Laura Kina: DePaul in the Arts Lecture Series
@ DePaul Art Museum
935 West Fullerton Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614
Opening Thursday, November 3rd, from 1PM - 2PM
DePaul Professor Laura Kina will give a lecture about her new body of work, Uchinanchu.
From The Artists Website: Uchinanchu is the Uchinaguchi (Okinawan) language word for “Okinawan.” Uchinanchu (2015–2016) features textile-based paintings in which I, as a mixed race, yonsei, Uchinanchu, consider my proximity and distance to Asian American, white, Okinawan diaspora, and indigenous identities and communities. Using the form of a patchwork quilt as a starting point, the works simultaneously reference rural southern craft traditions I learned from my maternal great-grandma, Japanese boro quilts and Hawaiian quilts that refer to my paternal cultural heritage, and contemporary feminist and craft art practices.
Fragments of t-shirts appear in each work and trace return migrations to the similarly colonized island locals of Hawaiʻi and Okinawa. These quilt/hybrid paintings additionally function as family portraits and pay homage to specific Okinawan American activists, artists, and academics and Okinawan diaspora communities in Hawaiʻi and Los Angeles and my location of Chicago. The t-shirts, which I solicited from friends and family and recycled from my own archives, document group affiliations such as Honolulu Marathon finishers, Okinawan Association of America members, and participants in the Worldwide Uchinanchu Festival. These are combined with colorfully painted iconic and celebratory symbols of a globalized contemporary Hawaiʻi (e.g., SPAM and Hello Kitty) and Okinawan culture – shisa lions, bingata style flowers, andagi (Okinawan doughnut) – as well as symbols of contested histories, spaces, and bodies such as the hajichi tattoo tradition or the endangered dugong.
Taken together, the works are about islands of diaspora and explore themes of transnational family ties and heritage tourism, mixedness, ethnic pride and solidarity, military and colonial histories, and current geopolitical military/environment issues in Okinawa and Hawaiʻi.
Also included in this exhibition is my 2012 quilt/painting “Omiyage,” which tells my father’s story of forgiving his absent father. This four-panel piece is set against the backdrop of our family’s history of Okinawan sugarcane plantation and military service in Hawaiʻi.
Free and open to everyone
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Tags: Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, DePaul in the Arts Lecture Series, Laura Kina, Lincoln Park, Uchinanchu
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