Collaborative UH Hilo group co-sponsors Korean art and history exhibition
Many of the historical and art displays in the exhibition are created or curated by UH Hilo faculty and students from the English, business, language, and art departments.
By Susan Enright.
The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo is co-sponsoring the exhibition, “One Heart: Korean Art and History Across the Pacific,” at Wailoa Center, Hilo, running May 3 through June 20, 2024.
The event brings together a juried art exhibition and a presentation of new historical research showing an almost completely forgotten history of Koreans on Hawaiʻi Island.
On the first floor of Wailoa Center, the displays focus on the history of Koreans on Hawaiʻi Island with artifacts, photos, clothing, newspaper clippings, and information about the people and politics surrounding the waves of immigrants to the island. Displays includes details about business, cultural traditions, people, families, and deaths. Many of the historical displays found on the first floor of the exhibition are the work of, or curated by, UH Hilo researchers from the English, business, language, and art departments. Other contributors are historians, photographers, experts in language and culture, genealogists and economists, some from Hawaiʻi Island or the mainland, one from South Korea, all with either personal or professional ties to Korean history on Hawaiʻi Island.
Pulling the group together is Seri Luangphinith, a professor of English who has done extensive research into the history of Korean immigrants to Hawaiʻi Island and written a book on her findings, The Paths We Cross: The Lives and Legacies of Koreans on the Big Island (Ka Noio ʻAʻe Ale, UH Hilo Independent Press, 2018). She is a major contributor to the history component of the “One Heart” exhibition, including as writer of the biographies and discussions found throughout the displays and the wealth of information gleaned from her field work throughout Hawaiʻi Island collecting gravestone rubbings.
“We need to better understand and appreciate the Asian presence on this island,” says Luangphinith. “Koreans are a forgotten people here and that’s unfortunate given their contributions to the local community and to Korea.”
On the second floor of Wailoa Center is a juried art exhibition, “Paths We Cross: Perspectives from the Korean Diaspora,” featuring local and international artists working in a wide variety of styles and art media.
Through a collaboration with Michael Marshal, professor of art at UH Hilo, the art show was juried by Mizin Shin, assistant professor of art and history at the University of Rochester. Shin, Marshall, and students in his gallery management class assisted with handling and preparing the works for installation.
“Collaboration is a journey, within which everyone who is engaged with the process comes away with a broader understanding of the subjects,” says Prof. Marshall in the exhibition’s printed program.
The “One Heart” exhibition is supported by the UH Hilo College of Arts and Sciences and the UH Mānoa Office of Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity. Major funding comes from the Hawaiʻi Council for the Humanities through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Finding history
On Hawaiʻi Island, the first wave of Korean immigrants came from 1903 through the 1920s. The second wave came during the Japanese occupation, then the next came because of the Korean War.
“You have all these different people who made up these different waves and then they all started inter-marrying and it became this really big web,” explains Prof. Luangphinith.
- Read full story about Seri Luangphinith’s book, The Paths We Cross.
- Prof. Luangphinith recently released “Snapped Life Chords: Problematizing the Execution of the First Koreans in the United States 1905-1906” in the Hawaiian Journal of History (Vol. 57, 2023). A longer version of this story as well as the narratives and materials found in the “Open Heart” exhibition will be published in a second edition of The Paths We Cross, due out in 2027.
In additional to oral interviews she conducted for her book, Luangphinith began digging through old newspapers and public records of Koreans in the Lyman Museum archives.
“Then, on a hunch I started looking at Korean cemeteries because I knew that Japanese and Chinese immigrants recorded hometowns and families on their graves and sure enough the Koreans also did the same thing.”
The exhibition includes rubbings from four of the Korean gravestones Luangphinith has discovered along with information about how the artifacts have helped Korean families on the island reconnect with long-lost generations of their ancestors.
“It is hoped that the four graves we feature here help people better appreciate the care and sentiments that went into creating these memorials for the people who would never be able to return to their homeland, due to poverty, occupation, war, political upheaval, and/or the loss of kinship,” says Luangphinith in the exhibition’s program.
“As documented by the gravestone rubbings that are incorporated into the 2024 Wailoa Center exhibition treatment, our connection to the memory and history of how we got to where we are now, is vanishing,” says Prof. Marshall in the exhibition’s program. “We, of course, will not understand the direct or indirect cost of this erasure, until it’s too late.”
Other contributors from UH Hilo include Andrey Simonov, associate professor of accounting who has a keen interest in history, and Jiren Feng, associate professor of Chinese studies who translated the Manifesto of the Korean National Assembly.
Feng says some people might assume that translation work is a “no-brainer.” However, he says, this is not true.
“To me, it has been a very special experience,” says Feng. “I was impressed that the Manifesto was written in very refined classical Chinese language, and it was full of idioms and vivid metaphorical language. To translate it well, you have to do some research about Korean history, culture, and get to know the way of thinking of Koreans in the early 20th century.”
He says he is glad Prof. Luangphinith gave him the task, “it was a special opportunity to learn Korean culture and history from the language that they employed in writing.”
Exhibition opening
The public opening of the exhibition on Friday, May 3, featured opening prayers by Pastor Daniel Hyunsoo Lee of the Hilo Korean Christian Church and opening remarks by Prof. Luangphinith on Korean history as it relates to Hawaiʻi Island.
There were song and dance performances by the Hilo Korean Community Choir with a short speech by choirmaster Hannah Kim on the Korean War and its imprint on Korean identity.
The keynote was delivered by Mizin Shin, who juried the art show, on her work with the #StopAsianHate movement and the intersection of art, ethnic identity, and social justice.
Lumiel Kim, granddaughter of an independent Korean activist on Hawaiʻi Island, gave a talk the next day, Saturday, May 4, “Recovering the Past: A Korean Woman’s Journey to Traditional Asian Medicine & K-Drama,” about the lack of Korean culture in her life and how that lack of culture shaped her fascination with Asian herbalism and medicine.
She talked about key herbs such as ginseng that are essential to Asian medicine and ended with an interactive lecture on Korean acupressure technique.
A full schedule of upcoming events is posted online.
An online event, Talk Story with Gary Chong, is scheduled for Saturday, June 1, 2024, at 10:30 a.m.
Hours
The Wailoa Center, located at the Wailoa River State Recreation Area, is open Monday-Friday 9:00 am to 4:00 pm, and Saturday 10:00 am to 3:00 pm.
Story by Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
At Prof. Luangphinith’s request, a correction has been made to this post on June 27, 2024. The first wave of immigrants came from 1903 through the 1920s, not from 1905.
