Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Thomas Kong Interview, Jon Lovisetto

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist bio: Thomas Kong is an artist working in collage and assemblage, using advertising, packaging and other surplus material from his convenience store, Kim's Corner Food, located in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Kim's Corner Food features an evolving installation of Kong's work, and is open to customers and visitors 7 days a week from 8AM - 8PM at 1371 W. Estes Ave, Chicago, IL 60626.

The Back Room, an experimental project space in the store's former stock room, operated from October 2015 – March 2019, and has now closed. Bio from: https://thomaskong.biz/

Kazua Melissa Vang, Justin Beales

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Kazua Melissa Vang is a Hmong American filmmaker, visual artist, photographer, teaching artists, production manager, and producer based in Minnesota. Melissa is currently a lead artist as well as a teaching artist for In Progress. Her most two most recent photography works were showcased at In Progress under the exhibit, “NEXUS: Honoring the Self-Taught Photographic Artist” (2016), and “Hmong Tattoo,”(2017). Her current photography project is taking portraits of Hmong refrigerators and freezers. From her collection “F R I D G E S,” was featured in the exhibit, “Foodway”(Summer 2018) at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is currently …

Sky Cubacub Interview, Spencer Nieto

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Rebirth Garments are designed and made by hand by Sky Cubacub. Sky is a non-binary queer and disabled Filipinx human from Chicago, IL with life long anxiety and panic disorders. Sky first dreamed of this collection while in high school and couldn’t find a place where they could buy a chest binder as a person who was under 18, and who didn't have access to a credit card to buy one online. Sky is especially interested in Rebirth Garments being accessible to queer and disabled youth and is working on creating a program for making free/reduced priced garments …

Kai Duc Luong Interview, Stuart Hutson

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio Born in 1975 in Phnom-Penh, KAI-DUC LUONG fled the oppressive Khmer Rouge regime from Cambodia to Vietnam to France, where his family settled in Paris, in 1978. KAI-DUC operates between Chicago and Paris. His artistic projects include video (art / doc / film), photography, and mixed media installations. His unconventional path as a self-taught outsider artist, trained in digital communication & systems engineering, gives him a unique perspective, at times questioning subject matters through the understanding of transmission and systems (e.g. the primary emotions, the five senses, the stages of grief, the art industry). His works have been …

Heather C. Lou Interview, Katie O’Reilly

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: heather c. lou, m.ed. (she/her/hers) is an angry gemini earth dragon, multiracial, asian, queer, cisgender, disabled, survivor/surviving, depressed, and anxious womxn of color artist based in st. paul, minnesota. her mixed media pieces include watercolor, acrylic, gold paint pen, oil pastel, radical love, & hope. each piece comments on the intersections of her racial, gender, ability, & sexual identities, as they continue to shift and develop in complexity each day. her art is a form of healing, transformation, and liberation, rooted in womxnism and gender equity through a racialized borderland lens. heather works in education as an administrator. …

Nicole Sumida And Alex Yu Interview, Laraib Malik

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Nicole Sumida is a co-founder and co-publisher of Riksha Magazine, an online magazine featuring creative work by and about Asian Americans. Alex Yu is a co-publisher of Riksha and both have been involved in community arts organizing since the 1990s in Chicago.

“Riksha provides a space for capturing the Asian American experience through compelling writing, commentary, and artistic expression. We curate an online magazine that presents poetry, fiction, non-fiction, fine arts, and video and audio pieces. We also comment on and curate the bric-a-brac and ephemera of Asian American life.”

Ada Cheng Interview, Zishuo Wang

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Ada Cheng is the host of the storytelling show Pour One Out, a monthly storytelling series at Volumes Bookcafe. She is also the producer and host of the show Am I Man Enough? a storytelling/podcasting show, where people tell personal stories to critically examine the culture of toxic masculinity and the construction of masculinity and manhood. In addition, she is the co-producer and co-host of Talk Stories, an Asian American/Asian diaspora storytelling show, along with Randy Kim, a show where they showcase Asian/Asian American storytellers and performing artists.

Chamindika Wanduragala Interview, Vincent To

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Chamindika Wanduragala is a Sri Lankan American visual artist, cook, DJ ( DJ Chamun), puppeteer and stop motion animation filmmaker based in Minneapolis. Her work deals with personal experience through mythic stories. She is also the founder and Director of Monkeybear's Harmolodic Workshop, which supports Native/POC in developing creative and technical skills in contemporary puppetry.

Bio from: http://chamindika.com/index.html

Udita Upadhyaya Interview, Aneri Madhu

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Udita Upadhyaya is an interdisciplinary artist who uses the details of her medical, cultural, and social biography as her primary art material. Her work spans live art, devised theatre, performative photographs, sculpture, installation, video, writing, text, and fiber arts.

Upadhyaya delves into the privilege of being able to lose a language, to have a language to spare. She wonders which bodies have access to literacy? Which to expression? When? And Where? Upadhyaya writes in English, reconciling and reclaiming that her language of intellectual expression and subsequently of power is inherited from the colonizers of her ancestors. Simultaneously …

Devyn Mañibo Interview, Daniel Bugliarello-Wondrich

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Devyn Lorelei Mañibo is a Brooklyn-based maker, feeder, organizer, and educator. Through poems, art objects, and gesture, she thinks intimately about the language and texture of death & desire, fullness & loss. Mañibo has had video, performance, installation, and academic work shown, published, and presented internationally in festivals, museums, and conferences including the MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival, the National Queer Arts Festival, the Berlin Porn Festival, the Queens Museum, and the Allied Media Conference. Mañibo is a 2013 Princess Grace Foundation Undergraduate Film Award Recipient, an alum of Cycle III of the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship with the …

Migiwa Orimo Interview, Jessica Ruiz

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio:
Migiwa Orimo is an artist whose primary work takes the form of installation. Orimo was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. After receiving her degree in literature and studying graphic design, she immigrated to the US in the early eighties.

In her process of creating installations, she begins by entering a space of language. Often her installations consist of disparate elements--text, painting, drawing, objects, video and sound. In attempting to establish relationships and tension between those elements, similar to constructing sentences, she explores the notions of gap, slippage, and “a realm of disjunction.”

She exhibits her work nationally; …

Kioto Aoki Interview, Austin Sandifer

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Kioto Aoki is a conceptual photographer and experimental filmmaker who also makes books and installations engaging the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process. Her work explores modes of perception via nuances of the mundane, with recent focusing on perceptions of movement between the still and the moving image. She received MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a 2017-2018 HATCH artist in residence at the Chicago Artist Coalition.

https://kiotoaoki.com/

Mitsu Salmon Interview, David Yonamine

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio:
Mitsu Salmon creates original performance and visual works, which fuse multiple disciplines. She was born in the melting pot of Los Angeles to a Japanese mother and American father. Her creation in different mediums, the translation of one medium to another, is connected to the translation of differing cultures and languages.

Salmon received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. In 2005 she graduated from NYU where she majored in Experimental Theater, studying theater and visual arts. She has lived in India, England, Germany, Amsterdam, Japan, and Bali.

She has performed solo …

Nirmal Raja Interview, Dalton Campbell

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Nirmal Raja is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Milwaukee, WI. Born in India, she has lived and traveled in several countries. Raja received a Bachelor’s of Arts in English Literature in India, a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Painting at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and a Master’s of Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her work deals with concepts of displacement, cultural negotiation and memory. http://nirmalraja.com

Tony Moy Interview, Sarah Song

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio:
Tony Moy is a mixed media artist who focuses on watercolor and Gouache living in downtown Chicago. He has published art in books from the X-files, Dungeons and Dragons, Tome I & II, Memory Collectors and among others. In addition, Tony has over 10 years of teaching experience and currently teaches illustration and design at the School of the Art Institute. His inspiration comes from studying traditional and classic watercolorists combined with the modern influences of pop culture comics, anime and fantasy. https://www.tonymoy.art/about-me

Jeffrey Augustine Songco Interview, Yara Cruz

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio:
Jeffrey Augustine Songco (b. 1983) is a multi-media artist. Born and raised in New Jersey to devout Catholic Filipino immigrants, his artistic identity developed at a young age with training in classical ballet, voice, and musical theater. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. His artwork has been exhibited throughout the USA including the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids. In 2017, he was featured in the publication Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, and he was the Installation …

Sarah-Ji (Love & Struggle Photos) Interview, Aggie Kallinicou

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio:

Artist Bio: Sarah-Ji is a movement photographer who has been documenting freedom struggles in Chicago since 2010. Her long term work is to build a world in which prisons and police are not necessary, and no one is disposable. Sarah is a core member of For The People Artists Collective and organizes with Love & Protect and documents under the name Love & Struggle Photos. She and her daughter Cadence currently live in Rogers Park.

Catherine Cajandig Interview, Rebecca Murphy

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio:

Catherine Cajandig is a painter, printmaker, muralist and curator. At an early age, she showed an interest in art that was encouraged by her parents and teachers. She attended classes in the SAIC Junior School. In 1960, she was juried into The Chicago Society of Artists and has remained an active member. She has served as a board member that included various committees and was the President for one year. She is the committee chairwoman that publishes the yearly CSA Print and Drawing Calendar.

Her images are of personal topics and observations, developed through series and recurring themes. She …

Patricia Nguyen Interview, Joyce Shoults

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Patricia Nguyen is an artist, educator, and scholar born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans. Her research and performance work examines critical refugee studies, political economy, forced migration, oral histories, inherited trauma, torture, and nation building in the United States and Vietnam. She has published work in Women Studies Quarterly, Harvard Kennedy School's Asian American Policy Review, and The Methuen Drama Anthology of Modern Asian Plays edited by Siyuan Liu and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Patricia is currently …

Hương Ngô Interview, Jessica Perez

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Hương Ngô is a multidisciplinary artist whose work incorporates performance, sound, text, and installation. She was recently awarded the prestigious Fulbright US Scholar Grant in Vietnam to continue a project (begun at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in France) that traces the colonial history of surveillance in Vietnam and the anti-colonial strategies of resistance vis-à-vis the activities of female organizers and liaisons. The project, To Name It Is To See It, fleshes out identity and visibility as territories that both colonizer and colonized manipulate to achieve personal agency or state sovereignty. She was born in Hong Kong and is currently …

Jon Yamashiro Interview, Ciera Stokes

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Jon Masuo Yamashiro was born the oldest son and raised as a third-generation Okinawan American in the “cultural pastiche” of Honolulu, HI. He traveled from the islands to study at Washington University in St. Louis and received his BFA in 1985, then went on to earn an MFA in photography from Indiana University in 1991. Since the fall of 1993, he has had the privilege of teaching photography to college students at Miami University. Jon lives in Liberty, Indiana, with his wife Jennifer and their daughter Lydia and son Luke. http://yamashirophoto.com/

Kaveri Raina Interview, Eva Swiecki

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Kaveri Raina is an artist working in Chicago, IL. She was born and raised in New Delhi, India and moved to the States at the age of eleven. In 2011 she received her BFA in Painting and Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and in 2016 her MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Raina was a 2016 recipient of the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, Fred and Joanna Lazarus Scholarship, amongst others. In fall 2016 she completed a five-week residency at Ox-Bow, in Saugatuck, MI. Raina has exhibited in Chicago, New …

Mayumi Lake Interview, Raegen Balton-Watkins

Asian American Art Oral History Project

“Mayumi Lake is a Chicago-based artist. Her photography and video work delve into childhood and pubescent dreams, phobia and desires. She employs herself and others as her models, as well as dolls, toys, weapons, vintage clothes, and altered landscape as her props.” - http://mayumilake.com/about.html-

BFA, 1997, MFA, 2000, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions/screenings: Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, Asia Society, Art in General, Artists Space, New York; Fotograpie Forum International, Frankfurt; Cornelius Pleser Galerie, Munich; Director's Lounge, Berlin; Bangkok International Art Festival, Bangkok; Galleria PaciArte, Brescia; FOTOAMERICA, Santiago; Ellen Curlee Gallery, St. Louis; O Gallery, Tokyo. Monograph: Poo-Chi, …

Matthew Avignone Interview, Alicia Urquizo

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Matthew Avignone is a Korean-American photographer born in 1987. In 2011, he obtained his B.A. in photography from Columbia College, Chicago. He has been exhibited at the Aperture Foundation, the Pingyao Photography Festival (China), and the Camden Image Gallery (London), among others. His first artist book, An Unfinished Body (2011), is part of the collections of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film and the International Center for Photography. In October 2014, after working for five years on documenting his own family, he released his self-published book, Stranger Than Family. The story of this project, …

Wesley Sun Interview, Chad Novotny

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: BA, 2004, Stetson University, DeLand, Florida; M.Div, 2008, The University of Chicago. Both Wesley Sun and his brother (Brad Sun) were born and raised in Orlando, Florida, by their parents who are Chinese immigrants from Malaysia. Wesley serves as the Director of Field Education and Community Engagement at the University of Chicago Divinity School and is a volunteer chaplain at Cook County Jail. He also does creative writing for graphic novels that both he and his brother have collaborated on. His completed graphic novels include: Chinatown, Apocalypse Man, and Monkey Fist. Eisegesis: Kings + Queens is expected to be …

Raeleen Kao Interview, Beena Patel

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Raeleen Kao is a drawer, printmaker, and amateur competitive eater aka glutton residing in Chicago with a Charles Brand etching press, a red tabby, and forty plants.

Her prints and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the country most notably at the International Museum of Surgical Science, the Monmouth Museum of Art, Bert Green Fine Art, the Smith College Museum of Art, Tory Folliard Gallery, Firecat Projects, and Normal Editions Workshop. Her work has been represented at SELECT Fair New York, the Editions and Artist Books Fair in New York, the Cleveland Fine Print Fair, the …

Renluka Maharaj Interview, Steven Zych

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Renluka Maharaj grew up in the country of Trinidad and Tobago and moved to New York as a child where spent most of her life. Her Eastern and Western background wrapped with modern sensibilities is evident in her bodies of work. Her interests are centered on gender roles, sexuality, colonialism, mythology, iconography and fetishism. Some of the artists that have influenced her work are Yinka Shonibare and Yasumasa Morimura.

Ms. Maharaj completed her BFA at the University of Colorado Boulder and is currently completing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the …

Michio Iwao Interview, Grace Johnson

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Michio Iwao is one of four sons of the parents Kotama and Tomonosuke Iwao. He is known as an Asian American craftsperson that was born on July 12, 1922 in Suisun City, California. During World War II Michio and his family were relocated and held at the Gila River Internment Camp also known as Trulock. This stay lasted from 1942 to 1945 under the War Relocation Authority. This Japanese Internment camp inspired Iwao to spend his idle time learning how to make bird pins. This was the start of Iwao becoming a craftsperson.

Jun-Jun Sta.Ana Interview, Jackson Hughlett

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Jun-Jun Sta.Ana is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist born on September 19, 1963 to Remigio Benavidez Sta.Ana and Emma Cecilio Catral in Manila, Philippines. He moved to the United States at the age of 24, shortly after finishing a degree in Dentistry. He started his art career late just before he was turning 40- having a solo show of digital works using appropriated images from free porn sites which he deconstructed and embellished with images and symbols culled from Filipino talismans. His practice has become multi-disciplinary, and while still utilizing found images and materials, he also employs the technique of …

Kristine Aono Interview, Maureen Vela

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Kristine Aono is a sculptor and installation artist. She has a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In addition, she has done residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Arts.

She has received numerous grants from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts (Visual Artist/Public Project Grant), the Maryland State Arts Council, the Painted Bride, the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, and the Prince George’s Arts Council. Kristine Aono has served on the Board of the Washington Project for the Arts, …