The Wing Luke Museum: A Unique View into the Asian Diaspora

I couldn’t help but notice the signs in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District, which included Chinese translations beside the English street names. The purpose of my visit was to see the Wing Luke Museum—which focuses on the art of the pan-Asian diaspora—and its exhibit “Lost & Found: Searching For Home.” To be completely honest, I was skeptical of the purpose of the museum going in. Why does pan-Asian diaspora art need its own museum? By the time I left, my opinion had completely changed.

The Wing Luke Museum was less conspicuous than I expected. I even walked past it a few times. It was hard to believe such a small place could contain three floors of art and history. I found “Lost & Found” on the first floor, near a sign explaining that the exhibit focuses on the idea of home among the AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) community. Entering the exhibit, I immediately noticed a digital screen that displayed the story of Asian immigrants’ lives. This was my first hint that the mediums shown in the exhibit would be unusual. I couldn’t help but notice the Asian diversity on display. The screen not only showed ethnic diversity, but also diversity of experience and background. There were refugees and adoptees, men and women, recent immigrants, and those who had lived in America nearly all their lives. The depth of the museum’s pan-Asian focus began to hit me. 

The pieces near the entrance were more conventional—mostly paintings. Many of them used Western techniques to explore Asian themes. To me, this fusion demonstrates the mixing of identities inherent to the diaspora. A particularly interesting piece was “Hua Sheng Dun Crossing the Color Line (They Comin' to 'Murica)”—Korean-American artist Eric Chan’s unique take on Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” The title alone changes the topic of Chan’s work from the Revolutionary War to Asian immigration to America. Chan depicts a diverse group of Asian men landing on the shore with Western houses in the background, symbolizing America. A Hawaiian chief wearing the traditional battle armor of an ahu-ula feathered cape and mahiole feathered helmet points the men forward from the back of the boat. A Sikh warrior aims a rifle, and an East Asian brandishing a spear dismounts the boat. The ragtag nature of the group is like that of George Washington’s rebels. Both are fighting for America, but in different ways: one to create the nation, and the other to join it. Like these men, all immigrants are going into battle, facing isolation and prejudice in a strange new land. The diversity of the sailors fits the pan-Asian theme of the museum: they are together on the same journey, and will face the same struggles together despite their different origins.

I then noticed a white suit and hat in the far corner. This was Hae Soup’s “rebirth day suit.” She was adopted as a child from South Korea by white parents and only met her biological parents after 22 years. She had immigrated without ever realizing it, but eventually decided to reconnect with her birth culture. This piece was part of that process. She used her adoption documents to depict a hanbok (suit) she would have worn at her doljanchi, a traditional Korean celebration of an infant’s first birthday. She never experienced this, having been adopted as a baby. Her hanbok is entirely white. In Korean culture, white is the color of mourning, worn in funerals and ancestor worship. Soup’s exclusive use of white in this work connects her to her birth culture, mourns her loss of it, and affirms her connection to her biological ancestors. Seeing this work made me realize that adoptees often feel they have lost a part of their culture, much like second-generation immigrants do. 

In the corner of the first room were two similar works by Lauren Iida, a Japanese American artist. The first features childhood objects painted in white on top of a real nuclear industrial fan blade, depicting Iida’s grief over the atomic bombings, which affected her family in Hiroshima. The second, “Memory Net: The Things We Left Behind,” hangs above it, extending along the hallway to the next room. The work is made of paper in a netlike pattern, with memories from Iida’s childhood cut out of the net. She explores the two parts of her culture this way, showing objects from both, such as sriracha bottles and pizza slices, or tea pots and teddy bears. Of course, this experience isn’t unique to her; feeling torn between two cultures is a universal experience among all kinds of immigrants. The location of the work made it even more effective, as I continued looking at it as I went between the two rooms of the exhibit. 

A simple exhibit from the next room had a powerful impact on me. Maliha Masood’s “Dupatta Homecoming” doesn’t look like much at first. Just a female mannequin wearing a dupatta—a type of shawl from the Indian subcontinent—with several colored pieces of cloth hanging behind it. Another dupatta lies at ground level, with a mirror and a sign asking viewers to try it on. The sign gives several styles of wearing a dupatta. Another sign shares that Masood grew up in Pakistan. In her early years, she disliked the dupatta because it was considered immodest not to wear one. Later in life, after immigrating to America and returning to Pakistan in college, she re-embraced the dupatta as part of her culture and as an “artistic playground” of colors and styles. By asking the audience to experience a part of her culture, Masood’s deceptively minimalist exhibit challenges the common perception of Asian culture as one-dimensional. And by emphasizing the often-ignored diversity of Asia, Masood also highlights the common struggle of stereotyping and ignorance that members of the Asian diaspora face.

I left the exhibit understanding both myself and others better. As a child of Chinese immigrants, I related to the exhibits’ shared theme of feeling stuck between two cultures and not completely belonging to either one. “Lost & Found” reminded me that I was not alone; my experiences are like those of countless others. This is why the Wing Luke Museum matters. Art helps bring together the Asian diaspora by exposing the shared experiences that define it.

Lead photo: Wing Luke Museum exhibit graphic for "Lost & Found: Searching for Home".

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