Lower Haight Art Exhibition Pays Tribute To AAPI Food, Family, And Belonging

Shoes Off, the latest exhibit from Family Style collective, just opened in the Lower Haight. (Family Style Collective)

BY MARY KATE TANKARD

“It all started when I was getting tacos in the Mission,” artist and designer Ace tells me in reference to her joining the art collective Family Style. The collective is composed of 10 AAPI artists, artists and friends who collaborate to celebrate Asian American identity through various mediums, including but not limited to painting, sculpture, textiles, and poetry. The name Family Style comes from a shared admiration for food as an heirloom — a vessel to preserve and transmit familial cultural practices — as well as an ode to the care and community entwined in shared meals. 

For Ace and others in Family Style, their work embodies what they call “post-oriental,” or how younger generations of Asian Americans negotiate an identity that can be distinct from the countries their ancestors emigrated from. In honor of AAPI Heritage Month, Family Style will host an exhibit entitled Shoes Off beginning on May 12th and ending on June 12th as a part of the 2023 United States of Asian American Festival. The exhibition will be hosted by the Faight, a new music venue, art gallery, and community space in the Lower Haight. Gallery viewing is free to the public and open every Thursday to Sunday from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. In conjunction with Shoes Off, Cute Aggression, an Asian-American Indie soul band will perform on May 26th.

Like Ace’s Family Style origin story, the collective draws on humor and food to playfully pay homage, as well as reclaim histories of heritage through creative endeavors. For the collective’s newest art show “Shoes Off,” Ace, a first-generation Filipino immigrant, who called herself “the literal embodiment of fuck around and find out,” is building a roughly 120-pound, 6 ft by 5 ft statue of the Filipino fast-food icon, Jollibee. Ace’s sculpture, JolliBae, evokes laughter, aiming to bring more levity to explorations of identity. Since joining Family Style, Ace said she has felt more permission to lean into satirizing Asian stereotypes in hopes to counteract the belief that artwork must be sterile or overtly serious to say something significant about existence.  

Much of the artwork produced by Family Style feels whimsical and explores motifs of belonging and nostalgia. In the painting “Udon Combo,” Family Style collective member Seesha Takgishi captures a tender moment over a shared meal of comfort food with her father. As the observer, you sit as her, across him, his face obscured behind a bowl of noodles. Styrofoam cups of barley tea dot the table, and a plastic thank-you to-go bag sits tucked off on a wooden chair in the corner. The portrait is blanketed in red with blooming blue and pink peonies inspired by Japanese textiles. It feels vibrant and dream-like; as Takagishi calls it, it is “somewhere between surrealism and nostalgia.” As a fourth-generation Japanese American, Takagishi grapples with the repression and erasure of Japanese culture in the United States, as well as the experience of being of mixed race in her art. In her painting “Raised on Rice,” persimmons hang above a Thanksgiving turkey, and a suspended hand pours gravy over rice, bringing light to a literal and symbolic blending of tradition.

Tickets to Shoes Off can be found for sale on Instagram.

Lizzy Choi’s painting “Artificial Bloom” is one of many works exploring AAPI history and culture on display. (Lizzy Choi)