Across verdant mountain ranges and picturesque coasts, Hawai‘i’s lush bounty has long invigorated those who call the islands home. Artists of every persuasion have been and continue to be inspired by this elemental exuberance, generating a creative spirit that manifests works of ingenuity.
In this edition of Violet, we celebrate those whose lives are deeply rooted in a sense of place: creatives crafting a more nuanced portrait of their island home; the German American artist Otto Piene’s elemental Hawai‘i period; a pair of Native Hawaiian musicians rekindling the historic oeuvre of Queen Lili‘uokalani.
We travel through the country roads of Hanalei, whose small-town charms are kept alive by a tight-knit community, and across the verdant landscape of Ka‘ū, where a hardy band of farmers have steadily turned the region into a must-know for coffee connoisseurs. We also meet artists and makers who have transformed the natural into the transcendent, whether here or afar. A Native Hawaiian painter finds inspiration in the lava-hardened coast of his native Kalapana, while a Japanese woodworker gives new life to his country’s prized trees.
As you explore the natural wonders that give life to the world around us, we hope these stories lead you to see your surroundings with new inspiration and fill you with a renewed sense of adventure for your island home.
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Visual that amplify
notions
AR TS
the soul
of the city
Looking to the Sky
Text by Anna Harmon
Images by John Hook , Chris Rohrer and courtesy of Sprüth Magers and the Otto Piene Estate
Otto Piene, who designed the light sculptures in the Hawai‘i State Capitol building’s House and Senate chambers, was a pioneer of kinetic art.
One week before Governor John Burns’ 1968 inauguration, the 40-year-old artist Otto Piene stood on scaffolding at the center of the Hawai‘i State Capitol Senate chamber inspecting a polished aluminum orb approximately 80 inches in diameter, embedded with light bulbs, and covered in nautilus shells. Intended to call to mind the moon, it was one of a celestial pair; the other, a 14-karatgold-plated sphere dotted with smaller spheres, now hung 20 feet above the floor of the House of Representatives. From the courtyard both could be viewed, distantly, through the sunken chambers’ glass panes. All that was to be done was to turn on the lights.
In 1967, the Hawai‘i State Capitol Fine Arts Committee began its search for artists to make original works to adorn the new State Capitol building, which would be completed in 1969. Along with a mosaic in the central courtyard and two large-scale woven tapestries, the committee was commissioning two major lighting fixtures for the legislative chambers. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin described them first as “a chandelier of heroic proportions,” and then followed with a self-correction: “These fixtures are considered as structures transmitting light, rather than as conventional chandeliers.”
While the selected artists for the mural and tapestries both called Hawai‘i home (Tadashi Sato and Ruthadell Anderson, respectively), the German artist behind the “kinetic
Translation by Yukari Whittingham 翻訳 = ウィティングハム ゆかり
light sculptures” came all the way from the former Province of Westphalia, by way of the U.S. East Coast. Piene dreamed up two spherical sculptures that would anchor and artfully illuminate the rooms. Inspired by the sun and moon, the specular fixtures would pulse with light and evoke rainbows through colored light bulbs or prismatic refractions. The “Sun” has 132 gold orbs on its surface, each with a bulb behind it, which he programmed to brighten and dim in a breathlike rhythm. “The sun alternates with a sequence of projections, mainly for nighttime viewing, when people peer through the glass panes,” he said. The “Moon,” made of polished aluminum, features 620 pearlized nautilus shells a Pearl City dealer sourced from Fiji, illuminated from behind by white and colored light bulbs. Originally, it was intended to work its way from white light through the colors of the rainbow, and the sculpture could shine a specific color depending on the holiday.
As Piene recalls at 86 years old in a 2014 video, “Illuminating the Legislative Process,” he was asked to consider the State Capitol art project. Having never been to Hawai‘i, he visited the islands to see its nature, culture, and technology. Piene observed “how strong the role of the sun was in life and work in Hawai‘i, and how equally important the moon was, and that the tides and the sunrise and sunset were reigning all the life in Hawai‘i more than other states and countries.” This admiration of “the closeness between nature and life and work” left the artist impressed.
But the light sculptures he created also reflected the work he had been refining and expanding for years, which first brought him to the attention of the committee. From 1949 to 1957, Piene studied art, teaching, and philosophy in Germany while also actively creating. The year he graduated, he held a series of one-night-only pop-up exhibitions in Dusseldorf with friends, which led to the formation of Zero, a forward-thinking artist group that challenged the bounds of painting and explored new media. “As at the countdown when rockets take off,” Piene said in 1964, “zero is the incommensurable zone in which the old state turns into the new.” (Artists that later engaged with Zero included Nam June Paik, Yayoi Kusama, and Jean Tinguely.)
On display at those early exhibitions were “raster paintings” that Piene created by stenciling oil paint through a perforated surface of up to 10,000 hand-punched holes onto a canvas; shining light through them made projections he termed “light ballet,” which he developed into a one-man light ballet show in Dusseldorf in 1959. Using the money he made from the sales of these works, he began building bigger and more elaborate light ballets.
Simultaneously, he began experimenting with smoke drawings, in which he would adhere soot to paper, which progressed to fire paintings in the 1960s, in which he would set fire to an adhesive sprayed onto a painting
By 1964, he and the Zero artists had been invited to the United States, which was a turning point in Piene’s career. Through group shows and other commissions, Piene began to further expand his medium of light. In 1965, he held a solo light ballet exhibition at Howard Wise Gallery in New York City, which featured multiple polished aluminum globes covered with lights timed to go off in phases.
It was at this show that he met George Keyes, who invited him to give a lecture at Harvard University on the topic of light as a creative medium. The next year, Keyes shared with Piene his plans for a new Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Piene became one of the center’s first fellows in 1968 and then its director from 1974 to 1994. Piene’s eventual arrival in Hawai‘i may have been through this MIT connection, too: Sitting on the Hawai‘i State Capitol Architect Advisory Committee and consulting for the Hawai‘i State Capitol Fine Arts Committee was architect Pietro Belluschi, who until 1965 had been MIT’s Dean of Technology. In his early years at the MIT center, Piene established a peripatetic pattern that continued until at least 1990. He would go to Europe about once a month, where he had expanded his studios; return to Groton, Massachusetts, for a time; and then go to Hawai‘i, where he continued to work.
Piene’s arrival in Hawai‘i for the Capitol commission came at an interesting time in his career. After relocating to the United States, he found an opportunity for his canvas to expand from indoors to outdoors, which he came to call “Sky Art” in 1969. One of the earliest of these experiments took place at Kapi‘olani Park, sponsored by the Honolulu Academy of Arts. On September 19, 1970, 10 polyethylene tubes totaling 2,500 feet in length were inflated over the grounds, tethered by 1,500 feet of rope to which windsock sculptures were temporarily attached. Throughout the day and into the night, the tubes hung in the sky, floating and whipping with the wind. At night, one summary of the event said, “it looked like a giant animal that came out of the sea.”
At the same time, the Honolulu Academy of Arts hosted a show with Piene titled “Light / Air / Sky / Pax,” which featured indoor inflatables, a menacing set of black inflated flowers titled “Fleurs du Mal,” alongside a collection of sculptures and paintings. The entrance to the exhibition was another inflated work, titled “Red Sundew 2,” made of bright red silk with a doorway near its center, where inflating tentacle-like tubes undulated.
Piene quickly stacked Sky Art exhibits. In 1970 he also created the “Red Helium Sky Line” in Pittsburg and the “Washington Sky Event” at the Washington Monument. Two years later, he floated an inflated rainbow nearly 2,000 feet long for the closing ceremony of the Munich
Olympics. By 1976, he flew red tubes from four black smokestacks on the Minneapolis waterfront. He continued making these installations up until he died in 2014.
At the same time he was assembling these massive installations, Piene continued to paint and experiment with other types of installations. At least three works carry names from Hawai‘i: the oil-and-fire-on-canvas paintings titled “Mauna Loa” (1974) and “Kilauea” (1975), and “Black Hawaii” (1974), a color serigraph on cardboard. In 1976, he also created a sculpture of steel rods and prisms titled “Pleiades” that projects from a concrete wall in the quiet courtyard of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Institute for Astronomy, where it can still be visited.
Today, “Pleiades” is missing a few prisms, and the light sculptures at the Hawai‘i State Capitol only turn on and off, having lost their kinetic functionality due to outdated technology. But the impact of Piene’s work remains, just as the essence of the islands stayed with the artist throughout his life. “I have not lost my somewhat instant love to Hawai‘i,” Piene said shortly before he passed. “It’s been very important in my life.”
When the Hawai‘i Island painter Nainoaikapoliokaehukai Rosehill returned to his hometown of Puna from art school on the U.S. mainland in 2018, his homecoming was a period of deep change, isolation, and uncertainty. That year, 10-meter-high lava flows ran through Lower Puna, covering 13.7 square miles and creating 875 acres of new land. His community lost homes and everyday gathering places that can now only be remembered in mele (songs), words, and photographs.
“I started thinking about all these places that I grew up in not existing anymore, all of these memories that no
longer have physical attachments to them,” Rosehill says. “These are all the beautiful moments in my mind that I can return to.”
Surrounded by a family of musicians and dancers growing up, Rosehill was the first to pursue the graphic arts as more than just a hobby. While at North Park University in Chicago, he found himself drawn to paint. Marveling at a professor’s extensive catalog of pigments, the burgeoning artist considered each hue a lesson in its own right: He started to see color as sculptural and historicized, an understanding of material that would underscore his later works.
Soon after, Rosehill began taking burnt sienna, a color traditionally used as an understudy base layer, and bringing it into the foreground, an ongoing gesture throughout his body of work: drawing forth something meant to be buried underneath. During the pandemic, he collected rocks from a beach that no longer exists and gathered plants, shells, and organic dyes from other sites of personal significance. He did not have an array of pigments as his professor did, but he had a working archive of materials to inspire him. Rosehill takes great care to list these materials, as he does in “Deiwos” (2022): “hili kukui, alaea, hua moa, pau kukui, limu akiaki, wai ulu, pilali, kulukulu‘ā, synthesized yellow iron oxide derived from an early 20th-century shotgun, mineral pigments, and soot.”
Fusing inspiration from contemporary Chinese painters, such as Xu Longsen, with his studies and research on mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogies) and mo‘olelo (stories), Rosehill draws from many sources at once when assembling his mixed media works, allowing them to emerge like a memory in the finished piece. “Ikua” (2022) stands as an anchoring point for Rosehill, a dialectic of form and Native symbolism that deconstructs two paintings from 2019 and meshes them together to become one. An inventory of its media alone suggests a slew of disparate stories: “painted with the burnt bones of owls and elk killed by last year’s winter, fermented mango, turmeric, expired tattoo ink, taro (‘ula‘ula poni and mana ‘ōpelu) dye, and acrylic paint on handmade mulberry paper.”
The places significant to Rosehill’s identity as Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) have radically changed in the past century. Keeping personal and subjective records of joyful moments and the community lifestyle of Puna remains incredibly valuable to him. “It’s about connecting the family album into the role of the mele and the oli (chant) as prephotography methods of things through memory that we love persisting,” he says. “Songs are mechanisms for us to tap back into those memories, and art is a way for us to express those not-so-physical feelings of those places, and having those places become immortalized.”
One of the only vestiges of the Kalapana community that survived the 1990 Kīlauea lava flow of his parents’ time
Rosehill melds inspiration from contemporary Chinese painters with his studies on mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogies) and mo‘olelo (stories) to create works that layer past and present. Pictured above, “Ikuwa” (2019).
is the Star of the Sea Painted Church founded by Belgian Catholic missionary Father Evarist Gielen, built between 1927 and 1928 on the shoreline of Kaimū Beach. (It was lifted and relocated from Kalapana by a trailer truck to the end of Highway 130 ahead of the advancing lava flow.) Elaborate, life-sized paintings adorn the church’s Colonial Revival-style interior. They include Gielen’s depictions of scenes and religious characters from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, all painted at night by the light of an oil lamp. In 1978, Hilo artist George Lorch was commissioned by Father Joseph Edward Avery to paint a series of frescoes depicting traditional teachings of Catholicism on the existing panels. Lorch created scenes inspired by the seven sacraments, the Virgin Mary, saints, and angels. Father Avery, a priest from Massachusetts, spoke ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i fluently, and some of the featured scripture painted by George Lorch is written in Hawaiian.
Each pew has a plaque with the names of the people who used to sit there, including Rosehill’s great-greatgrandparents, who were among the Painted Church’s original parishioners. “It is the only physical thing that exists in that area that speaks to the village being there before,” he says. “It being a church and being filled with paintings and being connected to me through my family— it feels significant.”
Rosehill considers it “an architectural equivalent to a photo in a family album.” “I can enter and go inside,” he says. “We are intimately tied to that place to try and figure out what that means, how to keep that relationship alive today.” Like the landscape itself—more often in flux than dormant over the past century—the church is “a manifestation of diaspora,” he explains, “where you are there, but you can never really be there. It’s an impenetrable barrier between the ideal and the material world that mimics a lot of what religious art speaks to. The impassable barrier between the divine and the temporal. Eternity and what is mortal.”
Kihawahine, the high-ranking Maui chiefess who was transformed into a mo‘o (lizard) upon her death, lives again in Rosehill’s painting “The Passion of 40,000 Rivers” (2023), reflecting where he stands now in his artistic practice. Kihawahine approaches the viewer with an authoritative presence, embodying a shifting and expressive power over the land. “The heavens sough and murmur above her,” Rosehill says of its composition. “Out of death, she rises, stronger than ever; she is a testament, a memory, a lesson, a river of change.”
Like photo albums binding together places lost, people passed, and time elapsed, Rosehill seeks to connect everything around him: “I would love to show that through my art—that quality of living. To live in a way that is so moving that people, after you pass, still carry you with them.”
A new generation bucks the aesthetic and narrative stereotypes that have defined the islands.
新しい世代は、島々を定義してきた美的感覚や物語のステレオタ イプに逆らう
Every city contains an element that somehow calcifies into the most widely exportable cliché: Los Angeles has Hollywood; New York has finance; Hawai‘i has surfing. Hawai‘i, with its famed natural beauty, is better known by outsiders as a destination for water sports, a vacationer’s “paradise,” or a real estate developer’s dreams. Yet a group of Hawai‘i-based creative directors are proving that the islands are a fertile ground for the creative industry too.
Using their chosen avenues of expression—branding, publishing, wayfinding, production—these individuals are generating work that pushes against the stereotypical aesthetic of lovely hula hands and beach boys, which has dominated the popular imagination about Hawai‘i since the mid-century. Instead they represent a push toward a more authentic vision of the archipelago that gained steam during the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, one that incorporates Hawai‘i’s distinct culture—derived from Indigenous Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) and a longstanding immigrant community—and its complex history and politics—in which sovereignty, land, and water rights are ongoing conversations—to create work that is grounded in people and place.
In this way, Hawai‘i provides boundless inspiration, a vital element for any creative. Working here, though, isn’t without challenges. The market is smaller than others on the continent, with generally fewer artistic opportunities. Only one university has a BFA program, and there’s a general lack of institutional and public support. Then there’s the exorbitantly high cost of living, rivaling major cities, combined with overall lower wage rates and salaries. SmartAsset, an online resource for consumer-focused financial information, found that individuals in Honolulu must make $53.80 per hour (the current minimum wage is $14) and couples with two kids must make $299,520 per year to live comfortably using the 50/30/20 rule.
Yet it’s always been difficult to be creative, regardless of time and place. Rather than dwell on the downsides, we asked this select group, who represent a sliver of the industry at large, about their missions, approaches, hopes, and industry insights to paint a more nuanced portrait of living, working, and producing creative work in Hawai‘i today.
Her project’s elevator pitch: A publishing imprint for artists’ books and a platform for critical, experimental voices in Hawai‘i and throughout the tropical diaspora
On how being from Hawai‘i impacts her work
“I am not Indigenous, nor would I claim that I am ‘of’ place, but having generational family roots in Hawai‘i has allowed me to access a certain point of view and sensitivity to issues of place that shape how I operate as a person and, by extension, how I operate professionally. I prioritize narratives that feel as complex and multilayered as the issues of Hawai‘i. I embrace hybridity and queer identity, rather than falling into categorizations that constrict and oppress. The culture of Hawai‘i is fluid and alive—it is not a historical footnote.”
On her creative mission and hopes for the industry’s future
“My entire creative project is about upending the kind of careless appropriation and aestheticization of the tropics that have exploited and silenced native cultures—work that has been done, more often than not, by branding and marketing teams, and executed by creative directors, here and elsewhere. I hope that the industry sees the importance of hiring people of place. But even more so, I hope that the industry can see past its own capitalist intentions and play a more active role in actually supporting creative community here, and to steward the ideas and people of Hawai‘i.”
On if it’s easier or harder to be a creative director in Hawai‘i today
“I feel like there’s a suggestion that being based in Hawai‘i is a disadvantage, and I don’t subscribe to that thought at all. Hawai‘i has a rich legacy of nurturing remarkable talent across various creative fields. But there is an interesting dynamic. It’s as if there’s a constant need for our artistic expressions to be vetted and approved by other cities. Ironically, these same outside observers frequently claim to be inspired by Hawai‘i’s unique sense of place, yet they also assert their supposed superiority over our island home when it suits their narrative. My goal is to embrace and cultivate my authentic self and continuously question and explore what it truly means to be me in this extraordinary place.”
On her hopes for Hawai‘i’s creative industry
“My hope is that our state government recognizes the immense value of the creative industry by investing more in public education from K–12, as well as UH Mānoa, that goes beyond Hawai‘i’s Common Core Standards. It is crucial that the state acknowledges the power of art and design as invaluable tools for problem-solving, storytelling, mentorship, and innovation, particularly in the integration of AI into creative processes. By nurturing these disciplines, we can unlock new avenues to balance the state’s financial growth and our relationship with the land, its history of indigenous land dispossession, and its people.”
BEN PERREIRA & TAYLOR OKATA
Founders, Passionfruit
Born and raised: Kona (Ben), O‘ahu (Taylor)
Claim to fame: Creative consultants for Jacquemus “Le Splash” F/W 2022 show held in Kualoa
On building cultural bridges
“We don’t want to have that conversation of, ‘If you’re creative you have to leave to make a living.’ Our hope is to bridge that by 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. We want to give creatives here the opportunities to see and experience and be part of shoots where they are involved in the conversation and decisionmaking.”—Ben Perreira
On operating from an ethical framework
“In the industry, we always hear these words of inclusivity and representation, which are obviously very important, but they can be marketing terms. We always say Passionfruit has an intention-based approach to projects, and that comes down to every decision, be it behind the scenes, like the local cuisine served, the photographers, and the dressers, or in front of the camera, like the people in the audience or the models in the Jacquemus show. It really was making sure that we could fill in local talent at every level, not just the most visible.”—Taylor Okata
“We’re
bringing informational knowledge and cultural nuance from both perspectives, which is what our unique position offers. We’re not just people from Hawai‘i, and we’re not just New Yorkers.”
—Ben Perreira
ANN HaRaKaWa
CEO & Managing Director, Two Twelve
Born and raised: O‘ahu
Seeing the (wayfinding) signs: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Ward Village, Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, Queen’s Medical Center
On working in Hawai‘i versus the continent
“For our projects, Hawai‘i offers more instances to be placebased and connected to Hawaiian culture. We try to integrate a similar sense of place and culture to other projects outside of the islands, but the fact is that most don’t have that same kind of connection to the area and the stories around them. There aren’t as many design opportunities here, but there is a tremendous amount of creative energy in the community.”
On collaborations with Kānaka Maoli cultural practitioners
“In 2015, we were designing signage for Ward condominiums and brought in Sig and Kūha‘o Zane as cultural consultants. It was groundbreaking at the time from a design standpoint because most people were doing it with language. The Zanes went back to the primary sources of chants and helped us bring that meaning into our designs. With the Skyline, better known as the rail, Ramsay Taum helped us understand the neighborhoods and the deeper Hawaiian metaphors for station maps. Wayfinding in Hawai‘i means making people aware of the deep ‘āina connection and meaning and respect for the land, people, and real culture. Not just for the sun and ocean or the mountains.”
of Two
projects are enriched by a cultural and historical understanding
Many
Twelve’s Hawai‘i
of the islands. Top image by Tom Takata Photography, courtesy of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s Campus Design Lab. Bottom image courtesy of Two Twelve.
“I’m enjoying the shift in the creative industry as they incorporate culturally aware topics in their campaigns. If you can think of this place as the Hawaiian Kingdom and not the State of Hawai‘i, it can open you up to a different approach and execution.”
Erik Ries
Creative Ideator & Conversation Instigator
Born: California
Raised: Oregon
Hawai‘i resident: 13 years
Where you’ve seen (some of) his work: Posters for Girl, Interrupted, The Green Knight, and The Morning Show
On making creative work in the islands as an outsider
“My main means of financial survival comes from Hollywood and leaves me out of the scramble to find clients on the island. The time I did try to break into the local creative scene, I found it to be very difficult. Any creative here needs to have a strong sense of relationship to the local community. Without it, I don’t believe you can be successful. That said, when I’m dealing with anything specifically Hawaiian in subject matter, I ask for direct input from, and the perspective of, someone in the community. I try to ensure I’m being culturally aware and correct whenever possible, and to ‘celebrate, don’t appropriate.’ At least, that’s the goal.”
On common misconceptions about Hawai‘i
“Hawai‘i should not be viewed as a playground for the world’s travelers. It is the home of everyday people trying to survive, like anywhere else. People are working two, maybe three, jobs just to make ends meet. Add that onto [Hawai‘i] being an illegally occupied sovereign nation that has had its people’s culture suppressed since the overthrow, and it’s an extremely complex environment to navigate. It should be approached with sensitivity and respect. Many from the outside have tried and failed.”
“As a Native Hawaiian creative director, defining what is authentically Hawai‘i is my responsibility. With growing relevance of Native Hawaiian culture, placekeeping, and an increased interest in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, I see a modern Hawai‘i finding its identity by rooting itself in culture and bucking the cliché and stereotypes that defined Hawai‘i for so long.”
—Scott Na‘auao
On limiting aesthetics and producing better work
“Since I’m not from here, I see things differently than Scott does, which allows us to have a fresh perspective and sensitivity. It forces us to tease out how to make something interesting and relevant in a place with so many different cultures. The challenge is the ball and chain of clients wanting that classic, ‘nostalgic’ visual era of Hawaiiana from the 1950s to 1970s. We try to be authentic, but even authenticity is a fraught word that requires attention because it means defining whose perspective is authentic and whose isn’t. A lot of us are asking those questions and the creative coming out of here has gotten stronger.”—Jesse Arneson
“I see a
modern Hawai‘i finding its identity by rooting itself in culture and bucking the cliché and stereotypes that defined ‘Hawai‘i’ for so long.”
—Scott Na‘auao
MAlia WiSCH
Partner & Creative Director, Wall-to-Wall Studios
Born and raised: Kailua
A glimpse into her branding universe: Bishop Museum, Capitol Modern, Kalapawai Market
On a creative agency’s role in telling authentic stories
“We had a funny conversation with a hotel client that wanted to show the ‘golden age’ of Waikīkī. We pushed back and asked, ‘Well, what year was that?’ Because there have been many. Pre-contact, it was a royal playhouse for the ali‘i. Before statehood, there was the steamship era. Then there was the Beach Boys and Elvis. The client believed it was this one time, but really they were mixing a bunch of eras and making an assumption. Our job is to ask which one are we embodying? We’re very careful and thoughtful about when to apply a Hawaiian story. There has to be a valid connection, otherwise we won’t go there.”
On how design can deepen an understanding of Hawaiian culture
“When I started working here in the early aughts, we started to shift away from designing flowers and hula girls and diving into culture and stories. Hawaiian scholars, like Mary Kawena Pukui, and the renaissance of the ’70s gave us deeper access to culture. It went from just selling Hawai‘i to wrestling with the question: Where is that line between cultural appropriation and using a story because it makes visitors feel good, versus truly educating and benefiting visitors and residents? I’m a third-generation resident who isn’t Native Hawaiian. I’ve learned more about Hawaiian culture working as a designer because we have to dig into these stories and find ones that really connect and make sense.”
“We tell our clients, if you’re not from Hawai‘i, that’s OK, just don’t hide it. Don’t pretend. Just make that part of the story. One client was this crazy mashup of East Coast and Hawai‘i, and that is part of authentic Hawai‘i, right? Something fun and beautiful about this place is that it is a crazy mashup of everything.”
A sense
CUL TU RE of place
that
fosters the human spirit
Echoes of Aloha
Text by Martha Cheng
Images by John Hook and Vincent Bercasio
Two contemporary Hawaiian artists are reviving Queen
Lili‘uokalani’s musical legacy for the screen and stage.
TTo compose was as natural to me as to breathe,” wrote Lili‘uokalani in her autobiography, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. “And this gift of nature, never having been suffered to fall into disuse, remains a source of the greatest consolation to this day … even when I was denied the aid of any instrument I could transcribe to paper the tones of my voice.” Many know Lili‘uokalani, the last reigning monarch of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, penned the ballad “Aloha ‘Oe,” and perhaps some already know her as a prolific composer in her own right. But fewer may know the wide range of her repertoire, from waltzes to a comic opera
In her 79 years, the queen composed more than 150 mele (songs), including “He Mele Lāhui Hawai‘i,” a national anthem at the request of King Kamehameha V in 1866, and a series of songs that she wrote and published anonymously in 1895 in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Makaainana so that she could communicate with her people while imprisoned at ‘Iolani Palace.
A testament to how the regent’s music continues to inspire and engage today, an upcoming film and opera delve into Lili‘uokalani as a songwriter. Here’s a look at those two works in progress—from two female Native Hawaiian musicians—which connect deeply to the queen’s musical oeuvre.
Translation by Yukari Whittingham 翻訳 = ウィティングハム ゆかり
A Documentary Film
The Nā Hōkū Hanohano award-winning musician Starr Kalahiki’s first job out of high school was singing for Japanese weddings at Kawaiaha‘o Church. In the chancel, the then-18-year-old frequently sang the first verse of “Ke Aloha O Ka Haku,” also known as “The Queen’s Prayer” because it was written by Lili‘uokalani while under house arrest. Then, a year later, Kalahiki took an ethnic studies class at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. “That was when I learned the truth of the illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom,” says Kalahiki, now 38. “And I got triggered because I was singing ‘The Queen’s Prayer’ nine times a day.” Kalahiki quit the job, but as much as she tried to turn away from the music and the emotions it provoked, it was difficult for the singer to escape one of Hawai‘i’s most important composers. As part of a choir group, Kalahiki performed from The Queen’s Songbook, a compilation of Lili‘uokalani’s music first published in 1999, throughout churches in Europe. And in 2008, when cast in Waikīkī Nei at the 750-seat Royal Hawaiian Theater, she found herself singing “Ku‘u Pua I Paoakalani,” which the queen also wrote while imprisoned. On the surface, it is a mele about Lili‘uokalani’s gardens in Pauoa Valley and Waikīkī, but in subtext, pays tribute to a supporter who brought her flowers wrapped in newspaper, enabling her to read the current events her captors denied her. “I think I’m running away, but here I am again,” Kalahiki says.
By 2014, however, Kalahiki was ready to face headon what she earlier could not. Her college music theory teacher, John Signor, suggested they embark on what became The Lili‘u Project, a series of live performances in collaboration with other musicians to explore the queen’s songs in unique ways. (In one performance, the audience was blindfolded.) “I think a combination of things happens when we sing her mele,” Kalahiki says. “Manaola [Yap], the designer, is the one who taught me that mele is a poetic expression of time and space. And by singing it, it’s such a healing, liberating exercise, reclaiming the language with these beautiful melodies.”
A few years ago, Kalahiki and Signor began work on a documentary film, weaving a biography of Lili‘uokalani’s life in music with Kalahiki’s journey as she performs the queen’s songs at home and abroad. For Kalahiki, a turning point came in 2019, when she stood with the protestors against the Thirty Meter Telescope at Maunakea and sang “The Queen’s Prayer,” the same song that had caused her such anguish decades before. She hadn’t originally planned on singing it, but at that juncture, “I knew that I was born and bred and healed for that moment,” she recalls. “It was the perfect song for the moment, and I’m like, ‘This is why God made me.’”
The documentary is still in production, with an undetermined release date, but whatever the venue might be, Kalahiki feels a responsibility to share Lili‘uokalani’s songs. Many were personal compositions specific to a certain time and space but not bound by them, as is clear by their resonance today. They were written, Kalahiki believes, “with the intention of healing the lāhui for time immemorial.”
The composer and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti is writing the libretto to her new opera entirely in Lili‘uokalani’s own words. For Lili‘u, set during the queen’s eight-month imprisonment in 1895, Lanzilotti draws on Lili‘uokalani’s recently published bilingual diary entries and autobiography, along with lyrics from the seven songs she composed while held prisoner.
“Opera is one way of unifying all of the arts,” Lanzilotti says, referencing how the art form can incorporate music, literature, drama, visual art in the scenery and the costumes, and dance into “one fantastic performance.”
Beyond Lili‘uokalani’s talent as a musician and composer, Lanzilotti was drawn to the queen as a leader, particularly in how she chose to express herself and campaign for her people through many mediums, from writing music and publishing her work to quilting and arranging flowers as a form of resistance throughout her time in custody. “So expressing her incredible voice as a leader and role model felt fitting to do so in not only a form that honored her many talents,” Lanzilotti says, “but also a form that she herself chose to use to express herself.” In this, Lanzilotti is referring to Mohailani: a Hawaiian Historical Comic Opera, which was written under the name Madame Aorena but is attributed to Lili‘uokalani and presumed to be written around 1897.
Lanzilotti, 40, was raised in Honolulu and spent about 20 years studying and working in the continental U.S. and Europe. She is also the great-granddaughter of former Governor Samuel Wilder King and First Lady Pauline Nawahine Evans; the latter grew up visiting Lili‘uokalani at Washington Place almost every day, watching her mother and the queen play piano and sing together. Lanzilotti moved back to O‘ahu in 2021 and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for with eyes the color of time, a composition inspired by her childhood spent among the artworks at The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. For Lili‘u, she has received funding from organizations including the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation as well as Opera America. “I feel that it’s my kuleana (responsibility) to tell this story … from the Kānaka Maoli perspective and in her own words, which was extremely important to me,” Lanzilotti says in a video on the Lili‘u opera website. There is a richness that lies in Lili‘uokalani’s words.
As Lanzilotti writes in an article for the Forge Project, an Indigenous-led cultural organization, “In ‘Ke Aloha O Ka Haku,’ the word ‘haku’ has many potential interpretations. Given that diacriticals were not standard use at the time, there are even more possibilities. ‘Haku’ has always been interpreted as ‘Lord,’ inferring that the work is a religious song, however a purely religious reading misses the gorgeous nuance of Lili‘u’s lyrics and the importance of kaona (hidden meanings) in her writing.” Lanzilotti highlights the word’s additional meanings: to compose; to braid, as a lei; core, as in “pōhaku,” or stone, and “haku ipu,” or pulp and seeds of melon; to rise up, as the moon; and “e ku‘u haku” (“my chief”). Applying these kaona, “Ke Aloha
40歳のランジロッティはホノルルで育ち、約20年間アメリカ大陸とヨ ーロッパで勉強と仕事をした。サミュエル・ワイルダー・キング元知事とポーリ ン・ナワヒネ・エヴァンス大統領夫人の曾孫でもあり、後者はほぼ毎日ワシント ンプレイスにリリウオカラニを訪ね、母親と女王が一緒にピアノを弾いたり歌 ったりするのを見て育った。ランジロッティは2021年にオアフ島に戻り、ホノ ルルのコンテンポラリーミュージアムの作品の中で過ごした幼少期にインスパ イアされた作曲「with eyes the color of time」で2022年のピューリッツァ ー賞音楽部門の最終選考に残った。『Liliʻu』では、Native Arts & Cultures FoundationやOpera Americaなどの団体から資金援助を受けている。
The libretto for Lanzilotti’s latest experimental opera is written entirely in Lili‘uokalani’s own words, excerpts of which Lanzilotti previewed at Washington Place in 2024.
O Ka Haku” opens up significant dimensions to its title and lyrics.
“Told as a contemporary experimental opera, Lili‘u shows that Indigenous people are still here, and that our language is vibrant and living as it engages with modern discourse and expression,” Lanzilotti says. The release date has yet to be announced, but she says an integral part of the presentation of the opera will be free hula, language, and cultural workshops in the week leading up to the performance to “create space to come together through language and culture.”
In this visual melody of breezy linens, textured silk, and patterned sundresses, Shangri La artistin-residence Taimane exudes an eclectic elegance inspired by the creative campus and former home of Doris Duke.
Photography by Harold Julian
Styled by Ara Laylo
Hair and Makeup by Tamiko Hobin
Modeled by Taimane
Production by Taylor Kondo and Kaitlyn Ledzian
Styling assistance by Cindy Nguyen
Photography assistance by Blake Abes
Production assistance by Lelaine
Vintage gold-embroidered Nehru jacket, stylist’s own. Kamaka Hawai‘i ‘ukulele, talent’s own. Featuring a 19th-century Damascene interior from Syria, pictured at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design.
Built in 1937 as the Honolulu home of Doris Duke, Shangri La was inspired by Duke’s travels across North Africa and Asia. Today, the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design is a center of the Doris Duke Foundation that convenes conversations of global significance through its residencies, exhibitions, and community programs.
Burberry Prorsum silk dress, stylist’s own. Earrings, talent’s own. Featuring the Qajar gallery of Shangri La.
Leila multicolor abstract print plunge puff sleeve cotton dress by Mara Hoffman, stylist’s own. Sandals, talent’s own.
Featuring the Playhouse, modeled after the Chehel Sotoun Palace in Isfahan, Iran.
Custom sun-dyed top and wrap skirt by Aiala. Gimaguas disco pants from Here. Earrings, talent’s own.
Alémais checkmate linen pant and shirtdress from We Are Iconic. Earrings, talent’s own.
Featuring Shangri La’s marble Jali Pavilion from Agra, India.
Overlooking the southern shore of O‘ahu, Shangri La’s stark white façade and intricately decorated interiors inspire and create deeper understanding of Islamic art and culture. The surrounding flora and fauna call to mind the diversity of Hawai‘i’s natural landscapes.
Drawstring dress, naturally dyed detachable collar by Okbet, island Capri hat by Lorna Murray, all from Here. Earrings from Bevel Hawaii.
Taimane, the center’s summer 2024 artistin-residence, is an ‘ukulele virtuoso and songwriter whose dynamic style has earned her four Nā Hōkū Hanohano awards. Playing the instrument since the age of 5, she is now a globally touring artist known for fusing a multitude of genres, from classical to flamenco.
Rachel Comey dress from We Are Iconic. Bracelet, talent’s own.
Taimane’s immersive residency granted her access to Shangri La’s extensive archive of historical and contemporary Middle Eastern works. During her time as artist-inresidence, Taimane found a ready muse in the center’s serene expanse and transportive interiors, crafting an original song inspired by Persian mythology and goddesses.
Alémais linen dress from We Are Iconic. Earrings, talent’s own. Featuring a 20th-century Pahlavi mosaic from Iran.
“I am thrilled and deeply honored to be the artist-in-residence at Shangri La,” Taimane says. “The chance to draw inspiration from Middle Eastern mythology and infuse it into my music is going to be an exciting journey. I am also eager to learn more about Doris Duke and her rich history in Hawai‘i, adding another layer of depth to this incredible experience.”
Prints of the Pacific
Text by Natanya Friedheim
Images by Brandyn Liu
Silk-screen printing is artist and Tutuvi founder Colleen Kimura’s medium of choice. DESIGN
Colleen Kimura
For more than four decades, Colleen Kimura’s striking silkscreen prints have showcased a bold and wondrous vision of Hawai‘i and beyond.
Translation by Yukari Whittingham 翻訳 = ウィティングハム ゆかり
Under the light of a supermoon several years ago, Colleen Kimura, the Hawai‘i textiles designer and founder of local brand Tutuvi, traced the shadow of her front yard’s plumeria tree on her porch steps. She filled the outline it cast with purple paint, creating a permanent silhouette—a floral impression offering a hint of the artwork within her home.
Kimura lives in a classic, single-walled island home nestled against the Moanalua hillside. Outside her living room’s jalousie windows, bright green California grasses, grown long after heavy rains, dance and rustle in the wind. Below the windows, next to racks of aloha shirts, rolls of
After 44 years, Tutuvi’s motto of “intrepid design in fearless color” still holds true with garments that are wearable works of art.
plain cotton and linen fabric await Kimura’s artistic touch. Tutuvi isn’t restricted to the palms and hibiscuses one would normally spot on ABC Stores aloha wear. Nor does Kimura limit her color choices to the subdued, marketfriendly tones of brands like Reyn Spooner.
“It’s part of trying to differentiate myself from what is already out there,” says Kimura, a petite woman of 77, her hair tied up in a neat ponytail and ears adorned with shell earrings cut in the shape of hibiscus flowers. “The least I can do is just try not to repeat what everybody else is doing.”
Instead, her colors and shapes have an almost psychedelic quality. A pattern of purple squids and heliconia blossoms adorns one length of fabric, while a yellow shirt is printed with orange waves, whales, and coral, an ode to the marine national monument Papahānaumokuākea. On another garment, giant red ‘ōhi‘a flowers dwarf a mountainous landscape. Mixing and printing with such vibrant colors, “you feel like, whoa, you’re getting a little drunk or something,” she says, with a laugh.
The day I interview her, Kimura is wearing one of her own Tutuvi shirts: a kukui print featuring not just the recognizable three-pronged leaves but knotted stems of the Hawaiian candlenut tree leaf, woven together to make a lei. Fascinated by the lei’s pattern of knots, she conceived a print “that, if you look closely, you could figure out how to make the lei.” In this way, her design is more instructive than decorative, a convenient tutorial for onlookers.
In 1978, a sense of adventure took Kimura from Mō‘ili‘ili, the urban Honolulu neighborhood where she grew up, to Fiji via the Peace Corps. By then, the 30-yearold was already an experienced artist working in batik, an Indonesian wax-resistant method of dying cloth. Her early work, then under a brand named simply Kimura’s, already showcased a proclivity for the eye-catching. (One notable design was a playful pattern of bacon and eggs.) She spent the next two years teaching Fijian women how to market their traditional crafts, with the intent of building a cottage industry for a sustainable livelihood. When her tenure with the Peace Corps ended, she returned home and relaunched her brand as Tutuvi, the Fijian word for a cloth used to wrap around one’s body, or the act of wrapping oneself in a fabric. She also switched from labor-intensive batik to screen printing, a more commercially efficient method.
Over the following years, customers began asking about the plants in her designs, which made Kimura rethink the intention behind them. “That was different from when I started out,” she says. “There seemed to be an interest in plants that were symbolic and useful to history and culture.
Kimura’s designs are inspired by island motifs, from ‘ōhi‘a flowers to ceremonial shell breast plates.
As somebody that was born and raised here, that was more meaningful for me too.”
As a result, Kimura’s designs increasingly integrated motifs of Pacific Islander cultures and species endemic to Hawai‘i. Where she previously drew orchids and anthuriums—ornamental plants found in any tropical climate—she began referencing ‘ulu and kalo, staple foods of Samoa and Hawai‘i, respectively. “I call it ‘generic tropical,’” she says of her prior work. “It was reflective of life and climate and colors here, but it wasn’t so specifically of this place.”
Kimura lights a mosquito punk and places it on the floor of her garage-turned-studio, where she screen-prints yards of fabric to be turned into clothing, pillows, table runners, and purses. Dozens of screens made from her hand-drawn designs are stacked like books on a bookshelf. Along the wall are shelves with jars of ink, plastic cups, and an old Zippy’s chili tub repurposed for painting.
In her 20s, Kimura worked out of a studio space near the freeway, sandwiched between her two alma maters, Kaimukī High School and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she studied disciplines such as textile design and ceramics. “We were breathing in all the melted paraffin,” she says, recalling how people in the apartments above her made a fuss about the fumes. She moved into a new space nearby, where the wind coming down from Mānoa Valley would whip
A multi-site, thematic exhibition of contemporary art from Hawai‘i, the Pacific, and beyond.
hawaiicontemporary.org
around her fabric, still wet with ink. “Your face would be speckled with all these little dots,” she laughs.
On a stretch of fabric large enough to produce 20 pillow covers, Kimura places a screen etched with oblong shapes, each with a small rectangle at their center. She applies a glob of magenta ink thick as pudding and squeegees it down and across, layering the design onto an existing heliconia leaf print. The rectangular pattern, inspired by a photo of a ceremonial shell breastplate in an old Bishop Museum calendar, mimics the museum’s tags used to number artifacts, characteristic of Kimura’s ability to draw inspiration from the mundane. “I sometimes think of the prints as the main feature, and the clothing is there to show off the prints,” she says.
More than four decades later, she uses her library of 50-some-odd screens, their designs ranging from hala trees to ‘ōhi‘a flowers, to create new prints. Over the years, her work has found a home at cultural institutions such as Nā Mea Hawai‘i and the gift shops of the Honolulu Museum of Art and Bishop Museum. In 2024, Pu‘uhonua Society, a nonprofit that supports Hawai‘i-based artists and cultural practitioners, launched a retrospective of her work at Native Books at Arts & Letters, culminating in a private fashion show of Tutuvi prints on garments by local designers Reise Kochi, Aiala Rickard, and Rumi Murakami.
Until recently, she created up to three new prints a year, playing with the limitless color and pattern combinations of her archives: A fern here, a kapa pattern there. In the last year, though, she has taken a small step back from producing new designs to rethink her approach to clothing, saying, “I couldn’t picture myself doing the same thing, the same way, until the end of my career.” Still, the work continues to be a source of inspiration, giving her the same artistic rush with each new print: “It feels like every single one is a brand-new experience.”
In a region undergoing swift change, the cherished town serves as a poignant reminder that its heartbeat is sustained by the people who have long called her home.
急速な変化に直面しながらも、大切な町 は長年この町を故郷と呼ぶ人々によって 支えられている。
As the two-lane Kūhiō Highway pulls away from the coast north of Kapa‘a, the dense foliage pulls in tighter. A sea of green flashes by the car window, undulating under low-hanging clouds and occasionally punctuated by open pastureland or the lone farm stand. It is the dip down onto the Kalihiwai Bridge, where the road seems suspended over miles of canopy, that really captures the drama of Kaua‘i’s north shore. But it’s a viewpoint just past Princeville where the panorama of the awe-inspiring mountain range that embraces the hamlet of Hanalei finally comes into view: a small, picturesque town on the edge of a bay surrounded by rivers and streams and taro farms.
The descent down into the valley to access Hanalei frequently comes with alternating traffic lining up on the one-lane bridge to cross over the Hanalei River. Today, however, the queue is much longer than usual due to rainfall, despite it being a sunny summer day. Large machinery is blocking a lane to clear a landslide covering the road, fallout from the catastrophic flooding that took out this area of Kaua‘i’s north shore in April 2018, when 49 inches of rain fell in a single day. The deluge set the national record for 24-hour precipitation, cutting off access to much of the north shore and leaving hundreds of destroyed homes in its wake.
After passing acres of lo‘i (taro patches) and a “Nene Crossing” traffic sign, a reference to the endemic Hawaiian goose frequently found lounging in the ponds and streams of
Translation by Yukari Whittingham 翻訳 = ウィティングハム ゆかり
the area, I roll into the heart of Hanalei. A series of plantationstyle storefronts and the Ching Young Village shopping center, both vestiges of Hanalei’s rice plantation industry in the early 1900s, make up the majority of the “downtown.”
“As soon as you come over that bridge in Hanalei, it’s like there’s something that lifts off your shoulders and everything slows down a little bit,” says Ryan Hakman, owner of ‘Ohanalei Gallery. When I ask around for the best folks to talk to about the spirit of Hanalei, the same names and businesses pop up, a network of locals for whom this small enclave has been home for decades. Hakman is one of them, his gallery an ode to the town, showcasing art from local talent, vintage Hawaiiana, and products that celebrate the places and stories of old. “Our goal is to tell the history of the people and the characters of this town,” he says.
The draw of Hanalei, for locals and visitors alike, has always been its spectacular natural setting. It’s the kind of quiet surf town where everyone goes off to enjoy the surrounding mountains, beaches, and rivers, then returns, salty and sunburnt, to town for a bite or chat. On this visit, though, I am struck by how the demographics of the town have changed, with visitors seemingly outnumbering locals.
“It’s booming,” says Uilani Waipa, who co-owns the bustling boutique ‘Ohana Shop with Koral McCarthy. “We just get a lot of visitors and newcomers.” She opened the bustling boutique with co-owner Koral McCarthy to highlight Hawai‘i artists and carries authentic souvenirs
In this enclave on the edge of Hanalei Bay, life seems to move at a more languid pace.
made by mostly local companies. The woven lau hala hats that adorn the walls are made by a hui (group) of older female weavers from around the islands with whom the store has cultivated a strong partnership for almost a decade. The ladies weave whatever styles they feel like, and the hats are always bestsellers.
“It’s kind of like a double-edged sword, right?” Waipa muses about the town’s evolving demographics. “It is pushing out everybody that is from here.” During and after the pandemic, remote workers from the continental U.S. relocated to Hanalei, often buying up property sight unseen before arrival—a tale all too familiar in Hawai‘i but felt especially hard in this covetable pocket of Kaua‘i, where housing prices have soared.
“Hanalei used to be the locals’ town, where you drive down the road and you have to wave 10 or 20 different times because you’re seeing everybody, but it’s not like that anymore,” says Sara Saylor, a jewelry maker who grew up in the neighborhood. “We’ve definitely been put on the map. It’s gone from the millionaires’ club to the billionaires’ club.”
The socio-economic disparity can be shocking in a place where multi-generational taro farmers are now living next to the uber-wealthy. As Hanalei continues to convert housing into mostly vacation rentals, many locals have relocated to the neighboring residential communities at the end of the road. I stop at a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it storefront in Wainiha where the general store sells tropical fruit, eggs, and goat cheese from area farmers. Next door, locals wave as they pass Emmalani Lloyd at The Haven, the coffee shop she opened in late 2023 as a communal hangout. Her father, Jeremy, shows up with a traditional alaia surfboard in tow. He and his wife, Ivory, run Lloyd Boards from their house up the street, where they shape boards made from Kaua‘i-grown woods, test them in the nearby waters, and sell them at boutiques in Hanalei.
Making my way back over the series of one-lane bridges to Hanalei, I stop for a slice of liliko‘i taro cheesecake found in the self-serve, honor-system fridge at Waipā Foundation, a cultural learning center and food hub committed to teaching Native Hawaiian approaches to natural resource management. The weekly farmers market and Poi Day,
Hanalei was once known as primarily a locals’ town. Today, a tight-knit community of residents hopes to preserve its spirit in the face of changing demographics.
a volunteer-driven initiative to process cooked taro into poi and keep the Hawaiian staple affordable, brings the community together.
It’s afternoon now, and the traffic is lining up to leave Hanalei. This difficulty of entering and leaving the area is part of what makes Hanalei special—and what leaves it vulnerable to natural disasters. When the rains in the upper slopes of Mount Wai‘ele‘ele, which supply water to the Hanalei River, threaten to raise the river over 8 feet, the bridge closes, cutting off all access to the town. During the 2018 floods, towns all along the north shore were cut off from each other and left without power or food. For months, residents could only enter Hanalei during certain convoy hours. Though Hanalei eventually reopened to visitors, the areas past Lumaha‘i Beach remained closed to all but residents for three years. First responders after the disaster were other community members, shuttling in by boat or jet ski. “People came together like nothing you’ve ever seen,” Saylor says. “It’s like one big family. When something happens, it affects all of us.”
With restricted infrastructure, the town is at the mercy of the weather—and the influx of tourists who continue to be drawn to its many charms. In response to the devastating floods, the community created the Hanalei Initiative, which aims to diversify the Kaua‘i economy and help tackle the unmanageable number of vehicles crowding the area. The nonprofit runs a shuttle service from Hanalei to Hā‘ena State Park, the kickoff point for exploring the iconic Nā Pali Coast, which has reduced the number of cars by 50,000 annually.
The late afternoon sun hovers above the horizon and behind the historic pier that extends into the waters of Hanalei Bay. Kids jump off the pierhead while Tahitian drummers practice under its roof. I walk the shoreline with other locals and visitors, then head into town for a sunset beverage at Ama, a popular ramen restaurant and sister establishment of the tapas mainstay Bar Acuda. Here they serve a Trader Vic’s original 1944 mai tai, a more citrusy, refreshing version of modern, often syrupy-sweet, iterations.
The view from the restaurant’s back garden stops me in my tracks: the three towering peaks overlooking Hanalei—Hihimanu to the left, Namolokama in the middle, and Mamalahoa to the right—are streaked with waterfalls and swirled in mist. I’m reminded of Uilani Waipa’s words, “The area has a lot of power.” But most importantly, when asked about what makes Hanalei special, she says, “the people that live here, the people that are rooted here.”
Approaching the nondescript building located among a jumble of residential apartments, boutique shops, and hip cafés, it’s easy to miss the small sign marking the entrance to the Wonderwood showroom in Tokyo’s chic neighborhood of Daikanyama. Thick slabs of gnarled planed wood line the interior, taking up nearly all of the available wall space. The heady scent of hinoki cypress and fragrant camphor permeates the showroom, insulating it from the diesel-fueled haze of the Tokyo megalopolis outside.
In the middle of this urban forest of polished wooden tabletops stands Wonderwood’s 34-year-old founder
and CEO, Yuki Sakaguchi. “It’s really hard for me to stay in Tokyo all the time,” Sakaguchi says, exhaling at the thought. “Everything here is so unnatural. The air is dirty, and the water is polluted. There are so many people here who feel disconnected from nature.”
Growing up in Tottori, Japan’s smallest and least populous prefecture, Sakaguchi was surrounded by sweeping sand dunes, sprawling national parks, and pristine nature preserves. “Tottori is close to the sea and the mountains, so as a kid I was able to enjoy nature year round,” he recalls. “Hiking in the mountains in spring to gather wild plants, swimming in the sea and collecting horned beetles in summer, camping in autumn, skiing in winter—nature’s rhythms became a part of who I am.”
As an iconoclastic youth, he chose a non-traditional path studying at Whittier College in California and the University of Ghana, setting himself apart in the competitive world of corporate recruiting after graduation. He landed an enviable position in the sales department of P&G Japan, but the thrill of his early career success was short-lived. “After about two years, I became completely depressed,” Sakaguchi says of his workaholic “salaryman” lifestyle. “But I continued to push myself. The only emotion I felt was wanting to die. So I decided to return to Tottori and end my life.”
Upon quitting his job and retreating to his hometown, Sakaguchi encountered a row of impressive slabs of wood lined up along the wall of a local café. He guessed that some came from trees that had lived for hundreds of years, surviving disasters both natural and man-made. Placing his hand on a large hole in one of the slabs of wood—a “scar from an injury,” as Sakaguchi describes it—he found himself moved to tears, struck by an overwhelming sense of connection to nature and to all living things, including himself.
As he relives the memory, Sakaguchi runs his hand along the surface of the table in front of him. “I suddenly felt those old trees were scolding me for thinking of ending my short life,” he says.
Deciding that he had nothing to lose—and despite no prior experience in the industry—Sakaguchi poured all of his savings into starting his own woodworking venture. He reached out to others in the community to better understand the business, consulted experts in the field, and launched Wonderwood in 2016, transforming his pain into an evangelism for reconnecting with nature through wood.
Tokyo’s urban sprawl gives way to mountains and verdant tambo (rice paddies) as CEO Yuki Sakaguchi makes the drive from the Wonderwood showroom in Daikanyama to the company’s factory in Akiruno.
Wonderwood’s high-end furnishings can be found in private residences, hotels, and restaurants throughout Japan and beyond.
Wonderwood’s products, which range from singleplank tables to smaller items such as cutting boards made from hundred-year-old ginkgo trees, undergo a meticulous treatment process guided by Sakaguchi’s mentor and Wonderwood advisor, Asahi Higashide, who is said to be one of only two sawyers still practicing the craft of woodcutting in the traditional Japanese way.
Among the diverse woods that Wonderwood sources from its trusted network throughout Japan is yakusugi, the name given to Japanese cedar that is upwards of 1,000 years old and from the remote island of Yakushima. “They say it rains 366 days out of 365 days in a year on the island, and the ground is mostly bedrock,” Sakaguchi says. “It’s difficult for trees to use transpiration to gather nutrients. It may be the tree that has struggled the most in Japan, so I love the yakusugi.”
Sakaguchi is also particularly excited about Wonderwood’s offerings made from mizunara oak, a rare wood in high demand in the Japanese whiskey industry and one with strict logging regulations as a result of overharvesting. Wonderwood was able to acquire felled mizunara wood from the protected forests of Mount Fuji, considered so precious that Yamanashi Prefecture negotiated with government officials for two years to remove it.
To ensure buyers continue to enjoy these prized goods for the rest of their lives, Wonderwood offers
Each tree has a unique history, one that Sakaguchi hopes to honor as he and his team give it new life at the Wonderwood factory.
after-purchase support services as the wood ages and reveals its natural imperfections. The company continues to maintain a 12-meter-long table for Muji Hotel Ginza that was crafted from 450-year-old camphor wood from Odawara Castle near Mount Fuji in Kanagawa Prefecture—a testament to the trust Wonderwood is committed to building with its clientele.
“I truly think that adding even one piece of Mother Earth to our lives changes the way we interact with the world and the decisions we make on a daily basis,” says Sakaguchi, who now lives in the surf town of Ichinomiya on the Chiba coast, having fallen in love with surfing on a trip to Hawai‘i in 2024. “Nature has a powerful influence on us. We all need to rediscover that connection if we are going to survive.”
こうした貴重な製品が一生大切にされるように、ワンダーウッドでは購 入後のサポートにも力を入れている。木材は年を重ねるうちに変化するし、そ の木の癖もはっきり出てくる。MUJI HOTEL GINZAに納品した長さ12メー トルのテーブルの素材は、神奈川県富士山にも近い小田原城のお堀に生育し ていた樹齢450年のクスノキ。ワンダーウッドがメインテナンスを請け負ってい ることも、顧客との信頼関係を重視する姿勢の現れだろう。
Just 25 miles southeast of the famed Kona Coffee Belt, growing alongside macadamia nuts, banana, avocado, and cacao, the former sugarcane lands of the rural Ka‘ū district rear some of the most coveted singleorigin coffee in the world. At elevations of 1,000 to 2,500 feet, the coffee-growing pockets of Kaumaikaohu and Palehua, the areas of Hawai‘i Island commonly referred to as Cloud’s Rest, Pear Tree, and Wood Valley, feature microclimates blessed with generous amounts of sun, shade, rainfall, mist, and mountain breezes—the perfect, natural ingredients for which an outstanding cup of coffee originates.
Although the Ka‘ū region is large, its community of coffee farmers and roasters remains tight-knit.
With fewer than 100 farms spanning 830 acres, Ka‘ū’s coffee real estate is a fraction of what its neighbor to the north grows. While Kona coffee traverses 4,000 acres of the island’s windward side, thriving on the western slopes of Hualālai and Mauna Loa volcanoes, Ka‘ū coffee is raised on the eastern slopes of Mauna Loa’s leeward side. Contrary to Kona coffee’s tendency to sell as a blend, Ka‘ū coffee is typically packaged as a single-origin product and boasts dozens of varietals, given a breadth of fitting and alluring names such as Mauna Loa, Red Caturra, Mokka, Geisha, Catuai, Pacamara, and Bourbon.
The higher pH (potential hydrogen) of Mauna Loa’s east-facing soil and the presence of Pāhala ash deposits from Kīlauea’s volcanic eruptions are said to yield a mellow, sweet-tasting brew. Ka‘ū coffee is readily described to embody “rich flavor, piquant acidity, and intriguing hints of sweetness and spice,” according to the Synergistic Hawaii Agriculture Council, along with citric notes, jasmine aroma, and fresh butter undertones. It also doesn’t hurt that Ka‘ū’s coffee plants are nourished by terra firma that sustained sugarcane for more than a century.
In 1996, the shuttering of Ka‘ū Sugar Company, the last remaining sugar producer in Hawai‘i, left the town of Pāhala suddenly without an industry. Plantation workers were offered 5-acre slices of leased land in higher altitudes above Pāhala to farm coffee, along with government startup support, though only a handful of displaced workers adopted the new vocation and crop. Four years later, fledgling farms planted the first coffee trees in Ka‘ū in more than a century. Up against a volcano-sized learning curve and a nonexistent market for their product, many growers sold their coffee cherries to established Kona producers at bargain prices. As farmers got their bearings and independent growers joined the community, Ka‘ū coffee began to assume its own identity.
Then, in 2007, the boutique coffee farms of Ka‘ū hit a watershed moment. Fifteen samples from the underdog region were entered into the Roasters Guild Cupping Competition, hosted by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. There, a 30-person panel sampled more than 100 entries from around the globe for fragrance, aroma, taste, flavor, aftertaste, and body. When the results were tallied, Hawai‘i’s Will and Grace Tabios of Rising Sun Farm and Marlon Biason of Aroma Coffee Farms, placed sixth and ninth, respectively, effectively putting Ka‘ū on the coffee map. Two years later, another Ka‘ū grower named Thomas “Bull” Kailiawa III, a veteran of the sugar
industry and one of the Hawaiian pioneers of Ka‘ū coffee, ranked seventh best in the world with his brew.
As long-abandoned plots were tilled and seeded, Ka‘ū’s coffee production ticked up, and aspiring coffee farmers moved in with hopes to plant themselves where proverbial lightning appeared to be striking. Growers studied up on everything from cupping practices to bean storage in service of quality and consistency. As a new niche market blossomed, the region added critical resources and infrastructure, and farmers were able to command higher rates for their harvests. In 2010, the 140-acre Ka‘ū Coffee Mill began offering processing, roasting, and packaging services to area growers. The Mill, as it’s known, became a hub of engagement and innovation, adding a visitor’s center, coffee classes and tours, and sustainability upgrades, including a hydroelectric plant for milling and pulping.
“I think of Ka‘ū coffee as the beautiful little sister of Kona coffee,” says Delvin Navarro, a third-generation coffee farmer and owner of Navarro Farms in the Cloud Rest area of Pāhala. “No matter who you drink it from, Ka‘ū coffee has a profile of being incredibly smooth, the product of hard work and rich, acidic soil.” In 2015, Delvin and his wife, Shawnette, took over the acreage run by Shawnette’s grandfather, Prasert Chantrakul, who was one of the original sugarcane-turned-coffee converts in Ka‘ū.
After three decades of tending coffee on borrowed land, the Navarros became fully invested in their family legacy once parcels in Ka‘ū were finally offered for sale to leaseholder farmers in 2022. Following the purchase, Delvin expanded the business to add online sales, in-house milling and roasting, and partnerships with specialty roasters and coffee shops.
Around the time the region started winning awards, Ka‘ū Coffee Growers Cooperative created the annual Ka‘ū Coffee Festival to celebrate the sleeper brew coming into its own, and to elevate the Ka‘ū district into a travel destination. In June 2024, the co-op returned for the first time since the pandemic to host its 14th festival, complete with 10 days of farm and ranch tours, grower meet-and-greets, brewing demonstrations, a coffee cooking competition, stargazing, and a closing ho‘olaule‘a (celebration) with hula and Hawaiian music.
While Ka‘ū’s extraordinary growing conditions offered a springboard for success, the rags-to-riches story of Ka‘ū coffee could not have been written without the tenacious collective of growers who chose collaboration over competition. “Coffee right across the street can taste different because everybody has that unique thing that they do, but we support each other like one big family,” Navarro says. “Whenever Ka‘ū coffee gets recognized, we all win.”
Discover Ka‘ū coffee at these locally beloved farms, events, cafés, and roasteries.
Text by Kaia Stallings
A yearly celebration of Ka‘ū coffee’s finest, the Ka‘ū Coffee Festival features a week-long lineup of events, from a multi-farm tour to a caffeinefilled ho‘olaule‘a (celebration).
Founded by former chemist Rusty Obra, Rusty’s Hawaiian farm and roastery is now led by Obra’s wife and son in upper Pāhala and has grown into a multi-award-winning brand.
Skilled Salvadoran farmers Jose and Berta Miranda chased their coffee dreams from Central America’s Coffee Belt to Hawai‘i. Their 30-acre Miranda’s Farms in Pāhala offers farm tours and award-winning roasts.
Ka‘ū’s coffee pioneer since 1894, the Aikane Plantation still thrives under Merle Becker, the great-granddaughter of Ka‘ū’s first coffee farmer.
Stop by ‘Ohu Bean, Hawai‘i Island’s newest café on wheels, at parks near Volcanoes National Park, the “perfect climate to enjoy a hot drink,” according to its owners.
Navarro Farms foregoes tours but delivers top-notch Ka‘ū coffee beans processed with a bespoke fermentation process that delivers unique flavor profiles and consistently wins awards.
At Hawai‘i’s Local Buzz, located inside Paradise Meadows Orchard & Bee Farm, explore 75 acres of delights, including an aquaponic greenhouse, pineapple garden, coffee samples, and a resident population of rescued parrots, with a behind-the-scenes farm tour on offer for just $20.
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