APAture 2008 - Comics and Zine Expo!

Each and every year Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) in San Francisco hosts for about a week and a half a festival for emerging Asian Pacific American artists known as APAture. This year it began on September 18th and continued on until September 27th. I was lucky enough to be encouraged and by my Asian American Culture teacher to attend one of these events because I would have not known about it otherwise.

The event I attended on the last day of APAture was an exhibit showcasing upcoming Asian American photographers, painters, cinematographers, and others in an event known as the Comics and Zine expo. As I walked up the stairs of the 180 Capp St. building that the exhibit was being held in, the organizers of the event made an effort to entice and lure the audience with a taste of the unique art that was to come in the room of the exhibit. The art piece on the left was the first thing that drew my eyes on it (unfortunately I do not know the name of this piece). Newspapers are not usually used as a canvas to draw or paint something on and I found it kind of funny that material of the canvas is also what is being displayed on the canvas itself. From this painting, I was hoping for better things to come and luckily, I found it in the exhibit room. In the exhibit room I found amazing and diverse pieces of art that made me think but yet I could not help but be a little disappointed in the overall lack in number of art pieces.

I continued on and found the exhibit room (at the top floor of the building), finding myself awestruck at the array of colors used and the messages the art was trying to illustrate to the audience who attended. The first notable mention is the Japanese fingerprint (shown below) which provides two images in one, the larger illustration of a swirl shaped fingerprint and when looking closer, individual red Japanese stamps are shown. This art piece proves the point that one needs to look at the big picture of life but also not to neglect the minute and seemingly insignificant things as well.


The next notable mention is an art piece by artist Lisa Solomon named "Synchronized Tanks: Radical Formation." In this art piece, pink and red felt tanks were put along the walls of the room and on the floor in a circular pattern. With the war (the Iraq and all other Middle Eastern wars) being so prevalent now, especially during these final days before election day, I thought it was appropriate to show this art piece to y'all. This piece shows (to me) how the idea of fighting for injustice (through war) appears on the outside to be ideal and "beautiful" but yet the grim reality is that it is an ugly and unjustifiable way to fight for one's rights.














The third notable mention is a piece from four different artists, two who are photographers (Leilani Nisperos and Mike Ricca) and two who are deeply immersed into the art scene (Han Pham and Julie Kuwabara). In this piece known as "Lost in the Woods," two Asian American women (Pham and Kuwabara) are depicted in a traditional fairytale scenario with a spin of reality in it. This photo was created to illustrate issues regarding race, gender, and identity in today's society and that traditional ideas that are society tries to maintain (such as men and women being husband and wife) are not always right.

Finally, there are some pieces of art that are simply amazing but unfortunately I do not have the titles or the artists' names to properly mention them. Here are the other pictures I took as well.

































Overall, I truly enjoyed attending the event. The artwork was magnificent and made me think about myself, the environment I live in, and how society works right now in the present. The artists who were in attendance were extremely friendly and I could tell that they were dedicated to their work and their craft. In fact, the whole experience felt very intimate and close because some of the artists who were there could actually explain what the work means to them which brings you as the audience closer to their interpretation. However, the walls seemed a bit bare and I expected more art to be displayed in the exhibit. If I didn't have time, I could have easily seen and looked at all the artwork within a 5 minute span. But I did have a lot of time to spend at the exhibit so I took my time enjoying and taking the experience all in. I even bought an APAture shirt and helped support an Asian American cinematographer by purchasing a DVD of his show "Eve: Beauty and the Blade." In the end, I'm glad I went to this event to help support my fellow Asian Americans.