JC
Mixed artist Laura Kina will have one of her pieces from Hapa Soap Opera displayed at the Korean Cultural Center as part of their 2005 Group Exhibition (March 11-24). At her site, Laura describes her motivation for creating the Hapa Soap Opera series:

My works draw inspiration from Asian film posters as well as European history and portrait genres and American pulp art. In my ongoing Hapa Soap Opera series (2002-present) I create movie poster-type fantasy worlds populated entirely by hapas.

The Hapa Soap Opera paintings are based on multiracial people that I have photographed from around the United States and Japan. I am interested in the slipperiness of identity and the variety of experiences that mixed-race individuals have based on age, class, gender, race, location, and family histories. My own experiences as an Uchinanchu (a term used to identify Okinawan immigrants and their descendants in Hawaii)/Caucasian, 30-something, middle-class, straight women living as a Jew on Devon Avenue in Chicago are very different than an AfroAsian in Hawaii or a LatinAsian living in California.

As controversy in the art world continues to simmer around words such as “post-black” , I wonder how this applies to my work and why, upon meeting me for the first time, so many people still ask, “so what are you anyway?” Race still matters…I’m just not sure what it really means.