8 Asian American and Pacific Islander Creatives on the Relevance of Heritage
From cakes as art to Met Gala couture, these women are making names for themselves while reflecting their own history
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I could take up an entire article covering the complicated existence of months dedicated to identity—they both celebrate and tokenize, recognize and reduce. After all, we cannot condense culture or history into 31—sometimes fewer—days, patting ourselves on the back for the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month infographics shared in the opening and closing days.
The AAPI community is not a monolith. Asian Americans comprise roughly 50 ethnic groups; and South Asians are often left off of this month’s traditional heritage packaging. One thing we can do to recognize that breadth is to highlight artisans who come from a multitude of backgrounds and demonstrate that—from felting to fashion to food—the AAPI creative community is present and thriving.
Below we’ve showcased the design work of brilliant creatives from AAPI communities across the globe. During discussions about how heritage informs their work, these artists talked me through their various media while overlaying snapshots of their ancestry. From describing web felting techniques to sharing the history of incense as a marker of time, consider this an invitation to extend your existence as a cultural sponge beyond the month of May.
Melissa Joseph
“I don’t think you can be brown in America and not be thinking about your [heritage] or have it impact what you’re doing,” says object maker and mixed-media artist Melissa Joseph. Her father immigrated from Kerala, India, in the early seventies as a surgeon and married her mother, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, four years later. Melissa always had an affinity for art—she took undergrad art classes at NYU and even pursued an associate program at FIT in textiles—but eventually chose the more “practical” master’s in education and began teaching all over the world.
Things changed when Melissa’s father died within six weeks of a cancer diagnosis. “It changed my idea of time,” she recalls. Soon after, Melissa chose to get an MFA at Penn Academy of Fine Art. It was there that she began experimenting with mixed-media pieces, first printing family photos on the Indian silk she was familiar with via home furnishings and local Kerala garments.
Melissa went on to teach herself felting during the pandemic, which she now uses in conversation with other materials, like clay. For the artist, “starting with one material and finishing with another” reflects her own feeling as someone with half a family an ocean away in India; the “material” connecting the dots in her life was not clay or felt, but long-distance phone calls or occasional visits to India. She also shares that, alongside her ancestry, her gender identity very much informs her work. “Because I live in a BIPOC femme body, it really colors how I view everything,” she explains. “It means something for my body to be making work in fiber because, historically, this was a craft relegated to femme bodies that were simultaneously discounted and disregarded.”
The galleries that show Melissa’s work often share her mission and sense of this deeper meaning. Her felt portraits have been displayed at RegularNormal and the Hannah Traore Gallery—two renowned spaces that center community and diverse voices—and her work is also featured in Jeffrey Deitch’s current show, Wonder Women, an exhibit of exclusively Asian women and nonbinary artists. Melissa is also showcasing works by her late father—who used gallbladders to make collages as an outside practice—at Brooklyn’s Soloway Gallery this month.
Guo Pei
Known for designing Rihanna’s Met Gala gown in 2015, Guo Pei has a long career in couture that culminated in her own exhibition, currently on view at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The 55-year-old fashion designer got her start supporting her mother’s needlework in Beijing and has spent her last 30 years doing everything from presenting on stages like Haute Couture Week in Paris to designing animated costumes for the Moon Goddess of Netflix’s Over the Moon. Dubbed “China’s couture queen” and “China’s hautest couturier,” Guo says that Chinese traditions and culture are at the center of her designs “like the blood flowing in my life.” Whether it be her grandmother’s bedtime stories about butterfly silk embroidery or her childhood visits to the Forbidden City and the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), Guo’s memories are physically woven into her work.
Megumi Shauna Arai
Megumi Shauna Arai grew up between Tokyo, where her father lives, and the U.S., where her mother comes from. When asked if her Japanese Jewish heritage informs her delicate textile work, her answer is simple: “How could it not? Our lived experience, it’s one of the most powerful things we have.” As a child, Megumi was quite tactile—she would fiddle with silver gelatin printing and was drawn to the spinning wheel, particularly how she felt when using it. “Its meditative, slow, repetitive [nature],” she says, “has always been the state that I prefer when it comes to art making.”
It was not through a technical degree but a 2015 residency in Shikoku, Japan, that Megumi began learning how to make traditional washi origami, or Japanese papermaking. This “fibrous process” led her back to that childhood love of textile, and she now focuses on bringing the practice of boro (Japanese for “rags” or “tatters”) into the present with naturally made dyes. Ultimately for Megumi, her work is about “incorporating the whole spectrum of influence and heritage,” which is why she combines Japanese and Eastern European fabrics into her patchwork.
Shaina Yang
According to artist Shaina Yang, she had two childhoods. As the child of two Chinese American immigrants, she spent the first half of her upbringing in Seattle—surrounded by kids who looked nothing like her but spoke her language—and the second in her parents’ hometown of Shanghai, surrounded by kids who looked like her but didn’t share anything culturally or linguistically. With architects for parents, Shaina recalls Halloween costumes made of tracing paper, coloring with markers used for pre-software renderings, and a home “filled to the brim” with origami, paper crafts, and Lego.
Shaina first pursued philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford, writing fiction in her spare time and flirting with a career in academia. Eventually, her “long-standing interests in activism had taken [over] specifically in the various housing crises,” which resulted in quitting that career, leaving London, and moving to the United States for a master’s in architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Shaina’s projects range from estates built for a community of folks in wheelchairs (“Crippling Architecture”) to a current plan that sees her conceptualizing models of living beyond the nuclear unit (“The Anti-Nuclear Family”).
For Shaina, the way she was raised, with extended family as part of her day-to-day life—a living concept that mirrors many Asian cultures—informs alternative ways of thinking of the homes and spaces she builds. But she also shares that the question of how heritage informs her work warrants a more layered and complicated answer: “Architecture has long been a tool of the violent colonial state, razing the villages of our ancestors, replacing them with structures designed to be as permanent as they are foreign.”
Prinita Thevarajah
Prinita Thevarajah describes her glass practice much like her family’s origins. Her family went to Australia from Sri Lanka in the late eighties seeking asylum, and her Tamil background was one reinforced by advocating for indigenous solidarity abroad. She has “always seen community as a pillar in navigating life,” and that’s who she thanks for her ability to pursue her art as a career.
It all started in 2019, when Prinita began taking courses at Urban Glass in Brooklyn to learn how to make neon signs. As glassmaking became more familiar, she went from molding signs to twisting tubes of glass around her hands as sculptures—which soon gained the attention of her Instagram followers. This process evolved into her founding of Kapu—meaning bangle in Tamil—where she sells playful jewelry pieces and vessels that mimic her original tube sculptures. Prinita underlines that she has stayed away from exclusively identifying as a Tamil, Sri Lankan, or South Asian artist, stating that she feels her work is “much more than that.”
Imogen Kwok
Imogen Kwok’s work exists within that special intersection between food and art—one where the plate is indeed edible, yet the recipient hesitates to destroy the decadent peach or tart before them. “I treat each table and dish like a still life,” Imogen says of her approach to culinary experiences. “Food is the way I chose to express myself in the same way a writer or a painter might.”
The chef-meets-artist left her New York upbringing to study art history at Scotland’s St. Andrews, but a nagging desire to pursue something more tactile after graduation led Imogen to culinary school. Her ensuing career covered both the restaurant world (working at renowned staples like Blue Hill Stone Barns and Eleven Madison Park) and food-stylist scene, where she assisted on food photo and video shoots for almost four years. Since then, Imogen has evolved her craft, and partners with galleries or fashion companies, creating what she calls “culinary responses” to works.
From stained glass and mosaic tile to László Moholy-Nagy’s paintings, Imogen’s references for food design center striking visuals and textures—the latter of which she says stems from her heritage. “What I have taken away from both sides [of my family, Chinese and Korean], is a very particular appreciation for the texture and ‘bite’ of certain ingredients,” she shares, citing the chewiness of tteokbokki, manipulating one’s mouth around spare ribs, and the act of your grandmother selecting the “best bit of fish cheek.” This intentionality is what marries food and design for Imogen and reverberates through her meticulous work.
Hyungi Park
Hyungi Park grew up with an affinity for the digital space—from computer programming lessons with her mother at age 10 to crafting Powerpoints for school book reports. She took her interest in computers and design and decided to pursue sculpture at VCU Arts, which is where her story of incense and craft making began to bloom.
What started with incense in performances and installations grew into a deep curiosity about its origins. She began shaping incense into flowers or braided sticks, twists on traditional cone incense. “I’m creating my own fusion of traditional-modern-American-Korean-abstract-Frankensteined,” she says.
While developing her work, Hyungi also became fascinated by the ways in which different Asian cultures applied incense—particularly citing how geisha used the burning of incense to indicate the cost of their entertainment and how Chinese working-class families let it be their version of an alarm clock. In a way, incense was a conduit for education, and Hyungi has taken that mode of learning a step further by opening the Baboshop storefront in Los Angeles. The space has become a hub for emerging craftspeople, with workshops that cover some of Hyungi’s latest self-taught forms—which now extend to bookbinding, laser-cutting, and tattooing.
A custom cake inspired by the colors of a Arcmanoro Niles painting.
Amy Yip
You likely recognize Amy Yip’s cakes from her ever-so-circulated Instagram page, @yip.studio. Between mossy, rocklike green works and lumpy pieces covered in strawberries and bright reds, Amy has created a name for herself when it comes to aesthetically pleasing baking. The New Zealand native comes from baker parents and actually avoided the career path at first, having seen all the physical labor that went into her family’s business. She started off in art school and then worked as a textile designer for six years; but when she eventually “discovered a way of connecting [art and baking],” Amy became fascinated.
Nearly two years later, Amy began her practice. The rock geometry of her cakes is quite intentional, derived from her mom’s enthusiasm for crystals; she also often takes inspiration from the florals present at events where she is the pastry partner. The design of Amy’s cakes is just the start, as the flavor profiles span yuzu shiso, oolong rose and lychee, brown butter and Japanese sweet potato, and more. “I always wanted Asian-inspired cakes for my birthday, [but] it was always hard to find those cakes and textures,” she says.
Not only does Amy’s studio tout the flavoring of her heritage, but Amy shares that she intentionally used her surname for the business. While she was growing up, her parents chose to name their own business after a New Zealand local; in the mid-’90s, she wasn’t as proud or vocal about her identity as 66% Chinese and 33% Vietnamese. “I wanted a different surname, like Smith—I wanted to blend in,” she says. Now, she is happy “to take something that I was embarrassed of and show how proud I am.”