Located in Seattle’s International District, the Wing Luke Museum showcases art, history and culture of Asian American, Pacific Islander and Native Hawaiian people. One of their newest exhibits, “Lost and Found: Searching For Home,” is a gallery filled with a collective of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) voices illustrating their connection to “home” in a multitude of ways. 

Identities of AANHPI across a wide diaspora have a unique mindset when it comes to identifying where and what “home” is. The “Lost and Found” gallery asks its audience how they define home, and each art piece is a personal look into the artist’s conscience of home. With 15 artists, the range of art, perspective and ideas of home are vast in diversity with mediums of art for everyone. 

One of the artists included Lauren Iida, a Seattle native coming from Japanese American heritage, hand-cuts paper illustrations as her medium of art. Among the few art installations Iida contributed to the Lost and Found museum is an intricate paper hand-cut titled the “Memory Net: The Things We Left Behind.” This piece depicts a net with cutouts of books, foods and landmarks caught in its web. The artifacts symbolize lost memories, not completely gone, just out of reach, with the possibility of fishing them up from the deep corners of our minds.  

The Memory Net is an ongoing project—as it visits new galleries and communities, those spaces are given the opportunity to contribute new ideas and memories, with Iida as the weaver of these stories. Along with present living stories, Iida also incorporates historical references to Fukushima, Japan, where her ancestors come from. 

“I’m using objects as sort of creating a symbolic language of objects—is what I call it—across time and space of geography and cultures,” Iida said.

Other notable pieces included in the Lost and Found exhibit was an oil on canvas by Kyler Pahang called “Fourth Wave.” Pahang is a Filipino American artist who uses large figurative pieces to reconnect with his culture. The specific pieces he included in this exhibit are meditative pieces reflecting his connection of identity and grief to home in Bohol, an island in the Philippines where he buried his great-grandfather and grandfather. 

“Fourth Wave” pictures a large landscape full of blues, purples and reds which seem to depict the surface of a planet and the galaxy above. The surface can be interpreted as the artist’s conscious self and solid identity, while the stars, planets and galaxy painted above represent the memories of loss he associates with home. Those painful memories aren’t always actively impacting him but their part of his foundation and are silently a part of him and his identity. 

The painting can be interpreted as an illustration of the artist’s consciousness; the frenzied red strokes in the right hand corner give a more present feel that may be his active consciousness. As you get further away, the dark hues connect to his subconscious which holds memories of grief. Pahang wrote that grief is something he doesn’t like to always be in remembrance of; but those memories of sadness are always there, silently a part of him and his identity. 

Safwat Saleem, a South Asian Muslim American, contributed works of art which reflected on his relationship with his daughter, and the disconnect of assimilation, cultural loss, and diasporic trauma between them—symbolizing the widely felt experience for children of immigrants. 

“Anxieties of an Immigrant Father” is a series of 30 charcoal and oil pastel print drawings addressed to his daughter about Saleem’s documented moments of anxiety over the past eight years of being a father. A few of those charts documented; 

“YOU’LL THINK OF THE BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY AS COOL, INSTEAD OF AS A VESTIGE OF COLONIALISM” 

“YOU WON’T LEARN URDU EARLY ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO TALK WITH MY MOTHER WHILE YOU STILL HAVE A CHANCE” 

“YOU WON’T RETURN MY CALLS (THE WAY I DON’T RETURN MY MOTHER’S)” 

“YOU WILL REALIZE THAT I AM NO BETTER THAN MY FATHERS RAGE”

Coming from an Asian background, living in America forces me to constantly feel a disconnect between my cultural identities. There is a term, “other,” which represents the feeling of being pulled in two different directions— never enough of my homeland and never American enough either. Growing up with Western culture, mainstream media has never taught me to be proud of my South Asian heritage, and there is constant challenge and question of the beauty and authenticity of where we come from. The Asian American and all AANHPI identifying are posed with the question of what home is for us and this gallery brought the question to the forefront of my mind— how do we know where we belong? 

Milly Pil, a staff member of the Wing Luke Museum, was on the community advisory committee (CAC) which was part of the process to help put the exhibit together. As a Cambodian American, Pil expressed her gratitude towards the artists who put so much intention behind their works on defining “home” and bringing voice and illustration to the types of representation that mainstream media—especially Western media—usually overlooks. 

“To see other voices that were speaking to the kind of dissonance and nuance, even if I knew that it already existed within the community, seeing art that names it and shows it in all the different ways that it can was really profound and resounding,” Pil said. 

Another staff member, Hana Natsuhara, also voiced the way that, for so many people, the Lost and Found exhibit has given space for them to dig deep into their memory and find the string of home that calls to them. 

“It’s brought in a lot of different people and there’s a lot of different ways that you can identify with Homeland and that means something to everyone,” Natsuhara said. 

Home is something that can be lost, but it is also something that is always ready to be found. Being part of a diaspora means that looking for home will seem like an endless endeavor, but as is reflected in the “Lost and Found” gallery, home isn’t one defined place. The world around us constantly pushes us to reject our roots, but the diaspora gives us the power to determine where we belong. Whether that is a memory of the embrace of a late grandparent, a meal served warm, a location we can return to, or the people who surround us, home is what we choose to make it.