ROCHESTER, N.Y. — May marks Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. To celebrate and honor the community, Asian artists in Rochester are highlighting AAPI stories through a month-long exhibit.
“When I make art about the present moment, I think, I have to go back to my roots,” artist and immigrant Thao Le Thanh said.
Art can draw discussion.
“I try to do art that feel honest,” Le Thanh said. “To where I am in life. I always loved drawing. I think, it’s definitely in my family because a lot of folks in my family, [like] my uncle, my cousin, loved to draw. And growing up, I loved writing, and I love drawing. I made comics with my brother. And I just wanted to keep doing that.”
For Le Thanh, her work also shares a story. Facing isolation, she was from one of the only Vietnamese families, at the time, in their town.
“My mother is, was one of the Vietnamese boat people,” Le Thanh said. “She left Vietnam during the war and she lived in a refugee camp in Malaysia. And then the Italian Navy brought my mom and the rest of her family, my family, to Italy. There’s a lot of generational trauma that needs healing. I think, you know, my parents in particular didn’t really want to talk about Vietnam. There wasn’t a lot of representation and the representation was often skewed by white supremacy lenses. And I think that these folks are missing a piece of the puzzle. So, having the possibility to represent yourself, it’s clarifying.”
Using art as a form of healing and connecting, Thao Le Thanh shares her art in spaces like “Red: An Asian American and Pacific Islander Artist exhibition.”
“Asian American artists are really broad spectrum of art and that we do lots of different kinds of things,” exhibition curator Julie Chen said. “I am an artist myself, I am interdisciplinary, I do a lot of different things and I’ve met a lot of Asian American artists coming from a lot of different backgrounds, and they also do a lot of different things.”
From paintings, poems and even photography.
“I was born in Vietnam and adopted and raised in Connecticut,” photographer Jess Connelly-Cohen said. “So, I’ve been going back since I was like eight years old every other year.”
She us ohotographing her trips in a world where she may have grown up in.
“It’s actually part of like a magazine, a little photo book magazine that I made when I came back from this trip, all about my photos from there and how I kind of got more in touch with my identity,” Cohen said.
They are finding identity through art, but also a community.
“A lot of different groups of people with a lot of different histories, so we all have these different pathways of coming here and becoming Asian,” Chen said. “Whether folks immigrated right here or there are generations they’ve been here for generations or whether, they were adopted. We are not just like one type of person that they’re we have lots of different stories in different, pathways becoming who we are.”
The closing event for “Red” is scheduled for May 29 from 6-8 p.m., featuring a pop-up market with its artists from the showcase at the AltBar in Rochester.
