| Kearny Street Workshop’s annual multidisciplinary arts festival entitled APAture features the work of emerging Asian Pacific American artists that live and/or work in the San Francisco Bay Area. This past fall APAture visual arts exhibition, Shifting Landscapes through the Labor of the Hand-Made, included a dynamic group of 20 artists practicing in a variety of media. Curated by Lucy Kalyani Lin in collaboration with Lyman Yip and Jack Choi, the works inspire inquiry into the connections and relationships between issues ranging from personal histories to globalization, the environment, and technology. Identity is rooted in the body for Stephanie Inagaki in her striking charcoal drawings of a female figure, with long dark hair that not only protects and shelters, but also provides strength and structure in the form of her skeleton. | 
|
Mary Chou
Amy M. Ho, Beyond II, 2008, Paper, mirrors, foam board, wood, and ladder (interior view). Courtesy of the artist.
Kearny Street Workshop’s annual multidisciplinary arts festival entitled APAture features the work of emerging Asian Pacific American artists that live and/or work in the San Francisco Bay Area. This past fall APAture visual arts exhibition, Shifting Landscapes through the Labor of the Hand-Made, included a dynamic group of 20 artists practicing in a variety of media. Curated by Lucy Kalyani Lin in collaboration with Lyman Yip and Jack Choi, the works inspire inquiry into the connections and relationships between issues ranging from personal histories to globalization, the environment, and technology.
Identity is rooted in the body for Stephanie Inagaki in her striking charcoal drawings of a female figure, with long dark hair that not only protects and shelters, but also provides strength and structure in the form of her skeleton. Distinctions between the individual, familial, and cultural intertwine in Noritaka Minami’s enormous fingerprint outlined with the blood-red ink of her Japanese family stamp. A sense of shifting identity is violently but poetically illustrated in Shadi Yousefian’s collage of hand-written letters—cut up and nailed into boards—that she exchanged with close friends in Iran shortly after moving to the United States. Imin Yeh comments on the globalization of commerce and culture by appropriating the familiar pattern used for packaging Chinese goods in a hand-printed installation that spreads beyond the walls to the ceiling and pipes of the gallery.
Other artists express their frustrations with society and its systems by subverting viewer expectations and envisioning an alternate reality. Weston Teruya, the featured artist in the exhibition, reimagines the way in which everyday objects provide order and assign meaning. In Harnessing of abandoned markers turned to signs (slippery mechanism), an unleashed force uproots and unravels houses, chairs, flotation devices, and fences. This feeling of disorientation extends to Lisa Solomon’s floral arrangement of pink and charcoal felt patterns in the shape of tanks. In the middle of the gallery, a ladder invites viewers to ascend the stairs and peer into a delightfully unexpected landscape constructed by Amy Ho of paper grass and mirrors that infinitely reflects the viewer’s image in all directions.
