elementary level didn’t mean that I couldn’t explore my own relationship with my culture. Instead of feeling a weight of obligation, I decided to lean into the weightlessness of play. What did I have at stake? I always live heavily in my daydreams, sometimes in a world parallel to reality. Because I’ve written stories consistently since elementary school, the act of looking has always been an act of insertion: given a set amount of objects, what is the story one can create? This helps me be a good liar (in concept, not execution). What is a storyteller but a really clever liar?
Even though I didn’t speak Farsi language con dently, I read many Persian texts (translated), poems, literature, and epics. The umbrella structure of these works always appealed to me. Meet the storyteller. Hear the rules of the game. Proceed to hear a variety of stories. It is a similar strategy to the Arabian Nights. We hear of a cruel king. We meet the storyteller Scheherazade. We learn the rules of the game: she will tell a story nightly to delay the king’s thirst for bloodshed, a cli hanger each night.
In Nizami’s Haft Peykar (The Seven Pavilions ), a king builds seven domes or pavilions for his seven lovers. Each corresponds to a di erent country and color. The king dons the color of the dome before visiting each lover, so she can tell him a moralistic tale. I decided to invent a story along those lines called The In nite Garden. My umbrella story was this: A king builds a garden for each of his lovers, one of (owers, another of fruit, and a third garden full of potions. Each day, the king visits one of his lovers, who regales him with a story.
My rst creative breakthrough — the rst artwork I made that received public attention in screenings, museums, and inclusion in a book on queer cinema — was a lm made while I was a student at UC Berkeley. I was shocked when I discovered Persian melodramas sexploitation lms from the ’60s and ’70s. I only knew of the Persian New Wave that existed post-Islamic Revolution, stark films about sick cows, poor farmers, and ailing children searching for shoes. Powerful lms, but not ones that carried the frivolity I liked so much about Classic Hollywood lms. The popular lms of the ’60s and ’70s (known as “ lmfarsi”) reminded me of 1930s Pre-Code lms from the US. They were sexy, they were sordid, and they were fun. I re-edited several lms starring Iranian pop icon Googoosh to make the lm Pop! The end result was a trans-romp set in the cabarets of Tehran. I painted over the scenes (literally on my laptop screen) and created my own world within a world.
I’d like to talk about The Infinite Garden more. This body of work was imagined during your time as an artist in residence at Shangri La in collaboration with curator Kristin Remington. The narrative serves as an umbrella of epics and stories of your creation. The tricks, the sounds, the phantasmagoric quality of the projections and sound beside hard sculpture. Can you speak more about this and its activation? What pulls you towards and into the digital to recite these particular tales?
Shangri La was very gracious about letting me exhibit my work alongside the artifacts that inspired me. I was intent on showing work that had been safely archived, but unseen by public eyes. I immediately knew I wanted to create a reason for the immense Qajar painted women to be exhibited. My sneaky plan was to include them in videos so it made sense to have them on display.
The In!nite Garden is a blessing and a curse. Because I’ve immersed myself in so much early internet ephemera, I
started to think about what an alternate archive would look like. Ever the storyteller, I knew just showing images of early websites didn’t have the sense of play I wanted to relay. A larger umbrella story would add a di erent kind of heft to the body of work, and would allow me to make a throughline from my ’90s childhood ephemera, and the cultural play that brought ease to inner identity crises.
I had my interests: early internet, VHSes, Persian myth, queerness, and storytelling. Thankfully, I found an object I knew could be a central force. The replace in the Playhouse [a guest suite located in a separate structure] at Shangri La had so many gures I knew I could isolate and animate. From there, I created a king and three lovers, each with an identi able garden and storytelling structure. Because the replace is installed in a location that is rarely open to the public (in a gorgeous museum that already requires some e ort to visit), I wanted to create access to it by presenting it through my work.
Much like I was inspired by a mix of paintings, tilework, and metal objects, I wanted to make a variety of work. Specifically, short films, vertically aligned single-channel looped videos (to mimic a manuscript page), VHS cases (an alternate version of a manuscript page), and a slideshow of partially fabricated website pages. They were all connected as ephemera related to this non-existent epic about a king and his three lovers. So, iterations of The In!nite Garden are just as in nite. I liked the idea of people learning about an epic based on the work it has inspired, rather than by a fully complete, real text. It’s all several steps removed. The slideshow portion allowed me to slow the process of animation down to the utter stillness of one slide at a time, sometimes two views of the same page (“scrolled down”), and sometimes just a GIF reduced to separate slides, such as an hourglass whose rotation is painfully and pleasurably slowed down.
In short, I saw art and artifacts that inspired me. I wanted to exhibit as much of it as I could. I also wanted to strengthen
my own work by contextualizing it as an alternate archive, alongside revered “serious” historical objects. Also, I wondered, “How could internet culture get the museum attention it deserved?” The objects from Shangri La’s archive, and the images from the early internet, needed to be given the honor of contemplation. A museum at its best allows both context and contemplation.
What does internet purity mean to you?
Internet purity is a complicated concept. So much hinges on the word purity, and I never want to sound facetious about the early internet elements I collect, composite, or re-imagine. There is a “purity” in knowing the impermanence of these collections. I made a few e-diaries in my pre-teen and teendom, and for me there was this beautifully private space where I could create a world of my own. That worldbuilding was quite simple: a font, a page name, a few
graphics, and a custom visitor counter at the bottom. That was all it took to feel a sense of public privacy. It feels innocent in retrospect for a number of reasons. For one, the idea of making the private public was far more humble. Meaning, a fan blog about the show Felicity wasn’t tied to the website creator as directly as content is now. Finstas aside, content production can be incredibly identity-based. “Look at what I made, buy the supplements I take, believe the joy from this documented trip #ad.” But a fan blog was just a fan blog. A MIDI choice on a website just meant you liked that song. But these early website pages were also monetized. For example, there were Amazon.com headers that gave the website owner a few fraction of cents if anyone redirected to Amazon from their page.
More than anything, depictions of grief were so earnest in early internet websites, it feels brutal. For my process, I click through the Internet Archive to ll thematic folders I keep on my desktop:
clouds, fairies, blue, glitter, memory are a few folder names. Every so often, I come across a website that is a tribute to someone’s death. The text is as heartbreaking as the imagery. Sometimes they are decorated with photos of the deceased. Sometimes they are customized composites: a baby photo in a pixelated “snow globe” with birth and death dates digitally engraved. Spelling errors are common on most old website personal pages I peruse. There’s this quick energy of “I love this, I feel this, I want to document this” that is captured. I would call my perusal a version of internet purity. I go into the search not knowing what I will nd or come across. There are broken links and corrupted image les during my digital tourism. What follows is a glimpse of someone else’s immediacy, now partially documented in a way that likely wasn’t imagined: incomplete but still emotionally impactful. Searching the word “heart” can lead to many early GIFs that sparkle and (oat. Or something unexpected might pop up: a 9/11 eagle in a heart charm GIF, or another dead baby in a heart frame with Winnie the Pooh in the corner. My reaction is pure — bruise for bruise, I feel a morsel of what someone else might have felt. Through my work, I hope to bridge the ache.
Read full interview at uxhawaii.com. Learn more about Sinaki at navidsinaki. com and on Instagram and TikTok at @ navidsinaki; and Shangri La at shangrilahawaii.org and on Instagram and TikTok at @hi_shangrila.
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Shaping Narratives
FOR BARBARA POPE, BOOKS ARE MORE THAN THE SPACES THEY !NHAB!T. THEY’RE RESERVO!RS OF L!V!NG CULTURES.
TEXT
BY ! MAGES BY
_ L ! SA YAMADA SON _ CHR ! S ROHRER
When I first meet the book designer Barbara Pope, on a summer afternoon at her Nu‘uanu studio, she is juggling so many projects she nearly cancels our interview. “I can barely remember my own name,” says Pope, who, along with a lean sta of three, are in the throes of assembling a literary arts exhibition for Festival of Paci c Arts and Culture, the world’s largest celebration of Paci c Islanders, held for the rst time in Hawai‘i this past June. In her queue, there’s also a bilingual English-Hawaiian book on the writings of Kamehameha dynasty advisor John Papa ʻ*ʻ#; a retrospective on the Ossipo jewel, Liljestrand House; a pocketbook compendium for Windward Community College on Hawaiian protocols; a catalog of 20th and 21st century shell lei by Ni ʻihau artisans.
“If you like,” she adds, “I’ll show you something else that’s fun.” Pope leads me to a back o)ce where she unfurls a sheet of opaque glassine paper, revealing a vibrant silkscreen reprint of the book jacket for the seminal 1950s instructional, Arts and Crafts of Hawaii, by anthropologist Te Rangi H#roa. Pope and her team took great pains to preserve the jacket’s original design by watercolorist Joseph Fehér, whose mid-century prints of
POPE HAS WORKED ON MORE THAN 150 T I TLES UNDER HER NAMESAKE COMPANY, BARBARA POPE DES I GNS, AS WELL AS THROUGH ‘A I P Ō HAKU PRESS, AN I NDEPENDENT PUBL I SHER SHE FOUNDED W I TH MA I LE MEYER I N THE 1990S.
Hawai‘i enticed travelers the world over to visit the islands, by scanning the one copy they could nd at Bishop Museum, then enlisting a Los Angeles-based silkscreener to reproduce its layers of blocky graphics. “It was really a tour de force to do this, and I’m incredibly proud of it,” she says.
Although her company, Barbara Pope Book Designs, is noted most times in a modest corner of a book cover or listed unobtrusively in an acknowledgements page, Pope’s work has outsized in(uence and has propped up the canon of Hawai‘i
and Paci c Island literature for more than four decades. Many of the texts that pass her desk are grounded in cultural tradition, the result of growing up in Maunawili in the 1960s surrounded by a tight-knit community rooted in agriculture. Pope remembers exchanging eggs, milk, beef, and produce with her neighbors, many of them kuleana families with deep connections to the land. “People engaged in a rural lifestyle seemed to have an innate responsibility for the land itself, caring for the watershed, the kalo, the ancient sites or stone walls,” she says.
“There was a really healthy exchange that I saw, with bene ts both to the environment and to the families themselves.”
In 1975, Pope left Hawai ʻi to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, before moving to New York to attend Columbia University a year later. Her rst o)cial foray into design came while she was teaching gure drawing at Columbia in 1983, when the opportunity of a lifetime came knocking at her door. It was Andrew Elston, who was then the press director of Bishop Museum’s publishing arm: Would she like to design a new
book with the family of Mary Kawena Pukui, whose Hawaiian Dictionary had long been — and remains today — the de nitive authority on Hawaiian language? Although she wasn’t formally trained in it, Pope always had an affinity for design and typography, and she immersed herself whenever she could in advancing that interest, whether perusing Columbia Library School’s rare book collection, taking summer classes in printing at Rochester Institute of Technology, or just “fooling around” with drawings of letterforms based on the Hawaiian language.
The book, as it turned out, would be ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs & Poetical Sayings, Pukui’s groundbreaking tome of Hawaiian aphorisms, quips, and idioms amassed over the course of her lifetime and compiled by her daughter, Patience “Pat” Namaka Wiggin Bacon. “It was like someone grabbed me by the scru of the neck and said you need to pay attention and learn something here,” recalls Pope, realizing the weight of the project. Putting the material into book form and keeping it in print, Pope says, helped to advance the accessibility of the vast amounts of cultural knowledge that,
for a long time, was cataloged primarily in one woman’s head.
Since ʻŌlelo Noʻ eau, Pope has worked on more than 150 titles under her namesake company, as well as through ‘Ai Pōhaku Press, an independent publisher she founded with Maile Meyer in the early 1990s, just as Congress was nally returning Kaho‘olawe to the people of Hawai‘i and halting the live re exercises, military trainings, and bombings that had devastated the island since the 1940s. Although protests by Native Hawaiian activists in 1976 thrust the military’s degradation of the island into the national spotlight,
MANY OF THE TEXTS THAT PASS POPE’S DESK ARE GROUNDED I N CULTURAL TRAD I T I ON, THE RESULT OF GROWI NG UP I N MAUNAW I L I I N THE 1960S SURROUNDED BY A COMMUN I TY ROOTED I N AGR I CULTURE.
there was little visibility of the bombings’ e ect on Kaho‘olawe’s terrain. After a yearslong e ort, amassing a drawerful of paperwork seeking permission to send photographers to document the island in its entirety, ‘Ai Pō haku published Kahoʻolawe: Nā Leo o Kanaloa. The 116page volume introduced the world to the beauty, cultural history, and tragedy of the uninhabited island with images by photographers Wayne Levin and Franco Salmoiraghi.
‘Ai Pōhaku, or “to eat stones,” is a reference to “Mele Ai Pohaku,” the famed mele
of resistance, also known as “Kaulana Na Pua,” written by Ellen Wright Prendergast in 1893, shortly after Queen Lili‘uokalani was deposed by the United States. The idea behind the press, explains Pope, “came from that awareness of what it took to get Kaho‘olawe out of the hands of the military … of what it takes to turn the tide on something that is clearly detrimental and destructive to the land.”
Even after reading thousands of pages of text over the years, Pope remains inspired as much by the words that ll her page layouts, as well as those who write
POPE ALWAYS HAD AN AFF I N I TY FOR DES I GN AND TYPOGRAPHY, AND SHE I MMERSED HERSELF WHENEVER SHE COULD I N ADVANC I NG THAT I NTEREST.
them. Two books she worked on—Kailua: In the Wisps of the Malanai Breeze for Kailua Historical Society and Life of the Land by Dana Naone Hall—in fact, gave her the courage to purchase 1,000 acres of commercial land that she will eventually turn over to the state for conservation, as well as to two nonpro ts that will utilize it for agricultural and educational purposes. “Books have transformative power,” she says. “They enable a community to come together to say for themselves, ‘This is who we are, this is where we come from, and this is what’s important here.’”
Makerspaces emerged from the maker movement of the mid-’90s, when computer programmers and amateur hackers converged at communal spaces to exchange ideas and share tools. Over the decades, the movement grew beyond its tech-oriented beginnings to include makers of every métier, from hobbyists to savants. Makerspaces, too, evolved to encompass a wider breadth of disciplines. Today, makers can tap into a diverse ecosystem of fabrication laboratories, communal artist studios, and small business incubators.
No matter the niche, though, their founding ethos remains. They foster a democratic sense of creativity by circumventing the barriers, such as money and access, that traditionally
The Art of Coworking
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COLLABORAT!ON AND !NGENU!TY, HONOLULU’S MAKERSPACES EMPOWER THE !SLANDS’ CREAT!VE SET.
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gatekeep industries. With Hawai‘i’s high cost of living and nite real estate, the necessities to support one’s craft—a studio space, proper equipment—are out of reach for many local creatives. Thankfully, the islands’ creative minds can nd their footing at Honolulu’s makerspaces, where “made for locals, by locals” takes on new meaning.
ourspace
The concept for Ourspace came together over game night. During a round of a questions-based card game, the prompt “What can we build together?” spurred an earnest conversation between founder Darren “Dyo” Yomogida and his friends. The group lamented the closing of Oahu Makerspace, a cooperative craft studio that offered access to equipment too costly for most individual artists. When it shuttered in 2019, dozens of makers were suddenly without a means to create. The loss was personal for Yomogida, a jeweler and watchmaker, as he knew the price of being an independent creative. “It’s hard to get stu here,” Yomogida says, referencing the high cost of transporting materials to Hawai‘i.
_ KATHLEEN WONG _ JOHN HOOK
MAKERSPACES I N HONOLULU PROV I DE ACCESS TO CREAT I VE COMMUN I TY AND TECHNICAL EQUIPMENT TO LOCAL MAKERS ACROSS D I SC I PL I NES, M I T I GAT I NG COSTS OF PRODUCT I ON AND RENT THAT OFTEN DR I VES ART I STS OFF -I SLAND.
It’s a challenge that can prevent artists from staying in Hawai‘i, adds Nina Faye Lin, Ourspace’s interim executive director until February 2024. “I think it makes people a little bit more scrappy, more resourceful, with what they’re making and how they’re making it,” she says. “Or it causes them to move away.”
Launched in 2023 by Yomogida, Lin, and a crew of professional creatives, the nonprofit Ourspace—Hawai ʻ i’s first hybrid production and incubation studio— takes the traditional makerspace model and retools it for Hawai ʻi’s community of small businesses and burgeoning artists. Here, makers have access to a host of
machinery and equipment on which they can experiment with product design and branding, without the cost of outsourcing production: a desktop CNC mill for 3D printing prototypes, laser cutters and engravers to design product branding, a large plotter and wide-format printer for art prints and wall vinyls. (Ourspace regularly supplies wall vinyls for art exhibitions at Kaio Space in Chinatown; merchandise for CreativeMornings Honolulu, a monthly breakfast series for the creative community; and signage for local design studio Marlowe Furnishings.)
To empower makers with a DIY sensibility, the nonpro t also o ers oneon-one training on its production software and equipment. Community manager Lauren Hana Chai, an artist who originally came to Ourspace as a client in need of art prints and stickers, is now helping to further shape this community-oriented approach, which includes a creative exchange program aimed at increasing access for creatives across income levels, allowing makers to o er skills and services in exchange for use of the space.
In 2023, Ourspace left its temporary site in Kakaʻako’s Entrepreneurs Sandbox in search of a permanent and more spacious venue, where it will expand its services to include a photo studio and individual workspaces. For now, Yomogida stores some of the machines in his studio at Fishcake, bringing members together and
publicizing Ourspace’s services through workshops and events around town.
fishcake
Maura Fujihira and Akemi Rogers rst opened Fishcake as a furniture showroom and gallery in 2007, gradually expanding it into a platform for creatives ranging from makers of home decor and jewelry to tattoo artists and hair stylists. “We always had the art components because we really like working with local artists and incorporating art into any living space,” Fujihira says. “Living with art in parentheses.”
In keeping with this ethos, Fishcake has evolved beyond its retail origins in recent years, starting with the culinary incubator space Fishcafé. The idea took shape post-pandemic, when former tenant BoxJelly and its accompanying café, Try Coffee, moved to their own location. Seeing its potential, Fujihira chose to continue operating the café on site and expand it into a test kitchen for micro food businesses.
Fishcafé’s rotating cast of chefs and bakers run the gamut of goods in Hawai ʻi’s foodie scene, from vegan sushi by Honobono to upscale local cuisine from C4 Table. Here, maverick restaurateurs are a orded a testing ground for dishes and a low-cost way to build clientele. The concept has proven successful for many a Fishcafé maker: Bread Service, a smallbatch artisanal bakery that began vending
at Fishcafé in early 2024, now sells out of several pop-up locations, including Try Co ee at Ward and Howzit Brewing in Kakaʻako.
At the other end of the Fishcake showroom is Fishschool, an art and craft education space and ceramic studio led by creatives. In 2020, Fishcake was donated a kiln by its neighbor, designer Andrew Mau. Ceramicist Jun Funahashi began teaching ceramics courses in the space and enlisted fellow artist Dane Nakama to o er instruction in drawing and painting. Studio director Joy Sanchez recalls that in Fishschool’s infancy, its teaching space was just a room with plastic tables and tiny buckets of glaze, hosting classes just three times a month. Now, Fishschool has 30 teachers on its roster who lead up to 15 classes a month. The studio is also home to independent ceramicists who take advantage of Fishschool’s kiln and pottery wheel.
In true makerspace fashion, members are encouraged to work alongside each other. “I see it as a community space more than an education space,” Sanchez says. “I want people to know that they can come here, and it’s safe to mess up, to learn.”
honolulu print0akers
Operating out of an unassuming space in Chinatown is Honolulu Printmakers, one of the oldest community print shops in the country. For nearly a century, the organization has nurtured a community of
emerging and seasoned creatives, including some of Hawai‘i’s most notable artists. Its founding members include former Honolulu Museum of Art director John Kelly and French muralist Jean Charlot, and artists Pegge Hopper and Masami Teraoka are among its long-time supporters. “We’re deeply enmeshed in the community in a very signi cant way for lots of people, not just the printmaking artists, which is a very niche community,” says executive director Denise Karabinus.
The studio’s lithography machine, screen printing equipment, and three large
etching presses — steel behemoths weighing approximately 2,000 pounds — service a yearly membership of 140 printmakers. On any given day, you’ll see a handful of printmakers perfecting their etchings or searching for the perfect shade of ink. The studio is entirely self-run by its members.
“Especially in the small spaces we all live in, nobody can really a ord—or has the space for—a printmaking press,” Karabinus says.
“It’s like joining a gym, but for artists. You come in and you nd all these people there who are ready to encourage you and support you.”
“ I T’S L I KE JO I N I NG A GYM, BUT FOR ART I STS,” HONOLULU PR I NTMAKERS EXECUT I VE D I RECTOR DEN I SE KARAB I NUS SAYS. “YOU COME I N AND YOU F I ND ALL THESE PEOPLE THERE WHO ARE READY TO ENCOURAGE YOU AND SUPPORT YOU.”
The studio also hosts public classes in mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock printing), Native Hawaiian kapa making, and more. Six exhibitions are hosted in the space each year, including the organization’s renowned annual juried exhibition. Winning artists receive prize money or purchase recommendations for the Art in Public Places collection of the Hawai ʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, a “catalyst to keep moving their art forward,” Karabinus says. “You’re really a part of something much bigger when you’re a Honolulu printmaker.”
“
is the product of a colonized paradigm. We refuse this loneliness and choose to be Aloha ‘ Ā ina. ” — ‘Ihilani Lasconia
Lens Lan
FLUX _ FEATURE
ON THE RELAT!ONSH!P BETWEEN TEXT AND !MAGE !N THE WORK OF KAPULAN! LANDGRAF
guage
TEXT BY
ARTWORKS COURTESY OF PORTRA I TS BY
_ DREW KAHU‘ &I NA BRODER I CK AND R I CHARD HAMASAK I
_ KAPULAN I LANDGRAF
_ MARK KUSH I M I
When the artist Kapulani Landgraf was ve years old, she acquired her rst camera, a secondhand Kodak Hawkeye from St. Ann’s Carnival Country Store, for 25 cents. As a young child, from Pū‘ahu‘ula, K,ne‘ohe, O‘ahu, she accompanied her mother Kahulumanu Landgraf, a Department of Education resource teacher, to the photography lab at Hale ‘Iolani at Windward Community College. In high school at Kamehameha Schools Kap , lama, Kapu enrolled in photography classes and worked on the yearbook, Ka Naʻ i Aupuni, with Kumu K#hei de Silva; then, as an undergraduate at WCC, she immersed herself in the world of black-and-white photography. It was the spring of 1985. Under the guidance of Mark Hamasaki, the photographer, typographer, and creative, and later his older brother, poet Richard Hamasaki, Kapu developed a nuanced and multilayered approach to her images at a time when there were very few published women photographers in Hawai ʻi and even fewer who were Native Hawaiian.
No matter the nal form, be it a single silver gelatin print, extended photographic essay, or multipart installation, Kapu, 58, remains intimately connected to process through a direct relationship with materials and histories. “Usually it comes all at once, when there is a need,” she said during a recent face-to-face at Hale P,lanakila, the humanities department at WCC, in the same o) ce that Mark worked in during his years as an educator. “I remember being a young Hawaiian photographer and having to escort this established white American woman photographer, Linda Connor, during her photo trip to Hawai ʻi,” Kapu recalled. “I was supposed to take her to all these sacred places so that she could teach me how to make images in my own
home,” she continued. “I guess in some ways because of this early experience, for me it’s always been about making work that counters the visitor photographers who come to Hawai ʻi to capture beautiful scenes.”
Kapu’s photo collages produced during the 1990s critically engage with issues of US occupation, cultural erasure, environmental degradation, and Native Hawaiian rights, to name a few. Film negatives are scratched with metal awls and compass points, gelatin silver prints with rotary tools producing distinct marks — a style emerges. When asked why she manipulates pristine negatives and prints during the production of her work Kapu responded matter of factly, “Altering negatives and prints is like altering the land, it can never be undone.”
“The Hawaiian landscape is a document of cultural history” reads a short introduction that Kapu wrote for her 1993 photo series, ʻAi P&haku, where she goes on to state, “Resort, military, industrial, residential, and highway development ravages our ʻ,ina.” A century after the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by pro-America businessmen with the backing of the US military, Kapu began to meticulously research, rediscover, and document the signi cance of speci c heiau on the island of Oʻahu. For one particular image, beneath the Moana Surfrider hotel in Waik # k # , its eerie beach umbrellas, and oblivious sunbathers, Kapu painstakingly scratched with the sharp point of a drafting compass a partial story of place — a kind of counter-chant — scored directly into her 4x5
lm negative. Intentionally, if not ironically, her words carved into the sand are indelible: “THIS TEMPLE WAS LONG AGO DEMOLISHED, NOT A STONE BEING LEFT TO MARK THE SITE OF THE APUAKEHAU HEIAU.”
One of Kapu’s earliest book projects, Nā Wahi Pana O Koʻ olau Poko: Legendary Places of Koʻolau Poko, was published by the Kamakak ū okalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai ʻi in association with the University of Hawai ʻi Press in 1994.
“Altering negatives and prints is like altering the land, it can never be undone.”
kapula,i la,.g0a1
Championed by Native Hawaiian scholar, poet, and political activist Dr. HaunaniKay Trask (1949–2021), who at the time was also the founding director of Kamakakūokalani, the now out-of-print book features more than 80 black-andwhite photographs of wahi pana — sacrosanct places and sites pulsating with life — on the Windward side of Oʻahu. Each photograph was in turn accompanied by a description, excerpts from preexisting English language texts translated or rendered in Hawaiian by Fred Kalani Meinecke. In the introduction to Nā Wahi Pana O Koʻolau Poko, Haunani-Kay
Kapulani Landgraf, White Woman , 1994, reprinted and constructed 2018, gelatin silver collage on fiber-based paper. Collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Purchase, 2016 (2016-1-01).
Trask writes, “I was determined to have it as the inaugural volume in the Hawaiian Studies publication series.” Image and text, art and scholarship, both together, this would become a de ning characteristic of Kapu’s work in the years that followed.
Nearly a decade later, in 2003, Kapu released Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui, which reshaped the approach and format of her earlier publications. Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui was designed with black-and-white
photographs of Maui’s sacred places on the right page and Kapu’s original poems written speci cally for these same locations on the left page, ʻōlelo Hawai ʻi above and English below. Kapu’s texts and images demand patience and reverence of their reader. One of her most extraordinary projects, it is also one of her least engaged. In an attempt to change this, in 2025, Kapu will present a selection of her photographs and poems from Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui in the
United Arab Emirates as a participating artist in the Sharjah Biennial 16. Exhibiting these works more than 8,500 miles away from their source, documentation of Maui’s resilient land, sea, and sky will be given an international platform even as rampant construction plans continue to threaten the island’s sacred places, speci cally, the U.S. Air Force’s recent announcement of its intention to build additional telescopes on the slopes of Haleakal,.
Kapulani Landgraf, Ā puak ē hau Heiau , 1993, from the series ‘Ai P ō haku , hand-altered gelatin silver print on fiber-based paper. Art and Public Places Collection of the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.
Kapulani Landgraf, M ō kapu , 1994, from the book N ā Wahi Pana O Ko‘olau Poko: Legendary Places of Ko‘olau Poko (1994), published by the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i in association with the University of Hawai‘i Press.
Wanawana ka niho o ka l ! ʻū malu o M ! ui, lu ʻ u ka ʻōʻō ka wahine ʻ ai honua i ! Keonehe ʻ ehe ʻ e.
P ū liki ke ahi o M ! ui i ka lewa nu ʻ u,
ʻ a ʻ ole p ū ko ʻ a a ʻ ela ka uahi o Pele i ka pali Kamohoali ʻ i.
Huaka ʻ i ihola ʻ o Pelehonuamea i ke kai Ko ʻ olau, m !ʻ e ʻ ele ʻ o Pele i ke kai kapu o Kamohoali ʻ i.
The sun’s teeth become needles in the shadows of M ! ui, and Pele’s ʻōʻō pierces Keonehe ʻ ehe ʻ e. M ! ui embraces the sky with his fire, the Goddess refusing to disturb the cliffs of Kamohoali ʻ i. Pele, who gives birth to the reddish earth, flows like the ocean to Ko ʻ olau, but she is benumbed by Kamohoali ʻ i’s sacred seas.
Kapulani Landgraf, Pu‘u O M ā ui , 2003, from the book N ā Wahi Kapu o Maui (2003), published by ‘Ai P ō haku Press.
Image and text, art and scholarship, both together, are a defining characteristic of Landgraf’s work.
Founded in 1989, Pili,mo ʻo is the collective name for Mark and Kapu’s shared practice. Rooted in the particularities of place, the two have collaboratively documented transformations across the ahupuaʻa of Koʻolaupoko on the island of Oʻahu, including the water struggle of Wai,hole, the construction of Interstate H-3 in K,ne ʻohe, and the modernization of Kailua.
Consciously employing and subverting the formal language of early twentieth-century American landscape photography and land-surveying traditions, Pili , mo ʻo replaces sublime landscapes and mapped territories with their emotional responses to scenes of devastation—mountains of poured rubble. Ē Luku Wale Ē (2015), published by ʻAi Pōhaku Press, arguably Pili,mo ʻo’s most important e ort, contrasts stereotyped assumptions of photographic depictions
of Hawai ʻ i’s rural valleys — paradisiacal, serene, and untouched — all the while mourning what has been lost forever in the name of progress. A verse from the book’s kanikau, or lamentation chant, composed by Kapu, expresses Pili,mo ʻo’s grief:
Nui ka hewa ma Kukuiok!ne
hoʻopunipuni n! iʻ a me n! niho kīlou
Kanu n! pōhaku heiau o K!ne kūpilikiʻi i Punaluʻu kukui paʻi aʻa l!
Ke kūpaka nei ʻo Kahoe
kahe koko ke koʻa mokumoku o Loʻ e Hanehane n! kumupaʻa i m!ʻehaʻeha
olo e makena e ʻ uw! ana ē
Kau ʻeliʻeli kau mai kau ʻeliʻeli ē.
Extensive deceit at Kukuiok!ne
fishes with iron claws controlled fraudulently Heiau stones of K!ne lay buried
Punaluʻu’s kukui its rooted veins distressed
Kahoe tortured with grief torrents bleed upon Loʻe’s broken coral
Excruciating pain of the ancients weeps wails roils
Digging turning over revealed.
TOP
Installation view. Pili ā mo‘o (Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf), Ē Luku Wale Ē , 2022, Hawai‘i Triennial 2022: Pacific Century – E Ho‘omau no Moananui ā kea , curated by Drew Kahu‘ ā ina Broderick, Miwako Tezuka, and Melissa Chiu, Capitol Modern: The Hawai‘i State Art Museum.
BOTTOM
Pili ā mo‘o, ‘ENA‘ENA N Ā IMU ‘Ā HULI‘U O HO‘OLEINA‘IWA 9.10.89 HO‘OLEINA‘IWA , 1997, from the book Ē Luku Wale Ē (2015), published by ‘Ai P ō haku Press.
In the early 2000s, Kapu’s work began to evoke the color red, carrying with it additional layers of cultural, political, and spiritual signi cance. “Red is koko. Red is revolutionary,” Kapu explained. “Red is a vital part of our Kūʻ! aesthetics.” In a seven-panel piece from 2014, made for an exhibition curated by brothers Hamasaki celebrating the life and legacy of late poet Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, Kapu takes inspiration from the poem, “washing windows,” published posthumously as part of the collection “Down on the Sidewalk in Waikiki (1972–73)” included in Westlake Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947–1984). The normally silver-colored ,holehole used as o erings to the gods are now stained red and staked to the surfaces of glass, steel, and concrete. Below the towering skyscrapers with no end in sight lay a sea of tourists completely disconnected from the reality of living in Hawai ʻi.
washing windows dirty janitor sweats clean tourist asks “how do you get . . .?” before he’s finished tell him
EAT SHIT!
Kapu was introduced to Westlake’s work along with other Native Hawaiian poets like Haunani-Kay Trask, Dana Naone Hall, ʻ*maikalani Kal,hele, and Joe Balaz in 1987 while enrolled in a course now titled Ethnic Literature of Hawai ʻi at the University of Hawai ʻi at M,noa. Going forward poetry would play an important role in Kapu’s practice.
Kapulani Landgraf, Lehu ‘ula no lehu pele , 2014, gelatin silver collage on fiber-based paper, Down on the Sidewalk in Waik ī k ī : The Westlake Art Invitational (2014), curated by Richard and Mark Hamasaki, Gallery
‘Iolani, Windward Community College.
Working primarily with photography and poetry across the 1990s, during the early 2000s Kapu began to move into the realm of installation art. Her contribution to Nā Maka Hou: New Visions – Contemporary Native Hawaiian Art (2001), the rst and last large-scale group exhibition of Native Hawaiian art to be presented by the Honolulu Museum of Art, was a life-size gure, reminiscent of ki ʻi and k,ʻai, formed of photographs and poems on paper bound in pulled kapa, standing atop a bed of dark cinder, surrounded — if not menacingly guarded — by glistening, razor sharp ulua shing hooks suspended from above. Kapu titled the installation Make I Ke Kai Hohonu (2000). In lieu of an artist statement she provided audiences with a poem, “For He Who Wears the Sea like a Malo,” written by Richard, in memory of his friend and mentor Wayne Kaumualii Westlake.
. . . For he who wears the sea like a malo, gathers about him infinite inspiration, as we continue a journey within, that empties the heart of sorrow.
Kapulani Landgraf, Make I Ke Kai Hohonu 2000, gelatin silver prints, pulled kapa, fishing hooks, cinder, N ā Maka Hou: New Visions – Contemporary Native Hawaiian Art (2001), The Honolulu Academy of Arts (now Honolulu Museum of Art).
Portrait of Haunani-Kay Trask. Kapulani
Landgraf, ‘Au‘a , 2019, Honolulu Biennial 2019: To Make Wrong / Right / Now , curated by Nina Tonga, Honolulu Museum of Art.
Kapu’s most recent exhibition, which was on view through September 2024 at the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an updated con guration of her monumental photo installation, ʻAuʻ a originally presented as part of the Honolulu Biennial 2019: To Make Wrong / Right / Now curated by scholar of contemporary Paci c art Nina Tonga. The work consists of photographic portraits of 108 K,naka ʻ-iwi community leaders willing to be adorned publicly with a declaration of loyalty: Ten words repeated across their faces, in repetition, a concrete poem manifesting and articulating solidarity and resistance beginning with “we” and resonating line after line: “WE ARE NOT AMERICAN HE HAWAII AU MAU A MAU.”
ʻAuʻ a is a reverberation of HaunaniKay Trask’s passionate and now historic speech delivered to thousands gathered on the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace during the 1993 centennial observances of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. “We are not American,” was her refrain, a fearless assertion in opposition to ongoing U.S. occupation and in steadfast support of Native Hawaiian self-determination. In acknowledgement of Hawai ʻi’s stalwart ʻ-iwi leaders, Kapu’s work unites di erent families, generations, and islands, alongside one another, forming a great shoal of ʻ au ʻ a — reminding the l,hui to hold fast and refuse to be caught.
When we think of ʻ-iwi leaders, those who have made a di erence in our lives, it is often the w,hine — sisters, aunties, nieces, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and so on — that
come to mind. One of Kapu’s most cherished pieces is a tribute to her late mother, Kahulumanu (1937–2009). To mourn and honor her passing, Kapu made an ʻahu ʻula. In lieu of feathers she fashioned her cloak from photographs — printed, cut out, threaded, and knotted together.
“When you wear an ʻahu ʻula, physically and metaphorically, you surround yourself with your ancestors. For me at that time it was my mom,” Kapu shared. “I had Mark photograph my eyes (both right and left). Then I selected a photograph of my mom, printed multiples of my eyes and of my mom on ber paper, and dry-mounted them together (my eyes on front, my mom on back).” Surrounding every one of Kapu’s eyes are the words of a kanikau she wrote for her mother, reduplicated and intensi ed. Because the work is backed and framed, only the artist’s eyes are visible to viewers. Out of sight, her mother’s likeness remains protected behind Kapu’s own eyes. The multilayered meanings of Kapulani Landgraf’s texts and images are not for everyone. And like Hawai ʻi nei, they shouldn’t be.
authors’ state0ent of relationalit1
Drew Broderick: As a young teenager with authority issues I enrolled in Kapulani Landgraf’s class, Introduction to Black and White Photography, at Windward Community College at the insistence of my mother, Maile Meyer. Through my mom, I met Kapu, through Kapu, Mark, and through Mark, Richard. Twenty years later, I continue to collaborate closely with the four of them. Most recently, the five of us had the opportunity to work together on the Hawai‘i Triennial 2022: Pacific Century – E Ho‘omau no Moananuiākea
Richard Hamasaki: My brother, photographer Mark Hamasaki, introduced me to Kapulani Landgraf in the mid-1980s. We’ve been friends since and have collaborated on a number of projects over the years. After nearly 40 years — we three live only a few minutes from one another — there’s much trust and many mutual friendships, both living and not living. It’s exciting that Kapu has returned to Windward Community College as a tenured professor, photography teacher, and Gallery ‘Iolani curator. Her students, colleagues, and our community at large are incredibly fortunate to have such a dedicated artist, educator, and kia‘i aloha ‘āina at WCC where she first set foot on campus with her Kodak camera accompanied by her artist mother Kahulumanu when Kapu was only 5-years-old.
Kapulani Landgraf, Kahulumanu , 2011, gelatin silver collage on fiber-based paper. Collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Gift of The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, 2011, and purchased with funds given by the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation (TCM.2002.17).
Archive of Pilina
TEXT BY ! MAGES BY
H ! LAN ! LASCON ! A AND D. KAUW ! LA MAH !
CHR ! S ROHRER
RESEARCH, K
THROUGH H!STOR!CAL ARCH!VES AND N2PEPA
ĀNAKA VO!CES TRACE NARRAT!VE GENERAT!ONAL MAPS THAT T!GHTEN THREADS OF SOL!DAR!TY W!TH PALEST!N!ANS.
Ua ala kue mai la na kanaka o Gasa.” Gazans Arose to the Fragrant Path of Resistance.
A simple phrase, nestled in the naʻau of an article published on the nal page of the June 17, 1892 issue of Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, interprets the story of Alexander the Great into ʻōlelo Hawai‘i. It may seem odd for Kō Hawai ʻi Pae ʻĀina, a nation constellated in the middle of the ocean, to be studying, translating, and then publishing the story of Alexander the Great during the late 19th century. However, K,naka Maoli and writers in Hawaiian language archives were attuned to stories from around the world and our kupuna imprinted our genealogy in their public archive as a means to contest, contextualize, collaborate, radicalize, organize, and share ancestral stories while remaining active historians documenting the experiences of our own people.
In tumultuous times, especially around the time of the illegal overthrow, our kupuna turned to our own mo‘olelo for solutions while also reading stories of liberationist struggles from around the world. This archive of pilina bundles K,naka Maoli genealogies of liberation to global genealogies of liberation like bundles of pili grass atop a house.
1839
In ʻōlelo Hawai ʻi archives, stories about Palestine are evoked by names such as Palekekine, Palesetina, Palestina, Palestine, Gaza, Gasa, Ierusalema, and Tel Aviv, among other names. The introduction of new religion also introduced reading and writing to Hawai‘i, and from that, the name Palesetina to Hawai ʻi. A series of maps guarded by Hawaiian Mission Houses in Honolulu detailing Palesetina were primarily carved by a K,naka Maoli cartographer named Kunui
onto woodblock and imprinted onto large archival paper at Lahainaluna. Kunui’s carvings of Palesetina began in 1839 and ended in 1843, a year many K,naka Maoli hold as signi cant because it was the rst celebration of L, Hoʻihoʻi Ea.
An assembly of articles mentioning Palesetina appear in nūpepa, Hawaiian language newspapers, from the time of the rst publication in Hawai‘i in 1834 in Ka Lama Hawaii until the late issues Ka Hoku Hawaii in 1948, which was the last nūpepa in circulation for a stint of 30 years. Many of these stories are digitized and some are not, but all of them are protected in Hawai‘i archives. Just over a century of writing details the intimacy of daily life, draws connection between ali ʻi and Palesetina, charts our connection to another, and is concluded by recollections of The Nakba. The Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near-total destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 through mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. While the phrase Nakba is not interpreted into ʻōlelo Hawai ʻi, it is recounted in multiple articles of Ka Hoku Hawaii.
A constellation of genealogy and connection are o ered over that century of literature surrounding Palesetina through nūpepa, links between their land, cultural practices, mourning practices, dance, song, and food. Of signi cance to K,naka Maoli is an invitation by John L. Nailiili to compose new mele while o ering mele that have been passed down in ʻohana. On October 21, 1845 in Ka Elele, Nailiili composed a kanikau for Timoteo Ha‘alilio, an ali ʻi held in high regard who brought formal recognition to Hawai‘i as a sovereign nation-state by the West. This kanikau, or lamentation chant, also serves as a form of performance cartography, intimating site-speci c and familial connections to the places associated with the person for whom it was composed. Traditional names for rains, suns, and famed locales throughout Hawai‘i are presented, followed by the sharing of a signi cant passage: “Aloha o Lilinoe ka wahine noho mauna / Aloha ka nahele o Opuola / Aloha na
waipuna a me na kio wai o Palesetina,” interpreted as “Aloha to Lilinoe who resides and rules the mountain [Mauna a Wakea] / Aloha to the forest groves of Opuola [in Koolau, Maui] / Aloha to the multitudes of springs and pools of water of Palesetina.”
Other accounts published in Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, between March 31, 1866 and October 13, 1866, account for 19 installments of daily life in Palesetina to educate ko Hawai‘i Pae ‘Āina about the aina they’d been reading about for decades. Descriptions and translations of famed mountains, valleys, and rivers in Palesetina are so fertile that nupepa articles over(ow with (owering descriptions of the lands that raise Palestinians. Some examples include mauna Karemela (Mount Carmel), Iapa (Ja a), Awawa o Sarona (Valley of Sharon), muliwai o Kisona (Kishon River), and mauna Tabora (Mount Tabor). A favorite installment describes the abundance of laau oliva (olives trees), the way these olives grow, the heights the trees reach, and Mauna o Oliveta (Mount Olivet). Over two centuries later, the symbolism of the laau oliva resonates and echoes a haunting ancestral rhythm.
In Ke Aloha Aina, another favorite nupepa, many passages about Palesetina are published. Ke Aloha Aina’s original head editor was Iosepa Kahooluhi Nawahiokalaniopuu, sometimes referred to simply as Joseph Nawahi. At the time of Nawahi’s passing, Emma Aima Nawahi, his partner in aloha ‘,ina, took over the nupepa and continued to print revolutionary thought. The Nawahi ohana was radical amongst K,naka Maoli in the late 19th and early 20th century for being explicitly anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist through aloha ‘,ina. This atikala highlights relationships between moolelo and place where multitudes gathered to incite change by having a deep relationship to the land. The highlighted portion below weaves in these sentiments in relation to Palesetina. Here is that passage followed by an interpretation: “oia hoi ka aina o Palesetina, oia ka aina o ka meli a me ka waiu, e kahe ana, he aina i piha i na mea e pomaikai ai na kanaka oia mau aina” interpreted to read “that is the land
of Palesetina, the land where the honey and milk (ow, abundant with blessings for Palestinians.” It can be used in a similar context to revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani who states, “The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.” Remembering, unearthing, and archiving these connections can sustain our ʻono for the milk and honey of liberation that will be the sweetest when they are from a Free Palesetina.
Kō Hawai ʻi Pae ʻĀina, a thriving constitutional monarchy in the 19th century, had ali ʻi and makaʻ,inana who engaged with nations all across the planet while remaining steadfast in defending our culture and home. This dynamic internationalism was intentionally orchestrated by K,naka Maoli and is evidenced in innumerable articles in Hawaiian language newspapers which fasten our connection to each other while simultaneously critiquing colonialists and colonialism. Amongst the many nations that Hawai ʻi had developed a web of relationships with is Palesetina. Diplomacy between Hawai ʻi and Palesetina was forged through mutual recognition, respect, culture, and adoration for each other’s homeland, while Western diplomacy is a multigenerational beneficiary of systemic violence through dominance, extraction, and Western forms of sovereign recognition.—D. Kauwila Mahi
2024
The events that transpired on October 7, 2023 have garnered unprecedented attention for Palesetina. However, Hawai ʻi has a centuries-long connection to that beloved and storied land. Today, more than ever, we are unearthing connections as colonies experiencing displacement and occupation by imperial forces. We do not con(ate the occupation of Hawai ʻi with the occupation of Palesetina; the violences inflicted by our colonizers are distinct. Hawai ʻi experiences slow violence through occupation: fuel bleeding into the veins of our aquifers, military occupation of sacred land, continued land dispossession, continued land desecration, mass exodus of our homeland,
continued prostitution of our culture, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and the consistent threat of violence upon our land and people. Palesetina su ers the violences of occupation through land dispossession as well as continued land desecration; however, the genocidal campaigns of their occupier have erased whole genealogies from the earth in perpetuity, maimed and murdered women, children, and men, starved people who are seeking refuge, ethnic cleansing, made rubble of generational homes through bombs, turned ancestral food systems into ash, and destroyed their national archive. Put plainly, their colonizer is attempting to erase evidence of Palestinian existence. We have another commonality, our deep love and a ection for our lands, so much so that we are committed to protecting her by any means necessary, which sometimes emerges as Aloha ʻĀina in Hawai ʻi and sometimes emerges as Intifada in Palesetina.
The world is di erent than it was centuries ago and we continue to fasten our relationship tighter to each other, especially in these dire times. We are bound by the same cause — the struggle for liberation. Our words do not serve as a comprehensive history of connection between Hawai‘i and Palesetina, rather, we ulana, interweaving both our histories into a liberated future woven as a ne mat in the present to hold ceremony for those willing jump o the cli of the colonial paradigm and dive into oceans of anti-colonial consciousness. As we submerge in this ocean we have a kuleana to emerge. While we are rising to the surface, the moon will playfully tug upon the ocean, we swim nearer the surface through our privileged responsibility of political education. As we emerge, we breathe in a constellation of deep love and struggle.
We as K,naka Maoli striving for ea, emergent sovereignty, cannot have a politic constrained exclusively to our island home. To think that we could ever achieve liberation in isolation is the product of a colonized paradigm. We refuse this loneliness and choose to be Aloha ʻĀina. An Aloha ʻĀina, a steadfast lover of land and protector of Hawai‘i, must also stand alongside other Indigenous peoples who
love their homeland just as we do ours. This also means standing in solidarity with our Black kin who have been forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands. We are not only ghting for a decolonial world, but an anti-racist one as well. One that is intolerant of anti-Blackness and anti-indigeneity. A world that holds the possibility for folks to make and remake connections to place.
The archive of pilina that K,naka Maoli and Palestinians have to one another remains steadfast. Despite our respective ongoing battles against colonialism, we continue to recognize and celebrate each other as indigenous peoples and ght for collective freedom. One of the strongest examples of this relationship can be witnessed through Palestinian solidarity. In July 2019, a Palestinian delegation showed up in support of K,naka Maoli protesting the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Maunakea. On the Ala Hulu Kūpuna where respected elders blocked the access road to the summit, the Palestinian (ag was raised among other national (ags in solidarity with K,naka Maoli. In Palesetina, Palestinians showed support for Maunakea by holding up signs and creating a mural in support of our struggle expanding our archive of pilina. Despite su ering violent regimes because of their occupation, Palestinians fastened our solidarity with one another. This unwavering support under dire circumstances should compel us as K,naka Maoli to reciprocate that aloha and commit to speaking out against genocide. As colonialism seeks to erase us, we add to our archive a history of resistance so that we will always remember that we have stood for one another.
Even within our educational institutions, Palesetina has been a topic of conversation for generations. University of Hawai ʻi professors such as the late kumu Haunani-Kay Trask, Ibrahim Aoude, Cynthia Franklin, Heoli Osorio, and Dean Saranillio have taught about the occupation of Palestine and its connection to movements for Hawaiian sovereignty. Outside of the academy, activists and organizers from Hawai ʻi have gone on exchanges to Palesetina through the Palestinian Youth Movement to strengthen our pilina and gain organizing
strategies. Political organizations and activist groups such as Af3irm Hawai ʻi, Hawai ʻi for Palestine, and Women’s Voices Women Speak have been organizing around educating people about what is happening in Palestine and holding actions protesting Zionism and the atrocities carried out by the Israeli Occupying Forces.
Another organization in particular has been critical to re-strengthening the relationship between Hawai‘i and Palestinians. Created in 2013 by professor Cynthia Franklin, Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine (SFJP@UH) is centered on ghting for a campus where the history of Palestine is able to be taught and discussed. Recently, SFJP@UH has called for the University of Hawai ʻi to divest from its ties to Israel. For years, SFJP@UH has brought out Palestinian artists, activists, and scholars to Hawai‘i to share their work with students, faculty, and community members. These exchanges include educational talks, art exhibitions, visiting historical sites, and sharing countless meals with one another. These events have been absolutely crucial to fortifying our archive of relation and strengthening solidarity between Hawai‘i and Palestinians.
All of these efforts are part of a mo‘okūʻauhau of consciousness that brings us closer together. Through education, resistance, and celebration we deepen and strengthen our commitment to one another as well as the ʻ,ina who raised us. Hawai ʻi continues to rise up against American imperialism in our homeland while standing with Palesetina. These moments of world-making carry us through the pain of living under occupation. There is deep joy and love in building this archive of resistance. It is because of this archive and longstanding memory that we have the ability to create opportunities to feel what it would be like to live freely, even just for a moment.—‘Ihilani Lasconia
Under the ever-impending doom and gloom created by imperialist forces, it can feel impossible to envision a reality not dominated by the West. For some, it is easier to imagine the end of the world due to
climate catastrophe than to confront or contest colonization. One hallmark of capitalism, the system that created colonialism, is that it prevents us from dreaming and carving a way out of the current suppressive system. We are inscribing a k/new archive via photos on our phones as well as analog and digital cameras; enunciating poems on stages, in classrooms, in public; dropping banners as the settler-Amerikkkan government attempts to propagate and perpetuate the fallacy of their legitimacy; shifting consciousness through guerilla education in public; in street-art through gra)ti and wheatpaste; through screen printed art on our clothing; and through Aloha ʻĀina music.
A series of pieces by street artist Tonk connects The Nakba of Palesetina in 1948 to Ke K,huli Aupuni, the Overthrow in 1893 of the Hawaiian Monarchy and Moʻ#wahine Lili ʻuokalani. These pieces are part of the public archive we are establishing which mark dissent for the colony and signals of a ectionate-solidarity which unsettle the settler-state as well as the settler-within ourselves. We must prioritize pilina with those who are seeking an end to this cataclysmic structure. This relationship can be weaved by returning to and rebuilding an archive of pilina through solidarity. Everything was once k/new, remembering our pilina to one another before we experienced conquest is essential. We are extending the legacy of relations that our ali ʻi and kūpuna left for us to maintain. Between Hawai ʻi and Palesetina, there are two centuries of pilina and we intend to make 1,000 more. Memorializing these generations of connection o ers us a cultural foundation to stand upon — it is an ancestral wisdom. Nearly two centuries after the initial connection between Mauna a W,kea and Palesetina in nūpepa, our kupuna stood together once again. He wahi manaʻo k!ia no n, mamo a ka ʻ*, ka Mahi, me ka Palena. ʻAʻohe lua e like ai me ka ʻono a ka hani aʻo ka hulihia, we’d like to o er this knowledge to descendants of the ʻ*, the Mahi, and the Palena clans. There is no honey sweeter than the taste of liberation. We must remember that there was a time before colonization and there will surely be a time after it.
THESE H I STOR I CAL MAPS OF PALEST I NE AND THE SURROUND I NG REG I ON, PHOTOGRAPHED I N THE L I BRARY READ I NG ROOM AT THE HAWA II AN M I SS I ON HOUSES HISTORIC SITE AND ARCHIVES, WERE PRINTED I N A PR I NT I NG PRESS AT LAHA I NALUNA, MAU I , C I RCA 1842 43.
When Mari
TWO LAWYERS AND ACT!V!STS DEFTLY NAV!GATE THE V!C!SS!TUDES OF LOVE, MARR!AGE, AND COMMUN!TY
Met Chuck
TEXT BY I MAGES BY
_ M I TCHELL KUGA
_ M I CHELLE M I SH I NA
“OUR S!DE W!LL W!N BECAUSE WE HAVE THE LOVE. THE OTHER S!DE !S THE MARKET, EMP!RE, CAP!TAL!SM, PATR!ARCHY, RAC!SM, AND HOMOPHOB!A. !T !S NOT A CLUB FOR LOVERS, AND ! KNOW THAT ON ANY G!VEN DAY HALF THE STUDENTS ! AM TRY!NG TO TEACH LAW TO ARE CONCERNED PR!MAR!LY W!TH THE!R HEARTS. W!LL ! F!ND LOVE, W!LL !T LAST, WHO W!LL LOVE ME, DOES SHE LOVE ME, WHY DOESN’T HE LOVE ME ANYMORE, !F SHE LOVES ME WHY DO ! FEEL SO LONELY, SHOULD ! LEAVE. LOVERS !S WHAT WE ARE F!RST AND WHENEVER OUR ENG!NES H!T NEUTRAL. S!TT!NG ST!LL. THE THOUGHT RETURNS: OF LOVE.”
MAR! MATSUDA, “LOVE, CHANGE,” YALE JOURNAL OF LAW AND FEM!N!SM, 2005
On a drizzly afternoon in late May, Mari Matsuda and Charles Lawrence III greeted me on their enclosed l,nai, which sits in the shade of a hulking olive tree fronting their M, noa home. Warm and spry, they served an iced tea steeped with mint from Matsuda’s garden and a fresh loaf of sourdough baked by Lawrence, who friends know as Chuck. Their white American bulldog, a rescue named Aki, nuzzled my leg as construction workers pushed a wheelbarrow past us down a pathway lined by statues of the Buddha, the birdsong punctuated by the crank of an electric saw.
The recently retired couple was in the process of repairing their cottage, with the hopes of converting it into Matsuda’s art studio, and things that would eventually get stored there were stacked around us in boxes on the l,nai — stray instrument parts, an assortment of art supplies, and as Matsuda puts it, “books, books, books, books, books.”
Despite the familiarity of this tableau, Matsuda and Lawrence are not your typical kūpuna transitioning into retirement, a fact that made itself apparent within the rst ve minutes of our interview. For starters, when I told them a mutual
friend heard their house was on the FBI watchlist, Matsuda let out a sharp laugh. “Is it? I mean I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, her voice calm but resolute. “We had dinner last night with Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is a leading critical race theorist, and she has to travel with a bodyguard.”
The couple are themselves pioneering developers of critical race theory, which in the 1980s introduced the concept of race as a political construct baked into the historical and contemporary formation of American law. But ever since conservatives began framing critical race theory as a threat to students,
transforming the once niche academic field into a Fox News talking point, they’ve had to remove their contact information from the University of Hawai‘i website. “We would get hate mail,” said Matsuda, who made history as the rst tenured female Asian American law professor, during her stint at UCLA in the nineties. “It would come in an envelope with no return address. That’s the giveaway. But now it is not just email. People will show up on your doorstep, so we are much more cautious about who we’ll talk to than we were before.”
Matsuda, 68, and Lawrence, 81, are progressive activists, scholars and former law professors who have been married for 32 years. Since retiring from the University of Hawai’i William S. Richardson School of Law — Lawrence in 2021, Matsuda in 2022 — they’ve regularly received requests from journalists from media outlets like The New York Times, asking to lend their venerated legal voices to pressing issues in America’s latest culture wars. In the ’90s, they co-authored two books, We Won’t Go Back and Words That Wound, which made legal cases in support of a)rmative action and free speech on college campuses, both hot button issues that have cycled back, decades later, as front page news. “Most signi cantly, none of the problems we were trying to solve got solved,” Matsuda said. “And we literally wrote the book about it, so everyone is calling us.”
However, unlike most journalists, I didn’t come here to discuss their legal opinions on the student protests over Israel’s assault on Gaza unfolding at UCLA or the Supreme Court’s recent rejection of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. I came here, instead, to talk to the couple about love — how it functions as the bedrock of their relationship, their engagement with various communities in Hawai’i, and their lives since retiring.
Not that they see much distinction between politics and their lives. “All of our friendships, our personal lives, have been colored by the work,” said Lawrence,
who wore a black T-shirt printed with a green and red image of the Black power st, from an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. “Really, the work isn’t separate from the life.”
So what does retirement look like for people who’ve devoted their long and esteemed careers to advocating for social justice?
More relaxing, in some regards. In lieu of Lawrence’s least favorite parts about working in academia, like grading exams and attending faculty meetings, he takes Aki on daily ve-mile walks through the neighborhood. It’s his chance to listen to audiobooks of mostly ction, revisiting everything from classics, like Beloved and Anna Karenina , to buzzy contemporary novels like Bryan Washington’s Family Meal. A former jock, he also plays tennis twice a week with “two groups of old guys who are all younger than me,” he said, laughing. “It’s the one time where all the rest of the shit goes out of my head, because I’m just into it.”
Matsuda has been able to devote more time to maintaining her garden everyday, which is often where she goes to think. “A lot of my writing took place in my head while I was pulling weeds,” she said. Before I left, she walked me through a tall lush patch in the front of their home teeming with Portuguese cabbage, herbs, mustard greens, and kalo, and handed me two green eggplants. Between an assortment of fruit trees, a composting and water catchment system, and their three chickens (they named their rst set Nina, Ella, and Sarah, after their favorite jazz vocalists), Matsuda dreams of one day becoming fully sustainable.
In conversation, the two are forthcoming and open and when prompted, speak fondly of another, by turns gushing and matter-of-fact. “I always knew, from pretty early on, that I was just totally in love with Mari and trusted her as a person,” said Lawrence. “Not just ’cause she was smarter than me, and not just because she’s a good person, but because
she really cares about me.” The fact of their relationship strikes the couple as both destined and miraculous, almost inevitable considering it emerged from a very small milieu of law professors of color who were challenging the white status quo of critical legal studies in the 1980s, but still beaming with the sparkle of wonder and gratitude. They’re also quick to note that it’s taken a lot of work.
“We had a couples therapist in D.C. for about six to eight years,” said Lawrence, “and fortunately she was good. She really helped us through a lot of hard stu . And it wasn’t that it was hard in the sense that our marriage was falling apart, but it was…”
“We had stressors,” Matsuda said. Since retiring, they’ve remained engaged on multiple fronts, cultivating new creative pursuits, and with it, new forms of community, while remaining steadfast in their commitments to advocating for social justice, curbing climate change, and demilitarization.
“They’ve been to any meaningful protest, at least that I’ve ever been to,” the poet, activist, and educator Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio told me. “They’re barometers in that way. Like, ’Am I doing the right thing? Well, Chuck and Mari showed up so I must be on the right track.’ They’re not just pillars in the community but these magnets that are pulling our compass in the right direction.”
Though she rst met them as a child, Osorio became closer to the couple when she started teaching at UH-M, noa in 2018 and was chosen by Lawrence to join his junior faculty seminar. For 12 years, he’d select around 10 new faculty members from di erent departments throughout the university, with an emphasis placed on K,naka Maoli, and host bi-weekly dinners at their home. It was a chance for young professors and scholars to not only discuss the papers they were working on but to share food and talk about their lives and dreams, and some of the di)culties they faced navigating the academy. These were issues Lawrence knew by heart, having taught at places like Stanford Law School,
in the ’80s, when he often felt isolated as one of the few Black people on sta He considers the students he mentored through the seminar to be family.
“It is kind of incredible that no senior Hawaiian faculty had taken this kind of kuleana as their own to really mentor young K , naka faculty, especially with their own understanding of how challenging it can be — not just to be hired into our institution but to survive our institution,” said Osorio. “And I can only guess that Chuck looked around and saw that there was this gap that he could ll. This speaks a lot to who Chuck and Mari are: when they see gaps that can be lled they do what they can to ll them.”
For Matsuda, art is the next frontier. In the beginning of 2021, she went into urgent care after noticing a sharp pain in her chest, and was later diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. By that fall, amidst chemotherapy treatments, she had enrolled in the MFA program at UH-M, noa (she is currently in full remission). “The cancer put me in this last chance frame of mind,” she said. “I had to face the fact that my life is nite, and if I have something I want to create it’s going to have to happen now, or it’s never going to happen.”
Despite long being interested in the arts, Matsuda said artistic pursuits once felt “indulgent” next to her legal work. “But I’ve come to see that the artwork is actually the same work,” she said. “You’re trying to connect on an emotional level around things that you care about, so that people are willing to join you in transformative acts.”
She’s capacious in her mediums, working with found objects and instruments constructed out of rescued parts (she recently made a Dobro but can’t nd an instructor on island to teach her
how to play it), metal sculpture, woodblock prints, and performance. In 2023, her rst solo show, Radical Wā hine of Honolulu, 1945 , exhibited at Aupuni Space, honored the lives of nine Asian and K , naka women, all working class progressives who radically shaped the history of labor organizing in Hawai‘i. A critic for Artforum described the show as “a shrine to the belief that art and politics are not separate.”
Lawrence has embarked on a creative project of a di erent sort: writing the story of his life. He recently completed a non-credited autobiographical writing class at UH-M, noa, and had written about six chapters when we spoke. Though he’s not sure if he’d like the book to get published yet, he’s approaching it as a valuable exercise in re(ection, while basking in the freedom of writing without footnotes.
“It feels good, when you don’t have a whole lot of time in front of you, to spend time looking at the time behind you, which you have a lot of,” said Matsuda, laughing.
“And trying to evaluate it and make it make sense to yourself and others — that’s a really interesting project.”
Matsuda likes to joke that if arranged marriages were still popular in the ’80s her parents would’ve set her up with someone like Lawrence. On the surface, an Okinawan girl born in Los Angeles and raised on O‘ahu, and a Black guy from New York 13 years her senior, was not an obvious match, except where it counted most: Both were raised by leftist, politically engaged parents who exempli ed a dogged orientation towards justice. Matsuda’s parents were civil rights
MATSUDA AND LAWRENCE ARE PROGRESS I VE ACT I V I STS, SCHOLARS AND FORMER LAW PROFESSORS WHO HAVE BEEN MARR I ED FOR 32 YEARS. THE COUPLE ARE THEMSELVES P I ONEER I NG DEVELOPERS OF CR I T I CAL RACE THEORY, WH I CH I N THE 1980S I NTRODUCED THE CONCEPT OF RACE AS A POL I T I CAL CONSTRUCT BAKED I NTO THE H I STOR I CAL AND CONTEMPORARY FORMAT I ON OF AMER I CAN LAW.
activists heavily involved in peace and labor movements in Hawai‘i and the continent, particularly as it related to demilitarizing Okinawa; Lawrence’s father was a politically engaged sociology professor and his mother, Margaret Morgan Lawrence, was the rst Black female psychoanalyst in the U.S. Despite growing up on opposite ends of the country, Matsuda and Lawrence traveled in similar political circles, and both of their parents knew W.E.B. Du Bois.
“We came up in a time when the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, really world-changing political formations needed the support of lawyers and intellectuals. And I always knew that’s what I wanted to do,” said Matsuda. “The slogan was ʻ serve the people.’”
Though Lawrence has no memory of it, Matsuda still remembers the rst time they met. She was a graduate student at Harvard Law School at the time, attending a conference for lawyers of color at the University of Pennsylvania, where Lawrence was invited to speak. She recalled writing in her journal that night, “Chuck Lawrence said X, Y and Z. He’s so smart.” Then she added a little carrot: “And cute!” They were both married to other people at the time, but would enter each other’s orbit a few years later, in 1987, as part of an intervention by lawyers of color at a di erent legal conference at UCLA, which many now consider the genesis of critical race theory. They were both single by then, and Matsuda, a plucky young law professor at UH-M,noa, was the one invited to speak this time. “The rst memory I have of Mari is the rst time I heard her speak, which just goes to show I didn’t fall in love with her body, it was her mind,” Lawrence said, laughing.
“You’re trying to connect on an emotional level around things that you care about, so that people are willing to join you in transformative acts.”
They started dating while teaching at Stanford Law School, and shortly after, moved to Washington D.C. together after accepting positions at the Georgetown University Law Center. They got married, had two kids, and co-authored two books. “When we were doing the book tour people would say, ‘How do you ever write a book together when you’re married? It’s just too much strain on the relationship,’” Lawrence recalled. “And I would say, ‘Well, it’s a lot easier than raising kids together.’”
“It almost became a break from that,” said Matsuda, “because parenting is the hardest job on the planet.”
With their kids still in high school, they moved to Hawai‘i in 2008, to be closer to Matsuda’s parents. Though she acknowledges that living in an integrated neighborhood in the D.C. area was the “best thing” for her family — “We felt so comfortable as a Black-Asian family,” she said — something always felt like it was missing. “I realize now I had a low-level depression the whole time I was away, because of not being able to see the mountains and the ocean. And not being able to count on aloha from other human beings.”
Through Matsuda, the first Native Hawaiian that Lawrence met was the late activist Haunani-Kay Trask, and “we loved each other,” he said. “She was totally into that correspondence with Black
consciousness. So when we came out here I was kind of immediately embraced by that part of the movement in Hawai’i, the sovereignty movement that recognizes the connection with anti-colonialism and anti-racism everywhere.”
Although the Covid pandemic has hampered the large gatherings they used to throw at their house, community remains the lifeblood of their activism and a core tenant of their marriage. “Part of what brought us close was our friends, our colleagues, people like Kimberlé [Crenshaw], who we’re still very close to,” said Lawrence. “That was how you survived. The people that you could really talk to, that you could count on and trust. The people who were willing to get out on the picket line with you. Even now, these things come up: Who can you count on if you take some risky play? Who’s going to be there when people come after you?”
Between Matsuda’s art community and the university activist community Lawrence fostered through his seminar, they are often the oldest ones in the room — a realization that sometimes surprises the couple, who tend to regard the young people in their lives as peers. Lawrence recalled one of his mentees inviting her father to a faculty seminar, and his shock when he discovered they were exactly the
same age. It’s a testament to how the couple approaches their role as kūpuna, with a wisdom that doesn’t preclude new ideas or experiences but instead acts as a portal to them. It’s an approach that’s also kept them young in their relationship. “I think I’m nally a grownup,” said Matsuda, when I asked if retirement feels like entering a new chapter of their marriage. “And I think that’s only recent.”
At various points throughout our conversation, say when he spoke about his daughter, or his grandparents, or the people in his seminar, or his wife, tears would bloom behind Lawrence’s eyes and hang on the precipice of his lashes, before eventually falling. I asked him where they come from, and he smiled.
“I don’t know whether it’s tears of joy but… it’s tears of recognition. I guess it’s usually just that I’m remembering, or someone has said something that moves me about how wonderfully human it is that I’ve been in this relationship, or even when I’m talking about these people who became my community,” he said. “I realize what a rich time it’s been for me that I can be in that kind of relationship with other human beings.”
“ It’s an attempt to find imagery that people haven’t seen before.
”
—
Colleen Kimura
Rocket’s Ascent
TEXT BY I MAGES BY
_ EUN I CA ESCALANTE _ NAN I WELCH KEL I ‘ I HO‘OMALU AND COURTESY OF M I CHAEL VOSSEN AND ROCKET AHUNA
For four months, last winter, a small Waik ! k ! hotel room functioned as the designer Rocket Ahuna’s makeshift atelier. On the fth- oor of Kaimana Beach Hotel, tables and a sewing machine had taken a couch’s place and the detritus of a nascent fashion house in production littered the space. “Sorry, it’s such a mess in here,” said Ahuna, stepping around scraps of aloha print fabric and poster boards with Polaroids of local models. Ahuna’s lithe six-foot frame was styled in thrifted jorts and a blue palaka top of his own creation, feminized with coquette flairs of a Peter Pan collar and subdued pu$ sleeves. Under an aloha print bucket hat tumbled a mass of long wavy hair that he deftly ties into a low bun in moments of concentration. His ensemble telegraphed a keen understanding of trends and how to make them his own, an instinct re ected in the half- nished garments around the room. Tucked into a corner, a dress featured a sand-hued bodice spangled with dozens of hand stitched puka shells, a sophisticated take on Waik!k! ’s famous shoreline. The dramatic silhouette — cinched waist, pannier hips — revealed an eye for contemporizing the historical, a characteristic quickly becoming among Ahuna’s signatures.
ROCKET AHUNA SKIRTS THE BOUNDARIES OF ALOHA WEAR WITH HIS BUZZY, EPONYMOUS FASHION LABEL.
The frenzied state of the place was understandable. In four days, Ahuna would present the rst ready-to-wear collection of his edgling eponymous brand. “This collection is the learning process. Everything has been a new experience,” he said, energetically, despite an oncoming weariness, no doubt a consequence of the last few months of work. “I really love putting myself in uncomfortable learning places because it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve never felt this before. I’m going to gure it out.’”
That following Saturday, the show’s crowd of invite-only guests trickled into the hotel’s second-floor ballroom,
greeted by a host in a see-through holok& designed by Ahuna. Everyone was clad in bold, maximalist aloha wear prints, a panoply of island-style Sunday’s best. The usual coterie of Hawai ʻi’s fashionable set — creative directors, local in uencers, and artists, including a writer covering the show for a piece in Paper magazine — mingled alongside the designer’s family and friends, some of whom ew in from other islands like proud supporters at a graduation. The duality in the guest list manifested a particular crossroads in Ahuna’s career: a local kid striving to break through the fashion industry’s upper echelons.
As the sun set, models glided down the runway to a custom soundtrack of piano keys and steel guitar chords reminiscent of hapa haole melodies. Inspired by the runway’s location, the show both celebrated and subverted the semiotics of Waik!k!. A duo in a his-and-hers ensemble parodied tourists with an a nity for matching aloha wear. Skull-hugging swim caps and preppy rugby sweaters referenced the old beach boys, with Duke Kahanamoku receiving a nod in a sculptural dress designed after his iconic alaia board. Most notable, though, was Ahuna’s take on the island’s most enduring fashion icon: the
aloha print. Oversized blazers and boxer shorts and skin-tight lycra dresses were emblazoned with a print he designed for the show, replacing the generic, non-native hibiscus with a place-appropriate hau ower. One look took the aloha shirt silhouette to hyperbolic proportions, styled backwards as a oor-length dress.
The collection was Ahuna’s largest endeavor to date. He graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2022 with a handful of garments based on drawings of larger theoretical collections, the bulk of which only existed as drawings on the page. Even his rst
collection, “Lau K! ”, presented the preceding fall was largely custom couture accompanied by a small run of screen printed shirts that felt more like art show merch than of a bona de brand. This latest collection, titled “Kaimana,” however, meant showing 25 individual looks as one cohesive narrative, 11 of which were ready-to-wear garments available for order immediately after. But if Ahuna was at all overwhelmed, he betrayed no sign of it. There was a drive in the way he approached his work — a consequence of having Scorpio as his astrological “Big Three,” or of growing
up with competitive brothers, according to his mom. “Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen,” he tells himself whenever doubt starts to creep in. “You just gotta trust the process and go for it.”
The 22-year-old had always been a quick study. At 10, Ahuna became obsessed with lei hulu after seeing his mom, Kanoe, making one for a Daughters of Hawai ʻi event. The vividly plumed pieces have long been admired for the patience and precision they require; a single lei hulu often needs a hundred feathers to complete. “He wanted to do it so badly,” Kanoe said, recalling how her son begged to be taken to a class. But Kanoe, an educator who has been instrumental in the development of Hawaiian charter schools since the ’90s, knew she couldn’t send Ahuna to just any lei hulu workshop. She approached Paulette Kahalepuna, who she described modestly as “a traditional lei hulu maker, very famous in Kapahulu.”
A generational master feather-worker, Kahalepuna was teaching and selling her creations at Na Lima Mili Hulu Noʻ eau with her mother, Mary Lou Kekuewa, who published the rst written manual on lei hulu in 1976. It was the equivalent of asking a rst-chair symphonist to teach your kid their rst music lesson. Kahalepuna, at the time, deemed the young Ahuna too green. “I don’t teach this young,” she told Kanoe, proclaiming she didn’t instruct anyone under 13. Nevertheless, Kanoe came back every summer, with an eager Ahuna in tow, and year after year, Kahalepuna turned them away. Then, when Ahuna turned 12, Kanoe bent the truth slightly to enroll him a year early. Finally, Kahalepuna acquiesced.
Ahuna proved to be prodigious, quickly taking to the artform. Before long, he became one of the youngest students to receive an ‘ & niki, or graduation ceremony, from Kahalepuna for mastering the craft. Today, his lei hulu are framed
and hung in a place of prominence at his t&t& Reynette’s home in Papak(lea homestead, where Ahuna now lives. And each year, he teaches seniors at Kanuikapono Public Charter School, the Kauaʻi school that Kanoe directs, to make lei hulu for their graduation.
Ahuna’s childhood was often punctuated by similar cultural christenings. Kanoe and her husband, Dan, moved the family — a daughter and four sons, of which Ahuna was the second youngest — to Kapaʻ a, Kauaʻi when Ahuna was two, taking posts at a new charter school on the island. In
2010, at the age of nine, Ahuna began dancing competitively with H)lau Ka Lei Mokihana O Lein)ʻala, whose kumu hula Leinaʻala Pavao Jardin remains a regular competitor at the Merrie Monarch Festival. It was in hula that his interest in design and fashion emerged, inspired by the intention necessary in every part of a performance. “Kumu hula are literally creative directors. They have to style, choreograph, compose sometimes, and tell a story. It’s like having a fashion show at Merrie Monarch,” he explains to me, when we meet up again two weeks after his runway show, in Papak(lea.
“My favorite aspect of hula was going to learn about somewhere, understanding what represents that place, and then building that garment, that dance, those facial expressions. And it was like, ‘Wow, that’s something I want to do.’”
Hula cultivated a formative grasp of his culture and history, later deepened by an after school program his mom founded in his early adolescence. Three days a week, Ahuna and a dozen other students from Hawaiian immersion schools would be shuttled around Kauaʻi in a 14-passenger van where he “would learn about the dirt here today or learn about the leaves in the mountain or every star at night,” he recalls, attributing that culturally rooted education to his overall design approach and aesthetic. “It was such a grounding thing to have experienced over the years.”
In November 2022, Ahuna posted photos of his FIT capstone project on Instagram. The model was bound in a bodice of multicolored ta$eta, with hundreds of individually woven strips in an uncanny mimicry of ʻulana lau hala. The sunset-hued skirt billowed out from the waist down as if a ower unfurling into full bloom. “I didn’t expect it to have that much of an impact,” says Ahuna. Truthfully, he had been too overwhelmed by the project, which necessitated learning lau hala techniques and countless hours in the studio perfecting the lattice pattern, to think about the publicity it could get. He was also worried about its public perception, knowing the weight
that such a traditional artform carried. Yet, the garment quickly garnered attention on social media, amassing thousands of likes. One comment read, “You implement culture so seamlessly into your work.” Another: “Where can I buy a corset or dress like this? I’ll pay anything.” The dress was awarded the Critics Choice Award among FIT’s capstone presentations and displayed at the Graduating Student Exhibition.
More than the accolades and likes, however, it revealed Ahuna’s design sensibility, showing an early yet astute ability to marry haute-couture concepts with Hawai ʻi’s cultural tapestry. It’s a fashionable tradition that Tory Laitila, curator of textiles and historic arts of Hawai ʻi at the Honolulu Museum of Art, says has always been natural to Hawaiians. Popular perception regards their transition into Western-style clothing as a result of colonization, but according to Laitila, “[Hawaiians] knew what they were doing. They wanted the newest fashions,” and their adoption of the latest styles was less a force of assimilation than of a desire to remain en vogue.
This history is where Ahuna mines much of his inspiration. One can see parallels in his favored silhouettes (corseted waists, dome-shaped skirts) and aesthetic touches (ruffles, embroidery, elegant lines) and the garments of postcontact ali ʻi. “Everything in Hawaiian fashion has that little Vivienne Westwood touch,” he says, referencing the British designer who subverted traditional Elizabethan and
Victorian looks. “Everything is so elegant, that’s probably one of my favorite things about our ali ʻi.”
“Clearly, he knows his history,” Linda Arthur Bradley, a scholar of Hawai‘i apparel and textiles, tells me upon reviewing Ahuna’s designs. “He’s trying to blend fashion innovation and Hawaiian tradition. That’s going to be a tough one to do, but he’s doing it.” Bradley references a look from “Lau K!” — a red zip-up corset and a netted skirt hemmed by a cluster of dried t! leaves — that transforms the utilitarian ahu laʻi, or t! leaf capes, of old Hawai ʻi into chic evening wear. (The singer Chardonnay Pao wore a custom version of the dress to the 2023 N) H(k& Hanohano Awards.)
“What sets him apart is he’s able to take these ideas and bring them to life,” says Puna Joon, who for the past year has been the brand’s stylist and Ahuna’s closest collaborator. “Everybody has great ideas, but bringing them to life is the harder part. Even sometimes he surprises me. Then he brings it to life and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I get it, I see it.’”
When I rst met Ahuna, in the second- oor ballroom a few days before the runway show, the space was functioning as a temporary studio for ttings while the young designer finalized the collection’s looks. After the last male model arrived, Ahuna scanned what was left of the collection. He
AMONG AHUNA’S EARL I EST MUSES I S H I S GRANDMOTHER REYNETTE, P I CTURED HERE AT HER HOME I N PAPAKŌLEA. “MY DEEPEST CONNECTION I S TO MY GRANDMA. SHE’S HELPED TO INFLUENCE A LOT OF TH I S,” HE SAYS.
still had an out t he was dying to try, except he hadn’t found the right talent to make it work. He pulled the red boxers from the rack and grabbed some leather platform sandals emblazoned with the same print. Was the model game? Yes. When he came back into the room, the easy masculinity with which the model arrived was replaced with an elegant androgyny. Ahuna nodded his approval: “I’ve been looking for someone with a fragile masculinity.” Later in the show, the model stepped out with blushed cheeks, glossed lips, and a red purse in hand — a daring burst of gender bending within a relatively restrained lineup.
Crucial to Ahuna’s personal self-expression, this uidity in dressing is just beginning to manifest in his brand, yet is something Ahuna sees as a key aspect moving forward. It’s also the most original aspect of his evolving aesthetic, one that has been absent from Hawai ʻi brands. In feminizing an aloha shirt as an evening dress or queering a model for the runway, Ahuna is testing the boundaries of aloha wear, an industry that remains decidedly binary. He’s not entirely sure if the local market is ready for it, though. “People here will either give you the gnarliest stares or the most slightly homophobic comment ever,” he says. “I kind of live for it in a way. It’s so driving to be pushing people’s perspectives.”
Growing up in a small island town made it di cult for Ahuna to explore his genuine self. Though he openly identied as gay by senior year, he found himself sticking to heteronormative gender constructs like playing sports or dressing conservatively. “On Kauaʻi, who was a fashion designer, you know? All of my friends are boar hunters, football players, surfers,” he says. It wasn’t until he got to FIT (after a short stint at Irvine Valley College studying international business on a volleyball scholarship) that he began to feel comfortable with his sexuality. By the time he graduated, he had
a cozy side hustle making customs for drag queens, which “actually helped me to start charging at a price point that I felt comfortable with.” When he ew back home in 2023 to attend Merrie Monarch, he connected with Joon and immediately saw parallels in their upbringing and approach to fashion as a mode of gender uid self-expression.
A look conceived by Joon for the fall show holds a particular place in Ahuna’s heart. It was of his oversized red carnation-print shirt, a call back to the golden age of Hawai‘i travel, styled o$-the-shoulder with a trailing cumberbund as a pseudo-skirt. “It doesn’t only represent me, but so many more kids here that had to experience the same things as me and want to pursue these things,” Ahuna says, his throat catching on tears. “It’s just fun to be with someone that constantly gets me.”
That Merrie Monarch trip unintentionally ballooned from a week to a month to a year. Now, he can’t imagine moving back to New York any time soon, especially with how well received his latest collection was. For a week, though, he had been recuperating on Kauaʻi to escape the overwhelm that hit as soon as the last model walked o$ the runway. The show was done, sure, but now there was an online store to launch, photos to post, and orders to ful ll. “All my friends were like, ‘We’re going to Kokeʻe because there’s no service and you need a break,’” he recounts, laughing.
But the holiday o$ered more than a respite. Amid stretches of lush verdure and Kauaʻi’s slow-going ease, Ahuna found fertile inspiration for his next show, inspired by the botanical allure that enraptured him as a child. And he’s eager to start, having already drawn some concepts over the weekend. “I’m ready for it,” he says, that familiar zeal back in his eyes. “I’m really looking forward to my next show now that I’ve felt it. I’m going to be doing this forever, twice a year. Let’s do it.”
High Passion
OKATA AND BEN PERREIRA OF PASSIONFRUIT ARE BRINGING HIGH FASHION HOME.
TEXT BY I MAGES BY
_ ALEX I S CHEUNG _ BRANDYN L I U AND COURTESY OF PASS I ONFRU I T
“I’m wearing my ‘don’t look at me’ out t,” laughs the stylist and consultant Ben Perreira. In a cavernous SoHo office, Perreira admits this after his business partner Taylor Okata, a fellow stylist and creative director, exclaims, “These are my errands clothes!” It’s a small thing, but how both dress is telling, revealing that when it comes to fashioning themselves and the world around them the two are always operating on the same wavelength. Although not dressed like twins per se, sartorial elements overlap: Perreira and Okata sport slouchy crew neck T-shirts layered under oversized button-ups, styled with knee-length denim shorts and easy sneakers (checkered Vans for Perreira, sold out Bode for Nike for Okata), nished with a tangle of neck chains and charms from jeweler friends or Hawai‘i stores.
They look like low-key island boys with high-end taste — a quality they’ve cultivated for over a decade each since leaving Kona and Honolulu, Perreira and Okata’s respective hometowns. Over the years, their individual resumes have boasted styling projects for industry titans like Carine Roitfeld and Yohji
STYL I STS TAYLOR OKATA & BEN PERRE I RA I N NEW YORK C I TY. “WE WANT TO EQU I TY BU I LD,” SAYS PERRE I RA. I NSTEAD OF EXTRACT I NG FROM THE I SLANDS, THE I R PROJECTS ARE CHOSEN W I TH THE GOAL TO “MAKE THE P I E B I GGER.”
Yamamoto, an impressive combined C.V. considering that fashion was never either’s o cial plan.
After graduating high school, Perreira and Okata, who are a few years apart in age, both wound up in Los Angeles separately for college, initially unaware of each other’s existence. Perreira originally studied psychology but after finding it boring decided to transfer to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising to major in styling. Okata, meanwhile, double majored in communication studies and studio art at Loyola Marymount University, with stints studying abroad in Italy and Tokyo.
“Fashion kind of found me, and I just went along for the ride,” says Perreira. His rst day at FIDM he was asked to
TAYLOR
intern on an Elle photoshoot. It was 2010, and with magazines consistently shooting celebrities based in Los Angeles, his new home proved fertile ground for a burgeoning career in fashion. “I was ambitious and young and could jump from photoshoot to photoshoot,” he says, and the jobs kept coming. After graduation, New York called. Perreira started working for Carine Roitfeld, the former editor in chief of Vogue Paris, as her photoshoots became internationally syndicated for Harper’s Bazaar France and, later, her totemic magazine CR Fashion Book.
Okata ended up in New York under harder circumstances. After moving to Asia in 2008 for a television career, his agents dropped him for being queer. His sister happened to be moving to New York, so he followed. “All I wanted to do was hide because I kind of had an identity crisis,” says Okata. He found his rst job on Craigslist as an editorial assistant at photo agency Trunk Archive, now Great Bowery. Though his education and experience proved his merit, Okata says that “having good style and being interested in fashion,” ultimately set him apart.
“WE MET FOR PAU HANA DR I NKS,” REMEMBERS OKATA OF THE I R F I RST ENCOUNTER. ALMOST I NSTANTLY, PERRE I RA CLOCKED H I M AS A FELLOW I SLANDER.
For years, Perreira and Okata hustled and parallel pathed their way through the industry. In 2013, they eventually met in Paris through a mutual connection. Okata was with Yohji Yamamoto in Paris, working on everything from sales and styling to supporting the runway shows, and Perreira’s assistant styling work for fashion shows, magazine editorials, and advertisements took him to the city frequently.
“We met for pau hana drinks,” remembers Okata of their rst encounter. Almost instantly, Perreira clocked him as a fellow islander “because of his accent.”
Passionfruit is selective, choosing projects where they can bring a more authentic perspective to every level of the production.
“I probably got bumped and the pidgin came out,” confesses Okata. “I say irraz under my breath a lot because people don’t understand it.”
The two liked each other but their work was all consuming. They remained distant, like planets orbiting each other. In 2019, Okata styled the fashion editorial “Blue Paradise” for the online retailer Ssense with Maui-based photographer Brendan George Ko. Okata scouted three local models as its stars: Haʻa Keaulana, pro surfer and granddaughter of legendary surfer Bu$alo Keaulana; Lindsey Higa, an in-demand Honolulu stylist; and Evan Mock, a skateboarder and model, then still pre-Gossip Girl and Calvin Klein billboard ad fame. Against a softly lit, color saturated Oʻahu beach, the trio posed in luxury ready-to-wear, from cherry red MM6 Maison Margiela trousers to a fuchsia cheetah-print Gucci scarf tied as a long sarong.
“People either see a fashion shoot with all white models in Hawai‘i or a very Roxy surf shoot,” Okata says of pairing local talent, speci cally chosen to re ect the islands’ Indigenous and mixed-Asian ethnic groups, with high fashion designer clothes. The editorial struck a nerve for its fresh approach, including with Perreira, who had already
been chatting with Okata about the overlapping circles they ran in, saying, “We should work together.”
It took two years, many conversations, a global pandemic that forced both to temporarily relocate to their homeland, and a fortuitous project for their professional partnership to finally come to fruition. They announced Passionfruit concurrently with their rst production: Jacquemus’ Fall/Winter 2022 “Le Splash” fashion show.
The opportunity arose from Perreira’s years of cultivating European relationships in the industry. After Jacquemus shot an editorial in Hawai‘i with photographer Tom Kneller, the designer Simon Porte Jacquemus thought the islands would be tting for his rst show outside of Europe, telling Vogue that he was drawn to the “dreamy and inspiring landscapes with incredible mountains, beaches, and sea.” A business contact from the team knew Perreira, who recently styled a Nike campaign with in uencer Bretman Rock, was from the islands and called him about producing it in Hawai‘i. Perreira answered, “The only way I’ll do it is if Taylor is free.”
Located on a small beach along Kualoa Point owned by Kualoa Ranch, the production was sparse with an azure runway spanning the length of M(li‘i Gardens’ beach. The cast of 56 models, a mix of local
“FASH I ON K I ND OF FOUND ME, AND I JUST WENT ALONG FOR THE R I DE,” SAYS PERRE I RA.
and own-in talent, walked in garments cut from neutral ecru, vibrant lime green, moody blue, sherbert orange, and bubblegum pink fabrics. Among the more interesting aspects of the production, though, was backstage, which was lled with a predominantly local crew, from producers and photographers to dressers and makeup artists.
The show on March 10, 2022 was a social media success — its rst Instagram reel currently has 9.7 million views — and was received warmly, though not without criticism. “For some fashion followers, the choice to hold a destination show in a place connected with colonialism and tourism was a misstep,” wrote Vogue, especially coming o$ the heels of a deadly pandemic.
They look like low-key island boys with highend taste — a quality they’ve cultivated for over a decade each since leaving Kona and Honolulu.
(Partially for this reason, only a select number of guests from Asia, Australia, the United States, and other Paci c Islands were own out to attend.) Adding, “But to many of the local guests in the audience, seeing a European designer arrive islandside was a rming,” given how many luxury brands litter Waik!k!’s thoroughfare yet don’t interact with the community beyond extracting tourists’ dollars and occupying valuable real estate.
“We want to equity build,” says Perreira. As this pertains to their Hawai‘i-centric projects, instead of extracting from the islands, their projects are chosen with the goal to “make the pie bigger.” Passionfruit does this by not only bringing opportunities to the state, but by giving Hawai ʻi creatives a seat at the decision-making table and inviting local talent to help envision the productions instead of merely executing someone else’s concept. “Brands have been doing resort and cruise collections in other cities but it’s never been done in the way that we integrated local communities in collaboration with a foreign brand at a luxury level,” adds Okata. It’s all guided by their self-proclaimed “intention-based approach,” which focuses on integrating the Hawai ʻi community with outside brands and publications. Passionfruit
serves as a bridge between their two worlds, Perreira explains, “helping people make livelihoods through our connections with clients from the mainland and Europe while also teaching those same clients the political and social nuances of Hawai‘i.”
The Jacquemus show embodied their intention-based ethos, allowing the creative studio to make better decisions at every level. “Be it from behind the scenes, like the local cuisine served, the photographers, and the dressers, to in front of the camera,” says Okata. “It really was making sure we could ll in local talent at every level, not just the most visible,” he adds, since that’s what many brands do when shooting in Hawai‘i.
Since “Le Splash,” Passionfruit helped pitch photographer Nani Welch Keli ʻihoʻomalu for a Hawai‘i water crisis story with the environmental publication Atmos and styled a fashion spread featuring local models and a photographer in Hawai‘i with Valentino clothing for CR Fashion Book. After the Lahaina res in 2023, they produced a “Maui on My Mind” fundraiser T-shirt in collaboration with outside brands like Jacquemus and local ones like Sig Zane. The project raised $32,670 for the K)ko‘o Maui Fund created by the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement
to provide aid to local communities impacted by the disaster. Most recently, in April 2024, they served as creative consultants on the debut campaign for Loulu Hawai ʻi, a skincare and wellness brand headquartered on O‘ahu.
Passionfruit’s portfolio is eclectic and, ultimately, still small. Perreira and Okata are selective about projects, choosing those where they can bring a more authentic perspective to every level of the production or that meet their environmental or social justice brand pillars. Both still primarily work on the continent for their paychecks because, as Perreira puts it, “We’re priced out of paradise too.”
As they re ect on their paths, there’s a hero’s journey arc to their stories (not that either would claim to be heroic): The protagonist leaves home, learns lessons, and returns transformed. While both are grateful for their experiences, they’re wistful that the opportunities they needed to grow happened outside of the islands. That’s something they’re hoping to change for others as well. “We’re trying to create those spaces, moments, and opportunities for people to experience the bigger world,” Perreira says, “and expose them to things where they don’t feel like they have to leave to appreciate what they have.”
That’s So Tutuvi
COLLEEN K I MURA’S UNABASHEDLY MAX I MAL I ST DES I GNS ARE BE I NG CELEBRATED BY A NEW GENERAT I ON OF LOCAL FASH I ON ACOLYTES.
TEXT BY I MAGES BY
Despite the boldly unconventional motifs that run through the textiles designer Colleen Kimura’s work — from the bones of the humuhumunukunukuapuaʻa to a wilting torch ginger far past its prime — it’s her colors that hit you rst: a dreamy periwinkle that zzles against the shock of citron-yellow or a brown rust billowing across an earthy expanse of moss. These are color combinations that have become recognizable, by a certain fashionable set in Hawai‘i, as “so Tutuvi,” a reference to the small batch collection of screen printed fabrics, furnishings, and aloha wear that Kimura’s been producing since 1980.
Her colors evoke responses typically associated with the pleasures of food. “I could eat this color,” exclaimed one friend, after Kimura showed him a deep aquamarine-turquoise she was working with. “That looks like the most intense shoyu teriyaki,” marveled another. The fashion designer Rumi Murakami, whose multiple collaborations with Kimura are titled “Umami,” describes her use of color as “juicy” and “delicious.” “There are certain colors that she uses and only she uses,” Murakami says.
“Just like the imagery, you’re looking for uncommon color combinations, a surprise,” says Kimura, 77, sitting in the living room of her Moanalua Gardens home, the front door cracked to let out the smoke of a mosquito punk. “You want to get that feeling, ‘Look at this.’”
When I spoke to Kimura in June 2024, the soft-spoken and self-effacing artist seemed dumbfounded by the recent attention her work was receiving, which was the subject of a 2024 art show and retrospective project organized by Puʻuhonua Society and Tropic Editions. Despite a decades-old devoted following,
_ M I TCHELL KUGA _ BRANDYN L I U AND COLE TURNER
WITH TUTUVI, THE TEXTILES DESIGNER COLLEEN K I MURA WANTED TO CREATE I MAGES THAT REFLECTED THE NATURAL BEAUTY OF HER I SLAND HOME.
which included the late activist HaunaniKay Trask, who once gave Kimura a navy dress to screenprint, Kimura says her vision has long felt out of step with prevailing tastes, her exuberant celebration of the Paci c either too loud or weird or expensive, given her time-consuming process.
But throughout the decades she persisted the only way she knew how, with a dogged and unwavering belief in her artistic vision. “I guess that was always the rst thing: What makes sense to me. What looks good to me. What resonates with me and, oh, yeah, I hope other people think the same way too,” she says. “It took years, but I kept putting it out there and eventually it became somewhat familiar enough to people.”
Kimura grew up in Kapahulu, in an apartment complex on Date Street. Her mother was a nurse but constantly made things on her time o$, from knitting and ceramics to furniture she constructed out of old apple crates. She’d also cut and sew clothing for herself and Kimura, who recalls being struck by her mother’s unusual fashion choices. “She was a very small woman,” says Kimura, “and whereas the thinking of the time was you’re small, you wear small prints, she didn’t care.”
Initially, Kimura felt reluctant about standing out. She still remembers showing up to middle school one day dressed in a amboyant African-inspired print her mom bought her and thinking, Wow, is this okay? But she eventually came around to appreciating her mother’s left eld fashion. “I thought it was neat that she was an odd person in a neighborhood where everybody else had sort of normal taste,” she says.
After graduating from Kaimuk! High School, Kimura studied art at the University of Hawai ʻi at M)noa, where she took to screen printing. She was drawn to the freedom of the medium, which allowed for a seemingly endless assortment of images and colors limited
solely by her imagination. In 1972, a few years after graduating, she opened Kimura’s in an industrial space on King Street. It started as a studio for her and a few friends experimenting with a labor-intensive form of Indonesian printing known as batik, producing textiles which they would sell to local fashion companies like Baba Kea. Over time, the space took on di$erent forms, functioning as a gallery and a store for her and her friends’ work.
Six years into Kimura’s, in her mid-twenties, Kimura says she found herself “in some strange middle ground.” She took stock of her life, her “nice middle-class family” and the small but tight-knit art community she had cultivated since graduation, and felt a sharp desire to experience something new. “I think I was curious to get really close to people who were in a completely di$erent situation than me,” she says. She signed up as a volunteer for the Peace Corps
and was soon stationed in Fiji, where she taught local women how to market their handcrafted wares. While she was away, she leased Kimura’s to Gary Fujimoto of Cane Haul Road, another long-standing local clothing brand.
It wasn’t until she was on the ight back to Hawai ʻ i more than two years later that she realized she had no idea what she wanted to do upon her return. “It was a sudden fear, like, I have to start all over again,” she recalls, gasping. Back home, her mind was ooded with memories of Fiji. During one bout of longing she picked up her Fijian dictionary and landed on the word “tutuvi”: to wrap yourself. It reminded her of the lavalava, or wraps, she wore all over Fiji, during a time when pants were considered an unacceptable garment for women. “I thought the meaning was perfect because that’s what I would be printing,” she says. “That’s the simplest garment, a length of the fabric.”
In 1980, she transitioned Kimura’s into Tutuvi. Though inspired by her time abroad, she knew she wanted to create images that re ected the natural beauty of her home. For her debut collection she landed on ve motifs: a squid, pu$er sh, lauaʻe fern, torch ginger, and banana leaf. She admits that she initially approached her imagery as purely decorative, focusing on colors and shapes she now describes as “generically tropical.” But over time, she came to understand that her alluring color palettes could function as a kind of Trojan horse, shepherding in images, stories, and references to Native
Hawaiian folklore that re ected the richness of local culture.
“It’s an attempt to nd imagery that people haven’t seen before,” she says, emphasizing that she thinks like a printmaker rst and a designer second, meticulously cutting her garments to best frame her prints. “It’s like, ‘Consider this. This is part of the whole history.’”
Kimura closed her store on King Street in 2013, after the building was demolished, and has been operating the business out of her home ever since. Still, surprising opportunities keep coming her way, from a sprawling art show in 2017 celebrating
the renovation of Pearlridge Center to designing shirts for Robert Cazimero’s H)lau N) Kamalei O L!l!lehua, when it took home the grand prize at the 2015 Merrie Monarch Festival.
More recently, in March, Puʻuhonua Society and Tropic Editions presented an exhibition at Arts & Letters called “Tutuvi Newsprint,” which transformed remnants of Kimura’s screen printing process — colorful layers of overprints that she would catch on pages from the daily newspaper, to minimize the mess — into works of art. In August 2024, her work was the focus of a retrospective fashion show in which four
ABOVE, R I GHT ( CLOCKW I SE FROM TOP LEFT): COLLEEN KIMURA, REISE KOCHI, RUM I MURAKAM I , AND MAR I KA EM I “ I TH I NK TUTUV I REPRESENTS A CROSSOVER BETWEEN ART AND FASH I ON HERE I N HAWA I ‘ I THAT I S LOST ON THE GENERAL PUBL I C,” SAYS EM I , FOUNDER OF TROP I C ED I T I ONS.
designers — past collaborators Murakami and Aiala Rickard along with Marika Emi and Reise Kochi — cast Kimura’s prints in a new light, designing garments that were styled alongside Kimura’s previous work with Toqa and Bete Muʻu, and a cape by artist Taiji Terasaki. After sifting through her archive, organized across large industrial shelves in her living room, they each worked with Kimura to interpret old motifs into new colorways and materials. Kochi described the process as “joyful,” highlighting the intentionality behind Kimura’s output, which o$ers a slower but more thoughtful alternative to the grinding pace of the fashion industry. “Tutuvi is a reminder that quantity does not de ne quality or success,” he says.
“Her prints and her aura are constantly reminding me to connect with the nature around me and have fun with the process,” says Rickard, who worked with Kimura on a swimwear collection for the 2022 Hawai ʻi Triennial. “She is so completely kind and thoughtful in her design. She takes into account all the little details in her prints, each stroke and negative space counts.”
The retrospective comes at a time when interest in the nuts and bolts process of garment manufacturing is experiencing a resurgence among younger people, says Emi, founder of Tropic Editions. In introducing a new generation to Kimura’s work, Emi hopes to spotlight Hawai ʻi’s rich legacy of fashion production, and the unique role Kimura’s played in that history. In addition to the
show, the retrospective will include a print publication by Tropic Editions and a lm that further re ects on Kimura’s oeuvre. (Both are slated for release in early 2025.) “Colleen’s approach to making garments has always been as an artist, not as a designer,” says Emi. “I think Tutuvi represents a crossover between art and fashion here in Hawai ʻi that is lost on the general public.”
As much as she’s drawn to the loudness of Kimura’s prints, Murakami says she’s equally inspired by her ability to hone in on life’s quieter details. She points to Kimura’s home as an example. A few years ago, Kimura came home one night during a supermoon and noticed the stark shadow of her plumeria tree stretching across her front steps. Mesmerized, she fetched a piece of chalk and quickly sketched the tree’s leafy outline, before lling in the space with mauve paint a week later.
“I think this re ects the way that she lives,” says Murakami. “She’s not looking out there for her inspiration. She’s inspired by stu$ that’s right in front of her.”
Kimura’s greatest thrill remains happening upon someone wearing Tutuvi. She can usually spot her garments from a block away, and though she never approaches the person, she sees it as an exchange.
“It’s kind of a language between me and these people that buy it and wear it. And it’s not a spoken language,” she says. “It’s something that you can’t quite name, but it’s a real thing that runs through the prints.”
K I MURA STUD I ED ART AT THE UN I VERS I TY OF HAWA I ‘ I AT M & NOA, WHERE SHE TOOK TO SCREEN PR I NT I NG. SHE WAS DRAWN TO THE FREEDOM OF THE MED I UM, WH I CH ALLOWED FOR A SEEM I NGLY ENDLESS ASSORTMENT OF I MAGES AND COLORS L I M I TED SOLELY BY HER I MAG I NAT I ON.
The darkness feels very fertile to me. ” — Kai Gaspar
Once Upon a Portland
A NAT I VE HAWA II AN POET AND TEACHER FROM H Ō NAUNAU, HAWA I ‘ I I SLAND, KA I GASPAR F I NDS COMFORT I N DARKNESS.
TEXT BY I MAGES BY _ CHR I ST I NE H I TT _ W I LL MATSUDA
“I spent the early part of my life without electricity and plumbing. So I grew up with kerosene lamps at night and I’m used to that. That’s very much part of my comfort zone,” says Gaspar, who still has the kerosene lamp he grew up with. He moved to southwest Portland a decade ago and spends hours deep into the night writing alongside husband Kasey.
In 2023, Gaspar published Ulu, a poetic memoir about his life growing up in the small village of H(naunau. “I started creative writing when I was a kid,” Gaspar says. “I’ve always been an escapist. I love fantasizing and escaping, and I still do. So writing helped me do that. Writing, reading and movies. Those were my obsessions, and they still are.” Gaspar, age, divulges a selection of rituals and Portland locales that serve as wellsprings of inspiration for his writing endeavors.
manifesting home
I enjoy the rain. It’s very lush. We’re thankful. We have a beautiful backyard for a garden and we planted a whole bunch of stu$ in the front. Howard’s End was sort of our spirit guide, you know?How can we make this like a secret garden? We planted Wisteria, trailing things. We’ve got roses covering the front of the house. It’s very private.
My husband [Kasey] and I are very big on feeling the fantasy, we want to make sure that the inside of our home feels very, very comforting. Tropical as much as we can, so when the doors are closed and it’s 20 degrees outside or colder or worse, it feels like home. And, I don’t just mean home here in the space, but home in the sense like maybe I’m still in Hawai‘i or Hawai‘i is here with me. I mean, it always is here with me. That’s where I’m from, but, you know, we try to evoke it in our surroundings as well.
I write every day. I love it. Everything is inspiring. So I carry around my notebook. I always have my notebook journal with me everywhere I go and some kind of writing instrument and just write and record. I mean, I could just watch an episode of Murder, She Wrote, and someone will say something and I’ll just love that word. Or I love the way that was expressed. That’s inspirational to me. I love walking around the Willamette River. That’s a really inspirational space. Just a majestic waterway and then the wildlife down there. We love birdwatching. That’s one of the cool things about living here is the variety of bird life. We go down there at night around this time,
the river
we can see the ducks on the water in the dark. You can see their dark silhouettes just skimming the water so you can see the little baby ducks just in a row. It’s super cute.
wrapped in darkness
I do love writing late at night. We are deep night people. We tend to stay up very late and I enjoy writing in the dark. We are candlelight people. And I feel like when night falls, it should feel dark — like, the dark should feel like it’s wrapping me up. Darkness should come
into the house. It should feel very comfortable because it reminds me again of longing for home spaces. It makes me just feel at home, and the darkness feels very fertile to me.
romantic feelings
Our favorite trysting spot is Driftwood. It’s a bar lounge in the lobby of the hotel called Hotel Deluxe. When we do go out for a cocktail, that’s usually where we go. It’s dark. The interior is old school, and it’s been around for decades and the interior hasn’t changed for decades so
GASPAR MOVED TO SOUTHWEST PORTLAND A DECADE AGO AND SPENDS HOURS DEEP I NTO THE N I GHT WR I T I NG ALONGS I DE HUSBAND KASEY.
it’s gorgeous. And it’s dark. It’s romantic. We enjoy just, you know, having a cocktail and sitting in the back.
The tables are all designed so you can just kind of be with your partner. Just be close, share a cocktail at these cute little tables, and just enjoy the space. Enjoy the darkness and your privacy, the sophistication of it all.
I always take my notebook with me. Always have it on me and I’m always coming up with ideas. Things around me inspire me, and I love watching humans interact with each other. I love romances.
I love Bollywood movies. I love a great Bollywood romance. Aamir Khan is one of my favorite actors. Very hunky. I love to cry. I love to feel deep feelings, and these movies are just next level. Driftwood kind of evokes those kinds of feelings when you just see lovers in the dark.
music obsession
We spend a lot of time listening to records. One of our passions is music. We have a pretty solid record collection. We’ve got thousands of albums. A lot of soul R&B albums. We’ll take music however we can get it. We particularly love digging for records at the record store which is really wonderful here.
Crossroads is our favorite record store, and it’s huge too. Their selection is amazing. There are times when I’ve opened it and closed it. Oh, it’s like I spent eight hours there. We are obsessed with music and they have thousands of albums. The selection is beyond and there’s no way you can see everything in one day. And not only do they have stacks everywhere — you also go under the stacks, so there are two levels. All the stacks have boxes underneath and those are full of albums too.
We were about to go and my husband had this album and he’s like, “Check her out,” and it was this singer named Liz Hogue. She’s out of Philadelphia. I thought, I like your look, and we literally had to leave. There’s a listening station and I thought, Oh, wellm you look great, maybe I’ll just preview this real fast. I just dropped the needle for literally one, two seconds and heard her voice
in the lower register and I was like, Oh, yeah, indeed. We’re good, I got it. We love contralto singers. We love all singers, but we love, love a solid contralto, like Phyllis Hyman, and a Hawaiian singer, Haunani Kahalewai.
dancing around
My husband and I love to have a good time. We love to go dancing. We love dancing here [at home]. We spin records almost every day, every night. We’ve explored clubs and dance clubs and haven’t found jus, like, the most perfect one. At this point, we mix really great cocktails at home, we have a great bar selection, and great music. We have a club-sized mirror ball in our parlor so we got everything we need to have a great time.
Oaks Park Roller Rink is one of the oldest in the U.S. It might be the oldest, actually. It’s just roller skating, you know, just picking up that speed and feeling the wind in your hair is awesome. And I love the DJ, and often the DJ will spin awesome sets. Last time we went, the DJ was spinning a lot of music from the ’80s, so that’s de nitely our jam. Cannot go wrong with the ’80s jams. Some Taylor Dayne and Kim Carnes, you know? I mean, like, yes, some Poison, Madonna, yes. It’s not necessarily a club environment. There’s lights and a DJ and the ashing lights. It a lot of fun.
page turners
Wherever books are being sold, I’m down to look at your wares. Powell’s is de nitely convenient and large. They have almost everything. You’ll always nd something
but I’ll nd books wherever. Used bookstores. You go along the coast, Lincoln City, Depot Bay, Newport and all these places are very popular tourist attractions, so there are a lot of antique shops and used bookstores.
I love memoirs. I read a lot of them, especially celebrity memoirs. I’m all about it. One of my favorites is the one Marlene Dietrich’s kid wrote. Maria Riva wrote a biography about her mother and that was a page turner and a half. I learned so much about writing techniques from the way that Maria Riva wrote about her mother. It just gives me insight into folks whose artistry I love. So it feels like I get to know the artist and the artistry even more too. So if I love something enough, I want to know more about it. I want to know how it came about and how it’s put together.
I read everything, and if you look on our shelves, we’ve got everything from architecture, photography, history, sociology, lots of cookbooks. We’ve got everything.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Willamette River
A major tributary of the Columbia River
Driftwood Room
729 SW 15th Ave.
Oaks Park Roller Rink
7805 SE Oaks Park Way
Crossroads Music
8112 SE Harold St.
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W Burnside St.
kai’s guide to portland
As your bare feet sink into the soft, white sands of Waikīkī Beach, and the melodic strums of a distant ‘ukulele echo around you, you feel your spirit set free. Anchored on the legendary shores of Kawehewehe, the OUTRIGGER Reef Waikīkī Beach Resort is your haven, where ancient Hawaiian healing traditions and the romance of an idyllic tropical escape intertwine.
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More than simply a luxurious stay, the OUTRIGGER Reef offers you a journey into the heart and soul of Hawai‘i. Explore the voyaging artwork of celebrated Native Hawaiian historian Herb Kane. Immerse yourself in
Tune of the Tides
the local culture through Signature Experiences that include hands-on crafts and educational activities. And discover the island’s rich heritage at the Aʻo Cultural Center, a portal to Hawai‘i’s storied past.
Culinary excellence is central to the OUTRIGGER experience. The esteemed Voyager 47 Club Lounge offers unrivaled beachfront vistas alongside exclusive local dishes, creating a dining atmosphere that is both sophisticated and intimate. At the Monkeypod Kitchen by Merriman, select from a menu brimming with local farm-totable cuisine, all while enjoying stunning views of Diamond Head.
In the evenings, melodies foat on the ocean breeze, emanating from the open-air Kani Ka Pila Grille. Revered as the Home of Hawaiian Music, this intimate venue showcases award-winning Hawaiian artists, offering live performances every night.
Families will delight in the newly opened Coral Kids Club, a supervised space where children partake in fun, educational activities centered on ocean conservation. Meanwhile, ftness enthusiasts can enjoy the state-of-the-art ftness center, featuring Peloton and Technogym equipment and a variety of classes, including yoga
At the OUTRIGGER Reef Waikīkī Beach Resort, every stay is more than just a visit, it’s a place where your senses are awakened, and your soul rejuvenated. Infused with Hawai‘i’s spirited sense of place, you will leave spellbound, connected, and forever eager to return.
Royal Riches
AFTER THE UNLAWFUL OVERTHROW, HAWAIIAN COINAGE CEASED TO BE RECOGNIZED AS LEGAL TENDER. NEVERTHELESS, THOSE NOW COLLECTIBLE COINS INDICATED AN INDEPENDENT NATION EAGER TO ACTIVELY ENGAGE IN THE GLOBAL TRADE.
TEXT BY I MAGES BY
In the world of a numismatist — a collector or expert in the study of coins and other currency — to hold a coin is to hold history in your hand. One November morning, I nd myself on the third oor of the Hawai‘i Convention Center for the Hawai‘i State Numismatic Association’s 57th annual trade show, walking among rows of stalls lled with an assortment of coins and memorabilia: jewelry, postcards, stamps, glass bottles. Coins from the Hawaiian Kingdom sit in display cases among South African Krugerrands and tender from the Confederate States of America. Bango, the essentially worthless scrip used on sugar plantations for a century in the islands, are displayed primarily for their historical curiosity, a reminder of the way physical currency is an expression of the economic power held by some — and the denial of power to others.
Named after the Japanese word for “number,” bango were usually made of brass or steel and stamped with a plantation worker’s number on one side, taking from the tag system used on American slave plantations. Worn as a pendant and shaped according to a worker’s race, bango enabled managers to avoid speaking
_ SONNY GANADEN _ JOHN HOOK
ISTORIC HAWAI‘I COINS AND CURRENCY TELL VALUABLE STORIES THAT OUTSTRETCH MONETARY LABELS.
workers’ names, standing in for both identi cation and currency — a way for the laborer to receive pay, do laundry, and make purchases from the company store. All sorts of currency were in circulation in the islands following Western contact. It was only in the mid-1800s, however, when a Hawaiian currency was established, modeled after the American system of 100 cents to the dollar. The Hawaiian government under Kamehameha III issued its rst o cial coinage in 1847 — a large one-cent copper piece that swiftly proved unpopular among local merchants. In 1883, in attempts to reafrm Hawaiian sovereignty in the face of growing American in uence in the islands, King Kal)kaua issued a set of silver coins that then circulated alongside U.S. currency.
Throughout the 1880s, the Hawaiian Kingdom also produced silver certificates in denominations of $10, $20, $50, $100, and $500, each depicting gorgeous images of pastoral Hawai‘i. The $500 note, a veritable work of art of which only two known proofs (non-circulating printings) remain, features a steam locomotive anked by sailing ships and two oval portraits: King Kal)kaua on the left and a man hauling sugarcane on the right. The reverse reads “Hawaiian Treasury” in an arc over the Kingdom’s crest, surrounded by ornate shapes and motifs reminiscent
of ne Hawaiian quilts. For a time, it seems, Hawai‘i had ambitions as an independent nation engaged in global commerce.
Less than two decades later, in 1893, the Kingdom was overthrown, and by 1904, all Hawaiian coinage ceased to be legal tender. The vast majority was recalled and melted, and the coins that survived were commonly made into jewelry, pins, and other souvenirs of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Another mass recall occurred later that century: After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American dollars circulating in the islands were recalled and
overprinted with the word “HAWAII” in giant letters, rendering them worthless in the event of Japanese military conquering the archipelago and con scating its U.S. currency.
At the Hawai‘i State Numismatic Association’s coin show, I notice there’s not a single credit card reader in sight. Here, cash is king, and business is done the old-fashioned way: hand-to-hand exchange. I continue to make my way from vendor to vendor, stopping to take in the myriad forms of currency on display. Inspecting an ancient Roman coin, I imagine it to be
Through flavors such as Pickled Mango, Salted Lemon, Pikake, Pandan, Durian, Plum Mui, and White Li Hing Mui Joanne Nguyen (lovingly referred to as “Mama Joanne”) and her son, Kenneth Ma, are serving up Hawaii’s favorite cool treat with organic sugar, fresh ingredients, and a whole lot of love at Island Soul Shaved Ice
and her son, Kenneth Ma, are serving up Hawaii’s favorite cool treat with organic cane sugar,
Taro & Ube with Pikake Syrup
the denarius that Jesus held up when he told disciples to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, unto God what is God’s.” In holding a bango in my palm, I imagine the sugarcane worker it belonged to, tired from a week’s worth of toil, exclaiming “bingo bango!” as he slams his piece on the clerk’s counter for his pay on Aloha Friday.
I ponder the deeper question of money itself, though I’m hardly the rst to recognize that a coin or a bill is only as valuable as we all collectively say it is. Upon returning home from the coin show, curiosity gets the better of me and I go online to peruse more currency from the Hawaiian Kingdom. As I’m hawked ads for cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens, I nd one of the two $500 Hawaiian Kingdom silver certi cate proofs is up for auction in Texas, its price yet to be determined by bidders.
Into the Green
BY I MAGES BY
At any given time and place in Hawai‘i, it is almost impossible not to know where the mountains and ocean are. This is especially true in Honolulu, a concrete city nestled between the looming green Ko‘olau mountain ridges and the dazzling blue, seemingly limitless Paci c Ocean.
When it’s time to relax or play, Honolulu urbanites head either mauka (inland) or makai (seaward). Those who crave the shade of a canopy such as myself often migrate to a mountainous area nicknamed Tantalus, where a web of trails offers anything from a short walk in the woods to an all-day adventure.
The three pu‘u (hills) that make up the region — ‘Ōhi‘a, K)kea, and ‘Ualaka‘a — represent some of the last eruptive activity of the Ko‘olau volcano about 100,000 years ago. After hundreds of millenia of quiescence, Ko‘olau awakened and magma came bursting forth from numerous points. When the rock settled, what had been birthed were the pu‘u that form modern-day Tantalus.
THE STATE’S N & ALA HELE TRA I L AND ACCESS PROGRAM MANAGES 77.5 M I LES OF TRA I LS ON O‘AHU.
NĀ ALA HELE IS A TREASURE TROVE OF INTEL ON HAWAI‘I’S MANY GLORIOUS HIKES. JOURNEY ALONG A FAVORITE OF ITS TRAILS IN THIS GUIDED TOUR.
TEXT
_ PETER KEAL I ‘ I THOENE
_ MEAGAN SUZUK I
Other iconic features formed during this rejuvenated stage of volcanic activity in Honolulu are L ē ‘ahi (Diamond Head), Kohelepelepe (Koko Crater), and Hanauma Bay, to name a few.
Such explosive origins laid fertile groundwork. Around 1,000 CE, the most competent seafaring society the world has ever seen discovered the islands and found them teeming with flora and fauna. They settled and farmed crops like ‘uala (sweet potato) on top of Pu‘u ‘Ualaka‘a and kalo (taro) in M)noa Valley. Eventually European
explorers found Hawai‘i. Livestock was introduced, and without fences, ungulates roamed freely through the forests. In these forests, the prized native ‘iliahi (sandalwood) was logged for trade. By 1870, the once forested pu‘u were barren. Water wells dried up and streams lled with dirt runo$. The wisdom of the Native Hawaiians, “Hahai no ka ua i ka ulu la‘au” (Rain always follows the forest), seemed to have fallen to the wayside. In response to the water crisis, Hawai‘i’s government passed legislation between 1876 and 1880 codifying the
I TE FROM THE HUSTLE AND BUSTLE OF
protection of the forests from further development. A massive reforestation e $ort began.
In 1988, the state of Hawai‘i created N) Ala Hele, a trail and access program, in response to concern about loss of access to trails winding through the forests and threats to trails from development. Today, the program manages 77.5 miles of trails on O‘ahu. N) Ala Hele trails are well documented and legal, which means you don’t have to scour blogs or worry about getting ticketed to enjoy an afternoon hike.
HONOLULU’S TRA I LS ARE A WELCOME RESP
URBAN L I FE.
I N 2005, VOLUNTEERS SECURED A PERM I T THROUGH N & ALA HELE TO RESTORE NAT I VE PLANT GROWTH ON A S I X - ACRE SECT I ON OF THE M & NOA CL I FF TRA I L.
One N) Ala Hele trail I turn to often is M)noa Cli$ Trail. When I want a forest adventure, it’s simple enough to park on the shoulder of the road next to the trailhead, and within 15 minutes of hiking, I am peeking o$ the edge of the steep trailside into the quiet neighborhood streets of M)noa Valley.
At rst, on this hike, I see mostly plants that were introduced to O‘ahu to save the watersheds. At the peak of reforestation e$orts in the 1930s, nearly two million trees were planted annually. Unfortunately, the trees chosen were fast growing non-natives such as the albizia and varieties of cus, resulting in sparse forests containing fewer species. Then I arrive at a gate designed to protect native plants from invasive feral pigs. Stepping through, I notice a dramatic change in vegetation. The forest beyond is a multi-layered, species-rich habitat. A group of dedicated volunteers has been working since 2006 to remove alien species and plant natives. Hiking here, I can imagine being one of the rst humans to step foot on O‘ahu.
The trail splits in the middle of the restoration area, and I take the upper Pu‘u ‘Ōhi‘a trail. Heading out of the gated native habitat, I enter a bamboo thicket. After a short climb, I nd myself on the top of Pu‘u ‘Ōhi‘a, next to a modern cell phone tower that now adorns the peak and makes it hard to imagine fountains of lava shooting skyward. Continuing along the Pu‘u ‘Ōhi‘a trail, I descend for a time before arriving back at the road I parked on.
The transition back to the human landscape can be jarring. City life can take a toll on my psyche, and I feel lucky that Honolulu has greenspace to escape to. These forests were exploited, replanted, and then protected again. Today, beyond being a mechanism to recharge the islands’ aquifers, forests are spaces to connect with what the Native Hawaiian people continue to recognize: Forests are divine. They are wao akua, the realm of the gods. We dive into the forest to feel what it means to be a human on this planet.
LIVING WELL
“ That’s just a Hawai‘i practice, right? If you going
invite somebody over, you going feed them.
” — Jamie Makasobe
On Moloka‘i, where clothing label Kealopiko’s manufacturing facility is located, fashion exists on the same plane as education, community, and outreach. For many Hawai‘i residents, the ordinary act of donning an out t can harness and re ect the beliefs one holds dear into a workaday context — a contemporary ritual of choosing what to wear that Kealopiko approaches with creativity, deliberateness, and care. Always considering the importance of moʻolelo and the generationally-held ‘ike of Hawaiian k&puna, the brand’s place-based principles emanate from its headquarters in the small town of
The Sweetest Part
MAGES BY
Kaunakakai, on a rural island composed largely of Hawaiian homesteads. What is re ected, then, in Kealopiko’s designs are the people and the stories that have been passed down, the eco-conscious framework of using only what is needed, and a tradition of sharing everything from food to conversation.
Founders Ane Bakutis, Hina Kneubuhl, and Jamie Makasobe, combined with their close-knit team of workers, make the magic that is Kealopiko. Emerging from their varied and distinct corners of artistic practices and academic backgrounds, Kealopiko is more than just clothing as consumer goods, but a vehicle to come together, collaborate, and share ideas.
Bakutis is a designer at Kealopiko with a background in botany, particularly native plants and ecological restoration. Her work lies in the cyclical tending and development of Hawaiian environmental recovery and protection. Designing graphic patterns with Makasobe and Kneubuhl, the trio’s work merges their deep respect and servitude to the ‘)ina, transforming nature’s everyday gifts into their prints. The kapa maker Kneubuhl is an ‘(lelo Hawai ʻi expert, committing
MANY D I FFERENT CHO I CES ARE CONS I DERED BEFORE THE MAK I NG OF A KEALOP I KO PRODUCT, TR I ED AND TR I ED AGA I N I N VAR I OUS WAYS TO CREATE D I VERSE AND D I ST I NCT I VE DES I GNS
TEXT
_ JASM I NE RE I KO
L I LA LEE
KEALOPIKO, AN ALL-WOMEN RUN HAWAIIAN CLOTHING LABEL, CENTERS ITS DESIGN ETHOS AROUND ‘ĀINA, INTENTION, AND CARE.
her life to the revitalization of the Hawaiian language where she spends the majority of her time within the archive of n&pepa, the Hawaiian language newspapers. An ocean person, Makasobe formerly worked with the shponds at He‘eia on O‘ahu, during the early days of Paepae o He‘eia’s development, as an area caretaker and farmer of moi, a Paci c thread n. Makasobe also collects, documents, and translates the stories of these k&puna. “Kealopiko, that moi icon, is the most delicious part of the sh,” Makasobe said, referencing the name of their brand, which draws inspiration from
the connection k&puna have to the sea, their love of food, and the ner things in life. Walking into the Kealopiko workshop for a studio visit this past summer, it became apparent to me that every day is di$erent. My eye gravitated to the myriads of colorways, overlapping screen print transfers, carvings, fabrics, colors, and inks, all illuminated by the open and sunny windows that bathed the entire house in light. Di$erent screen printing techniques inspired from across Moananui)kea are practiced and the workers are encouraged to bring in their design ideas and methodologies inspired
by the seasons. For example, based on the placement of a plywood woodblock above or below a textile can qualify a design as a Tahitian or Cook Islands technique; there are also many di$erent possibilities for color, most of which are chosen in relation to the time of year with Lono, K&, and other appropriate guides.
For Kawaila Purdy and Coral Mariano, two Moloka‘i women who work at Kealopiko, the job itself is a continuous learning experience. “There is always something to learn,” Mariano said, who handles printing, dying, and cutting at the facility.
FOUNDERS ANE BAKUTIS, HINA KNEUBUHL, AND JAM I E MAKASOBE, COMB I NED W I TH THE I R CLOSE - KN I T TEAM OF WORKERS, MAKE THE MAG I C THAT I S KEALOP I KO
“When we were operating out of their hale before, they taught everyone and we learned so much. I have been working for three years in this factory. Eight years ago, I rst learned how to dye. You are up close and personal.” Mariano brought her daughter into the room from her nap and everyone took a break to eat homemade jerky, chicken long rice, and patties for sandwiches, prepared and brought over from their house down the road by Bakutis’s husband.
“It’s all about setting the space,” Makasobe explained to me later by phone. “How you set the table and how you welcome those to come into what you want them to engage with.” When Kealopiko celebrated its rst anniversary, the founders essentially threw a baby party: a huge l&ʻau with hundreds of people, live bands, and food for friends and families. “If you just wanted to cruise and have good Hawaiian food and listen to good music,
the was happening. That’s just a Hawai‘i practice, right? If you going invite somebody over, you going feed them.”
Many di$erent choices are considered before a nal Kealopiko product, tried and tried again in various ways to create diverse and distinctive designs. By using and utilizing the studio, anyone becomes a part of Kealopiko’s bigger, expanding customizable world where your mark is historical amongst the many that have passed through the studio. There are numerous possibilities and they are all available with the ability to jump right in at whichever point in the process. The creative method of printmaking is an extension of people and storytelling in practice, an active conversation with space to test and modify. Each material down to the dye is sustainable and eco-friendly so that runo$ can water the banana trees when it gets washed outside. “We will use these as stu ngs for pillows!”
Bakutis said, picking up a bag of scraps.
The genealogy is on the tag. Talking story with Kneubuhl, each design is pulled from n&pepa ʻ(lelo Hawai ʻi, the Hawaiian language newspapers, “what Puakea Nogelmeier calls ‘the Hawaiian language repository,’” Kneubuhl said. She explained the philosophy behind their approach, saying, “Generally, we meet and share ideas, and see what’s resonating for us where we’re at. What are the issues of our time that we want to talk about? How may something like moʻolelo help us highlight di $ erent issues that are in our community or that we feel strongly about?”
From there, certain native plants, people, symbols, and animals are chosen and then researched through the Hawaiian newspapers. This year, Kealopiko will be highlighting one particular epic of Ha‘inakolo, which chronicles the adventurous voyages of an ali‘i woman between
THE CREATIVE METHOD OF PRINTMAKING I S AN EXTENS I ON OF PEOPLE AND STORYTELLING IN PRACTICE, AN ACTIVE CONVERSAT I ON W I TH SPACE TO TEST AND MOD I FY.
her birthplace of Waipi‘o to and from Kuaihelani or what Kneubuhl called the “cloud islands.” After experiencing heartbreak and betrayal, she returns to Waipi‘o with her son, and nds herself in the throes of mental illness. She then nds hula and healing through the practice, becoming a major presence within the dance.
“The n&pepa is a massive repository of knowledge that our k&puna intentionally left for us. The newspaper allows us to dive deep into what our k&puna thought and how they looked at the world,” Kneubuhl explained. “That’s the kind of stu$ we are
trying to draw out when we think about our design.” Nearly 100 di$erent newspaper titles were serially published from 1834 to 1948, amounting to over 125,000 densely printed pages (76,000 pages have been digitized, with 30,000 of those currently searchable by word). “They are an invaluable repository of cultural, historical, and contemporary knowledge as well as a space for engaged discourse created predominantly for and by the Hawaiian people,” Kneubuhl said.
As this grounding philosophy guides their work together, the everyday
experience of being Hawaiian in Hawai‘i is the label’s biggest and deepest inspiration. “For those who are interested in getting into Hawaiian fashion, I would encourage them to choose to make choices in their production that re ect their values. That means making choices that put people rst and ʻ)ina rst,” Kneubuhl said, cognizant of how one’s decisions a$ects future generations. “If we say that we’re a Hawaiian fashion brand, then what does that mean? I think those are questions for people to ponder when they’re thinking about this as a path that they might take.”
Voyager 47
Club Lounge at Outrigger Reef Waikiki Beach Resort
Kani Ka Pila Grille
Coral Reef Penthouse
Monkey Pod
A‘o Cultural Center
Plant Kalo, Protect Wai
A NONPROFIT IS REVIVING ANCESTRAL TRADITIONS TO FEED THE HE‘EIA COMMUNITY IN BODY AND SPIRIT.
TEXT BY I MAGES BY
_ LAUREN MCNALLY _ JOHN HOOK
Though life in the islands revolves around the ocean, it is wai, or freshwater, that Hawaiians consider a gift from the gods. Before the Great M)hele in 1848, when Hawai‘i’s lands were redistributed in accordance with Western-style private property ownership, the islands were divided into ahupua‘a, wedge-shaped districts whose bounds are dictated by the ow of freshwater from mauka to makai (from the mountains to the ocean). So intimately aware were Native Hawaiians of the vital role of freshwater in Hawai‘i’s island ecology that all aspects of traditional Hawaiian society were rooted in the understanding that ola i ka wai, or “water is life.”
Located on the lush east side of O‘ahu, the ahupua‘a of He‘eia was particularly rich with this precious resource. Native inhabitants learned to harness He‘eia’s plentiful rainfall and freshwater streams by constructing loko i‘a ( sh ponds) along the coast and lo‘i kalo (taro patches) in the inland valleys and atlands, which acted as retention basins that improved watershed recharge and made He‘eia one of the most agriculturally productive regions on the island.
Taro is thought to have been the dominant crop in He‘eia prior to
plantation times and again until the 1940s, when land-use changes transformed He‘eia’s fertile marshland into fallow pastures. As plans for various luxury developments took shape in the area over the ensuing years, it seemed He‘eia would never return to its former abundance. Met with erce opposition from the community, however, the projects never materialized, and the land continued to sit idle for decades.
Meanwhile, the intricate equilibrium of He‘eia’s adjacent K)ne‘ohe Bay was falling farther and farther into disarray. The region’s fallow lands were ine$ective at retaining water and filtering debris, encouraging terrestrial runoff and offshore sedimentation. Invasive algae introduced to K)ne‘ohe Bay for aquaculture
in the ’70s proliferated unchecked, choking out the bay’s coral reefs. Non-native mangrove planted in He‘eia in the 1920s to mitigate ooding and control erosion also propagated rapidly along the coast, wreaking havoc on the bay’s marine ecosystem.
“As young kids, we grew up driving past this area with a really large mangrove. They called it the ‘stink bridge,’” says Jonathan K)nekoa K&kea-Shultz, recalling the forest of dense mangrove that grew so thick along a particular bridge over He‘eia Stream that it obstructed views of K)ne‘ohe Bay on one side and the emerald
walls of the Ko‘olau mountain range on the other. Shultz continued to frequent the area as a founding member of Paepae o He‘eia, a nonpro t formed in 2001 to restore He‘eia Fishpond — among the largest of many ingeniously engineered Hawaiian shponds that once thrived in K ) ne‘ohe Bay. Over the course of his years working with Paepae o He‘eia and later as a phycologist and K)ne‘ohe Bay marine director with The Nature Conservancy, it became clear to Shultz that to address the bay’s ecological challenges at the source, e$orts also needed to be directed upstream.
With support from The Nature Conservancy and the Ko‘olaupoko Hawaiian Civic Club in 2009, Shultz took on the role of executive director of K)ko‘o ‘Ōiwi, a nonpro t that in 2010 was granted a 38-year lease by the Hawai‘i Community Development Authority to convert a 405-acre parcel in the He‘eia wetlands into a productive agricultural and cultural district. For Shultz, that meant returning much of the land back into lo‘i kalo, both to provide the community with a nutrient-dense food source and to revitalize an e$ective form of resource management — something Shultz believes the k&puna
S I NCE 2010, K & KO‘O ‘ ŌI W I HAS RESTORED PRODUCT I V I TY TO APPROXI MATELY S I X ACRES OF LO‘ I KALO AND CLEARED AN ADD I T I ONAL 20 ACRES FOR D I VERS I F I ED AGR I CULTURE I N HE‘E I A.
honolulumuseum.org
(elders) of He‘eia understood when they originally developed the land for taro cultivation.
There was much to be done before taro replanting could begin: divert water into the ‘auwai (canals) that irrigated He‘eia’s former network of taro patches, clear the land of invasive vegetation, rehabilitate the soil. To get it done, K)ko‘o ‘Ōiwi turned to the community for help, hosting workdays that enabled volunteers to take part in the restoration e$ort and, in doing so, forge a closer relationship with the land. “It’s important that we have non-farmers coming in to work the land because non-farmers are part of our food system too,” Shultz says, explaining that in addition to helping tend the lo‘i, visitors are invited to learn the history of He‘eia and the cultural and spiritual practices of those who inhabited it; wander along paths newly lined with fruit-bearing trees such as ‘ulu (breadfruit) and mai‘a (banana); and gather seasonal blooms from an agroforest that K)ko‘o ‘Ōiwi named Pu‘ulani, referring to a spiritual ridge between generations past, present, and future.
“When we planted Pu‘ulani, the intention was for it to be a place that feeds us in spirit,” says K)ko‘o ‘Ōiwi’s lo‘i manager, Mahealani Botelho. “Meaning we planted things that could be used for medicine, hula, building hale (houses), and lei making.” Raised in
a family of lei makers, Botelho remembers asking her aunt how to improve her lei-making skills, to which her aunt replied: “Have a relationship with the ‘)ina (land).”
Taking that advice to heart, a mo‘olelo (legend) Botelho often shares with visitors is about the name behind He‘eia’s valley of ʻIolekaʻa, Hawaiian for “rolling rat.” As the legend goes, the rats of the Ko‘olau mountains were fed up with rats from elsewhere on the island stealing their food, so they tricked the other rats into rolling down the mountain to their deaths. “The Ko‘olau rats knew their ‘)ina so well, they were able to protect it,” Botelho says. “If you know your ‘)ina, then you can protect your resource.”
To that end, K ) ko‘o ‘ Ō iwi sees its mission as two-fold: nurture the land and feed the community in body and spirit. The hope is that, in nourishing the ahupua‘a of He‘eia and those who care for it, the region will also see a resurgence of native culture and wildlife, including the endangered ‘alae ‘ula (Hawaiian moorhen) and ae‘o (Hawaiian stilt) that once ourished there. “We want to continue doing what our ancestors told us to do,” Shultz says. “The sound of the birds — hearing those native systems — is a way that our ancestors communicated with us in the past, and it’s how our ancestors communicate with us now.”
Kamehameha III and Nā hi
ena
ena
—oil
portraits by Robert Dampier, 1825
Already, they look at the artist with teenage skepticism. Or maybe it’s boredom among the ti leaves where each holds an old spear or k)hili— objects turned exotic for people they’ll never meet. They appear uncomfortable in all these layers meant to symbolize a kingdom they have just inherited. As the plaque tells it: measles struck their brother dead, his body shipped on the same voyage that brought the artist, more visitors, and foreign gifts. Now they can’t hear his stories about the other city’s cobblestone streets, Westminster Abbey, or seamstress shop windows doting white-collared shirts like the ones they wear beneath red and yellow feathered capes. They can’t fathom a kingdom without their brother in it, much less the airconditioned museum where I watch and wait. They can’t even give me permission to stand here and use their names.
