2 Girls | 1 Asian: A New Webseries

At Mixed Roots Stories we strive to support any effort to share stories of the Mixed experience.  2 Girls | 1 Asian is a comedic webseries co-created, produced, and starring Kelly Colburn and Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin.  They created the series, because, as Kelly and Kaela stated, “we don’t often see ourselves reflected in the entertainment we’re offered.”

Webseries Description “It follows Caela and Kelliye through breakups, career trials, apartment troubles, and even fissions within their friendship, but ultimately it’s the story of two girls who value each other more than they value the mistakes the other makes. Our perspective on race in America gives us a unique filter through which to view the “single girl in the big city” narrative, so our episodes actively work to subvert Asian American stereotypes we’re tired of seeing while passing the Bechdel test. We launched our independent, fully crowd-funded production online on June 5, 2014, and are releasing an episode each Thursday at 9pm through mid-July.”

ENJOY!

Episode 1: “I Enjoy Being A Girl…/Pilot”

Episode 2: “What Are You?”

Episode 3: “Eviction”

2 Girls | 1 Asian


Laura Kina: Blue Hawaii

We work closely with visual artist, scholar and professor Laura Kina on the Mixed Roots Stories programming for the Critical Mixed Race Studies conference (November 2014). She consistently explores the mixed experience in her work and in her classrooms. Here’s information on her current exhibition:

This week in Memphis – join Laura in person for the opening reception and artist lecture or visit the show virtually.

University of Memphis
The Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art

Laura Kina: Blue Hawai’i

February 21 – March 27, 2014

Opening reception: Friday, Feb 21 5:30-8:00pm

Artist talk: Thursday, Feb 20 7:00pm 3715 Central Ave. #310
“Remembering Painting, Forgetting Photographs”

University of Memphis
The Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art
Art Department
Art and Communication Building
3715 Central Ave.
Memphis, TN 38152
Tel 901-678-2216
http://memphis.edu/art/fogelmangalleries.php
https://www.facebook.com/FOGELMANCONTEMPORARY

Join the event on Facebook

All events are free and open to the public.

View the digital exhibition catalog featuring an essay “Okinawan Diaspora Blues” by Wesley Uenten, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies San Francisco State University

See the works online

You won’t find Elvis or surfboards or funny umbrella-topped cocktails in Laura Kina’s dystopic Blue Hawaiʻi. Drawn from family albums, oral history and community archives from Hawaii and Okinawa, these ghostly oil paintings employ distilled memories to investigate themes of distance, longing, and belonging.

Featuring new works and a selection from her ongoing Sugar series (2009-present), the setting is Kina’s father’s Okinawan sugarcane field plantation community, Piʻihonua, on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi near Hilo. Her obsession with blue was inspired by the indigo-dyed kasuri kimonos repurposed by the Issei (first generation) “picture bride” immigrants for canefield work clothes, and colored by stories of hinotama (fireballs) shooting from the canefield cemetery into the night sky. Blue Hawaiʻi echoes the spirits of Kina’s ancestors and shared histories of labor migration.

Pictured above Laura Kina, Elementary School, 30×45 in, oil on canvas, 2013