The hate the AAPI faced because of Covid as well as other racially targeted attacks affected me deeply and as a fellow member of AAPI, it’s important that I speak up, assert my position and my support, and advocate for my community. This piece was created in the wake of the Atlanta Spa Shootings 

The process of making this piece was extremely liberating to me as I was able to let out much of the pent up frustration and anger over the build up things happening over the past few months. This piece was my first dive into multi-media art and I chose to incorporate 3d elements on top of a canvas painting base. The arm that is protruding off of the painting perpendicularly is molded out of a self-made paper mâche clay. The collage on the top right are cut from stacks of newspapers from the past couple months. the section at the bottom left corner is fabric manipulation where scraps are shaped, ironed, and glued in a specific way to represent flowers and in a sense, a better world behind the first layer of it all. There is another strip of fabric that is pinned on the right of the piece; it can be moved to cover the eyes of the silk-screen printed person next to it as if it were a blind fold. the strip of fabric reads “Don’t be blind blind blind are you” to set kind of a questioning, if not almost accusatory tone at the way people react to these kinds of situations. It also serves as a call to action for people to start taking actions and making changes.

I think this piece speaks for itself and the emotion, message, and thought is fairly straightforward. I painted with my heart and this painting is representative of the state of my emotions as I was processing all that was happening.