Bio: Laura Kina received her MFA Studio Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Design, Vincent de Paul Professor and former Director and founding member of Global Asian Studies at DePaul University.
Born in Riverside, California in 1973 to an Okinawan father from Hawai’i and a Spanish-Basque/Anglo mother, Kina was raised in Poulsbo, WA, a small Norwegian town in the Pacific Northwest. The artist currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has shown nationally and internationally and is represented in Miami, FL by Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts. Her solo shows include: Sugar (Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, 2010), A Many-Splendored Thing (Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL 2010), Aloha Dreams and Hapa Soap Operas (Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, Miami, FL 2007 and 2003), and Loving (Grand Projects, New Haven, CT 2006).
For the past 20 years, Kina has been involved in Asian American arts organizations including DestinAsian, Asian American Artists Collective-Chicago, Foundation for Asian American Independent Media, Diasporic Asian Arts Network, and the International Network for Diasporic Asian Art Research. She is currently a board member of MAVIN in Seattle, The Japanese American Service Committee in Chicago, and a founding member of the Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) bi-annual conference and forthcoming CMRS journal.
| Critic Murtaza Vali has described her art as “a genre of Pop art with a distinctly postcolonial edge.” Curator Larry Lee, in his introduction to Laura Kina’s 2010 retrospective A Many-Splendored Thing , expands on this notion: Glance quickly at a Laura Kina painting and what comes to mind at first is Hello Kitty goes to Bollywood in Pearl Harbor by a Coca Cola sign. Or surely Pop gone haywire as the resultant byproduct the artist creates deftly fuses these loaded icons into a NeoPop Orientalism or less ironical Post Japonisme of East morphing West and vice versa not just Americanized but transnationalized. Yet to label her oeuvre strictly as such is an injustice because what you also see ostensibly hybridizes the anecdotal and historical, family and society, private and public conflated through collage of art imitating, or drawing from, life, particularly her life as a mixed Asian "hapa haole" alternately fascinated, bemused and obsessed with being in-between. |
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