Blue Hawai‘i (2014-2015)

a ghostly woman wearing a kimono stands in the foreground in this blue painting. Sugarcane workers stand in the background. — ***Issei****, 30 x 45 in., Oil on canvas, 2011*. Collection of Heiwa Terrace, Chicago, IL.

Laura Kina: Blue Hawai‘i

January 27 – March 3, 2015
Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery
New Jersey City University
Hepburn Hall, Room 323
2039 Kennedy Boulevard
Jersey City, NJ 07305
Tel: 201-200-3246

February 21 – March 27, 2014
The Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art
University of Memphis
Department of Art
Art and Communication Building
3715 Central Ave.
Memphis, TN 38152
Tel: 901-678-2216

You won’t find Elvis or surfboards or funny umbrella-topped cocktails in my dystopic Blue Hawaiʻi. Drawn from family albums, oral history and community archives, these ghostly oil paintings employ distilled memories to investigate themes of distance, longing, and belonging.

Featuring a selection from my Sugar series (2009-2013), the setting is in my father’s Okinawan sugarcane field plantation community, Piʻihonua, on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi near Hilo. My obsession with blue was inspired by the indigo-dyed kasuri kimonos repurposed by the Issei (first generation) “picture bride” immigrants for canefield work clothes, and colored by stories of hinotama (fireballs) shooting from the canefield cemetery into the night sky. Blue Hawaiʻi echoes the spirits of my ancestors and shared histories of labor migration.

My primary source images span the early 1900s to 1950s, from a period of hard manual labor in sugarcane fields up to the Americanization of WWII <em>Nisei</em> (second generation) and postwar Sansei (third generation). But my transpacific vision grew from my travels with my father. In 2009, I accompanied him back to his hometown community in Hawaiʻi to interview Nisei and Sansei, as well as my father, about their memories of plantation life. In 2012, my father and I travelled to Okinawa on a similar trip, collecting stories of heritage and history. I learned my grandmother and great aunts had been Kibei Nisei, i.e., sent to Japan for their education; that in the devastation of WWII and the Battle of Okinawa, four family members were killed; and, that my great-grandmother often sent care packages from Hawaiʻi to the family in Okinawa with money sewn into the hems of used clothing and hidden in the lids of mayonnaise jar packed with caramel candies.

As U.S. relatives ceased to use the Okinawan dialect of Uchinaguchi or standard Japanese, stories like these were lost. In Blue Hawaiʻi, I work to reclaim these histories via reanimated traces from old photographs and present-day vestiges visible in paintings such as “Okinawa — All American Food” and “Black Market,” which capture the remnants of war and a continued American military presence in contemporary Okinawa. Risking distortion, misreading, nostalgia and erasure, I fully engage in the messy business of memory, collapsing time and space into one “Blue Hawai’i.”