Care, Memory, and the Immigrant Kitchen
Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 2026
Everything in this exhibition begins with something I can't show you — only describe.
The first: katsuobushi, dried smoked bonito flakes, pulled from a fresh-opened box in a San Francisco kitchen in the late 1960s — and the tiny kokeshi doll waiting at the bottom, small enough to close your fist around. The second: adobo, not the spice blend but the dish, vinegar and garlic and bay leaf reducing slowly on the stove, drifting through the halls of Ping Yuen, the Chinatown housing project where my family landed after a fire and my parents' divorce.
This exhibition lives in the space between those two smells. It's a project about transmission — about how culture moves through people, through kitchens, through the everyday acts we don't always recognize as acts at all. Not nostalgia for a culture that was once whole and is now broken, but attention to the ongoing, adaptive, collective labor of people who have always had to make belonging possible themselves.
The small things we remember longest. The ones we carry.
The Paintings
Caballeros de Dimas-Alang
16" × 16", acrylic on birch panel, 2026
This portrait depicts my father as a young man, photographed in the 1920s soon after he immigrated as a teenager in the first wave of Filipino migration. He became part of the Manong generation — pioneering laborers who shaped Filipino life in America — and a founding member of Lodge No. 1 of the Caballeros de Dimas-Alang, established in San Francisco on December 14, 1920. Named for José Rizal's pen name meaning "cannot be touched," the Lodge's first home on Broadway Street was later sold and became Mabuhay Gardens, the legendary Fab Mab, where I came of age as a teenager, in the same rooms my father had helped claim a generation before.
Triptych: Love Translated / At My Altar / I Remember
16" × 16" each, acrylic on birch panel, 2026
A three-part meditation on wabi sabi — the beauty of what's worn, imperfect, and deeply lived. Each panel holds its own register: the altar as ritual, memory as active practice, love as labor. Together they ask what endures when nothing is perfect — how care moves through cracks, how devotion accumulates in the body, how love is translated, again and again, through food and touch and time.
Katsuobushi Dream
30" × 40", acrylic on canvas, 2020
Rooted in early childhood memory, the particular joy of opening a fresh box of katsuobushi, dried smoked bonito flakes. In the 1960s and 70s, those boxes came with a surprise: a tiny 1½-inch kokeshi doll, simple and wooden, no arms or legs.
The small things we remember longest.
Kitchen Archive
30" × 40", mixed media, 2026
The giant spoon and fork hung in every Filipino home I knew growing up, right next to the carved Last Supper, without fail — a symbol of abundance, of gathering, of the meal as the center of everything. These handles are etched with Bisaya tattooing: the sun, the islands, the eyes of ancestors. Beside them, a recipe for cuchinta. A child at a birthday table, candles lit, a mother leaning in close. The rituals that keep us.
Tokyo Fish Market
30" × 40", acrylic on birch panel, 2026
When Tokyo Fish Market in San Francisco's Western Addition closed, it simply vanished — no obituary, no marker, nothing to document it ever existed. More than a fish market, it was texture, color, and ritual. This painting is its record.
The Ping
30" × 40", acrylic on birch panel, 2023
Named for Ping Yuen, the Chinatown housing project where my family landed after a fire and my parents' divorce. Thin walls, overlapping languages — Cantonese, Tagalog, Spanish, English — and the smell of adobo, dumplings, and steamed rice drifting through the halls. Poverty shaped this world. So did the shared labor of survival.
Memories & Obstacles
40" × 60", acrylic on canvas, 2025
Black, sepia, neon orange — the colors of something worth remembering. The neon cuts through like a detail you can't forget, bright against all that history. I'm walking behind my mother on one of her last outings, and somewhere in that simple act I can feel the shift — me watching over her now as she moves toward a life she used to know. Past and present, almost touching.
Urban Wildlife
60" × 40", acrylic on canvas, 2026
My mother feeds pigeons. Behind her, a dandelion tagged on the wall, its seeds scattered like diaspora, rooted nowhere and everywhere. Food Not Bombs is written beside it — feeding people has always been a political act. And fading beneath it all, the ghost of T. Ikeda Co., a Japanese grocery store erased by Executive Order 9066 in 1942. Who gets fed. Who gets displaced. Who keeps showing up anyway.
Erased
10" × 20", acrylic on canvas, 2026
Erased traces my father's immigrant journey through the outline of his silhouette, daisies wilting within it — a quiet image of both memory, loss and resilience. His story mirrors that of countless Filipino immigrants in the 1920s who came seeking opportunity, only to find themselves in a country that denied them citizenship, land, and any real sense of belonging. Beside the silhouette, an inscription reads: "History is shaped by those who refused to be erased."
Whispers of Departure
20" × 26", mixed media, 2024
My cousin Akihiko moves through this monoprint the way memory moves — tunnels, urban streets bleeding into rural landscapes, stark black screen-printing cut through with neon.
He’s emerging from something here, or entering it. A moment when he was fully himself. This piece is about what family asks of you, what you ask of yourself, and what stays with you anyway.
The Altars
If the paintings are how I remember, the altars are how I practice remembering. They're not illustrations of memory — they're built the way memory actually works: layered, assembled from what survived, never finished.
Kitchen Altar
This is the one that started it all, because this is the kitchen. This altar holds what got said every single day without anyone calling it language — food as offering, medicine, memory, love, sometimes all at once, in the same dish.
There's a spoon carrying histories of deprivation and survival, the ordinary object that fed people through hard years and never got thrown out. A pestle fused with a miso recipe, literally carrying instructions for making something nourishing out of whatever you have. An herb-drying basket holding a block-printed heron, standing solo against a rice plant — farmers read it as a sign the harvest will hold.
There's embroidered ginger. In many Asian households, ginger is medicine before it's flavor — what your grandmother reaches for before the pharmacy. I stitched it instead of using the real thing, because embroidery doesn't fade the way fresh ginger does. This medicine won’t run out.
And there's a broken cup, repaired with gold paint — faux kintsugi. I'm not claiming an artisan's mastery, just mending a broken thing, visibly, with what I had. It sits on a cushion that once cradled a singing bell, retired but carefully kept, stitched around with milagros — small Mexican charms used as physical prayers. Inside the cup: acorns, something small already carrying a whole tree. Filipino, Japanese, Mexican, all in one repaired cup — that's what my kitchen actually sounded like, through the walls of the Ping Yuen Housing Project in San Francisco.
You'll also see a kitsune, evoking fluidness between worlds; a Jibo Kannon, goddess of mercy, keeping watch; a hamaya arrow standing guard against misfortune.
Nothing here is precious in a museum sense. Every piece was already doing work in somebody's life — my job was to notice that work and keep it going. A recipe you don't cook isn't an archive anymore. I'm interested in what's still alive.
Altar for Unspoken Promises
This altar came directly out of caregiving for my mother, and out of a piece I made before this show called A Promise Unspoken.
Caregiving doesn't announce itself. It builds quietly, in routines built entirely around another person's needs, in things you meant to say and never got to. The promises that really matter are rarely spoken — you just show up, and stay, and rearrange the small things around someone who's leaving.
At the center, my mother is screen-printed onto a tapestry combining shibori, bound and dyed cloth, with sashiko, hand-stitching traditionally used to reinforce worn fabric. Sashiko exists because of scarcity — people who couldn't afford new clothes mended old ones by hand, and that mending became its own kind of beauty. Care, on this altar, is literally stitched from a tradition built around not wasting what you already have.
Around her: block-printed koinobori (carp windsock), folded tsuru (paper crane), and her prayer book.
Below that lie prints reworked from the actual 1942 relocation orders that sent families like mine into incarceration. I rewrote the instruction. Now it just says: Protect Our Neighbors. Because never again is now.
At the front sits a kusuri bako, an antique medicine box, holding a stone wrapped in reed by my friend, artist Na Omi Shintani — one act of care resting inside another, inside a box built for exactly that, a hundred years ago.
None of these objects are relics. They're still in conversation, with grief and love at once — the way caregiving actually feels.
Truth Document Altar (Legacy Edition)
30" × 40", mixed media assemblage, 2026
This one started as a keepsake box purchased at an estate sale — the kind most families seem to have, where you put the things too important to throw away and too painful to look at regularly. I didn't buy anything new to build this. It was carefully excavated from the bottom of a suitcase in the back of a closet that hadn't seen light for half a century.
Here you see screen-printed family documents — birth records, affidavits. A koseki, a Japanese family registry: the official record of who belongs to whom, who the state recognizes. A child's zori (sandal), woven from scraps of old clothing. A family photograph. And running through all of it — red thread.
In Japanese tradition, an invisible red thread connects people destined to be bound to each other. I made it visible, and honest — knotted, uneven, and in places broken. That's not a mistake. My family was shaped by war, migration, and silence, and a straight red thread would have lied about all of that.
I didn't manufacture the sense of history in these materials — the documents were already old, already handled, already carrying weight. My job was to adapt them: screen-print them onto new surfaces, give them a frame that lets you sit with them instead of filing them away.
Below the documents hang folded tsuru (paper cranes), ribbons, bells — offerings. This altar holds what the official records couldn't. Some of this was never written down at all. Silence is part of the archive too, and the altar has room for that. A page doesn't.
Elements of this exhibition, including the Unspoken Promises Altar, grew directly out of A Promise Unspoken, first shown at SOMArts in April/May 2025 as part of Brown Palms, Yellow Balms: Reinventing Caregivers of Color.