Lost & Found: Journey Home
Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience
November 15, 2024 - September 14, 2026
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This exhibition at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience explores the complex relationship between place and belonging through the lens of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) identity. In this exhibit, artists unpack attempts to reconnect with their cultural homelands, through both physical and emotional journeys, to answer the timeless question: where and what defines “Home”? Expressed in a variety of media including painting, video and installations, this uniquely AANHPI perspective inspires conversation to both empower and challenge our perceptions of home and highlight the challenges to finding belonging in diaspora. The exhibition features captivating work from a diverse range of artists including including Eric Chan / 陳志宇 / 진지유, Lauren Iida, Ravleen Kaur, and Kyler Pahang. |
"Memory Net: Things We Left Behind" and Nuclear Memories Sculpture (Collaboration with Blades of Change)
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"Under the Same Moon" (2024)
Lauren Iida, hand-cut paper, ink, watercolor, acrylic, 9.5 ft x 4 ft
Artist Statement "This piece gives us glimpses of an epic journey from the birth of culture in ancient times, through sudden displacement and replacement of those launched on the road to elsewhere. In a moment, childhood innocence was lost, rights revoked, lives stolen, communities destroyed, families torn apart, individuals dehumanized, and worse.
New hardships awaited those who made it to the promised land, but seeds sown eventually spread new roots. The sweet smells of home waft through in the deep night, under the same moon that has always been there.
Whether or not we can return to the place we originated, it has already permeated our bodies and minds forever. It is the place we return to in our dreams, or nightmares.
If we are so lucky to choose to visit the place we once came from, we may find it unrecognizable. We may find it forever altered, physically, societally, as if hundreds of years have passed. Maybe we were too young to recognize it in the first place. Maybe we don't want to go back.
Traveling to the motherland can help us connect, understand, repair, or find lost parts of ourselves. But the truth is, now we have two homes under one moon."
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In English, we say we’ve “lost a memory.” The phrase suggests memory has been dropped, misplaced, but not gone. A memory, a loss, may seem absent in our lives but still present in some other way, perhaps on an unseen plane of existence. We say we “dredge up” a memory. The memory sinks, drifts, but with the right line, we might catch it – an object pulled up from the deep. -Kascha Snavely, The Vestibule |
"Things we Left Behind" (2024) Ink-washed hand-cut paper installation, 120 ft x 4.5 ft
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