10 Older Asian American Artists to Celebrate This AAPI Heritage Month

In 1991, Godzilla made waves for protesting the Whitney Museum of American Art for the glaring lack of Asian American artists in its Biennial. Although advocacy for representation has helped to nudge the needle forward, as Samet emphasized, “It is very clear that much work is also needed to correct decades of neglect of Asian American artists.”

On the West Coast, meanwhile, two concurrent surveys of Asian American art recently opened—“Scratching at the Moon” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and “P L A C E: Reckonings by Asian American Artists” at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Both showcase works by emerging and established artists, including Patty Chang and Stephanie Syjuco.

It’s important to acknowledge those who are breaking barriers today, as well as those who paved the way. The custom of honoring one’s elders is deeply embedded in many cultures: For this Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we spotlight a selection of artists over the age of 65 who have forged diverse and distinct paths.

Bernice Akamine

B. 1949, Honolulu. Lives and works in Volcano, Hawaii.

Proving that it’s never too late to follow your passion, Bernice Akamine didn’t begin pursuing a career as an artist until her forties. Initially drawn to glassblowing while enrolled in classes at the University of Hawaii, she later expanded to other media in her sculpture work and large-scale installations. Akamine, whose heritage includes Japanese and Native Hawaiian ancestry, is also an expert in traditional Hawaiian art techniques, including kapa cloth-making and waiho’olu’u natural plant dyeing.

A graduate exchange trip to the Bay Area in California would plant the seed for Akamine’s socially and environmentally conscious projects. She returned to Hawaii, where she conceived the traveling installation Ku’u One Hanau (1999), using her background in construction to build tents out of the Hawaiian flag to address the issue of homelessness among Indigenous Hawaiians. In Kalo (2015), she created paper sculptures resembling taro leaves, made out of historical anti-annexation petitions, reminding the audience of Hawaiian rights to sovereignty. As part of the series “Pololia” (2021), she crafted copper wire and glass beads into floating jellyfish—harbingers of the warming oceans due to climate change.

One of the blessings of being a more mature artist, Akamine said in an interview, is the freedom to create work without financial pressure. “I want to make things because they’re important to me,” she said. “Because if I don’t do it, who’s going to do it?” For someone who, in her younger days, never imagined art could be a vocation, Akamine has found her calling in the second act of life.

Natvar Bhavsar

B. 1934, Gothava, India. Lives and works in New York.

By the age of 19, Natvar Bhavsar was teaching drawing in his home state of Gujarat. His early exposure to Indian crafts came from his family’s textile-printing business, while his formal education included studying traditional painting and large-scale murals. Though he abandoned realism, the vibrant hues and sensual shades that surrounded him during those formative years remain ever-present in his work.

In the 1960s, Bhavsar arrived in New York City, where his instinctual approach gained recognition alongside other Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko. His paintings shift freely from blocks of color to organic bursts and layered compositions, revealing his origins’ influence. For example, his particular technique of sifting powdered pigments onto the canvas to create elaborate patterns using different, brightly colored powders is influenced by the festive Indian tradition of rangoli. Thus, a lifetime of artmaking has brought Bhavsar full circle.

Emily Cheng

B. 1953, New York. Lives and works in New York.

Emily Cheng was already exploring the language of abstraction when she began tapping into her cultural roots in the 1990s. Having grown up in the suburbs of New Jersey, the American-born artist has said in interviews that she reexamined her identity and connection to her heritage when she started learning about Chinese art.

Inspired by everything from Buddhist cave paintings to European ornamentation, she draws on symbols from Eastern and Western mythology to deconstruct binaries while also transcending them. Her paintings possess a kaleidoscopic quality, balancing order and chaos through geometric and free-flowing shapes. Motifs such as a tree or the sun often gesture to the spiritual, though her practice tends toward personal introspection.

In Cheng’s current solo exhibition “Opening of the Egg” at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, her work ascends even higher into the cosmological plane. In Saturn Venus Mars (2023), for instance, a celestial orb hangs over a multicolored landscape. Two distinct formations, a mountain and temple, rise from the undulating horizon, conjuring a realm that’s at once ancient and timeless.

Mel Chin

B. 1951, Houston. Lives and works in North Carolina.

“I’m in a state of becoming.” These were conceptual artist Mel Chin’s words on the occasion of his exhibition “All Over the Place” at the Queens Museum in 2018. It was his first survey at a New York institution, which also included public projects viewable around the city. For him, the solo exhibition was not a retrospective, but rather an affirmation that he’s still actively engaged.

Whether it’s “sculpting” a Minnesota landfill with plants to remediate contaminated soil in Revival Field (1991–present), or transforming a flood-damaged New Orleans house into a steel-doored sanctuary in Safehouse (2008–10) to call for climate justice in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Chin’s projects often invite real-world problem-solving and thinking outside of the gallery space. His work ranges from wryly humorous to pointedly political. Our Strange Flower of Democracy (2005), made from bamboo to mimic the “Daisy Cutter” bomb the U.S. military dropped in Vietnam, remains just as haunting and relevant now as it was in a post-9/11 America, challenging viewers to confront the price of citizenship.

David Diao

B. 1943, Chengdu, China. Lives and works in New York.

David Diao has experienced firsthand the many sides of the art world. His first job was as the “sweeper-upper” at New York’s Kootz Gallery, a major dealer of Abstract Expressionist work in the mid–20th century. A gig at the Guggenheim followed, as he mingled with prominent figures in the art scene of the 1960s. Before the decade’s end, he opened his first solo exhibition.

His early paintings are subtle and sparing, but several years later, Diao withdrew from exhibiting and didn’t reemerge until the 1980s with bright, bold canvases playing with graphics and text. The addition of silkscreened images, archival photographs, and pop cultural references into his work harken back to his childhood memories of fleeing with his grandparents from China to Hong Kong during the revolution. Although he was able to reunite with his father in the U.S. at the age of 12, he didn’t see his mother and younger siblings for another two decades. A sense of melancholic loss permeates some of these later works. As someone who understands what it means to be an outsider, Diao is an artist who resists easy categorization.

Tishan Hsu

B. 1951, Boston. Lives and works in New York.

Tishan Hsu’s art has frequently been described as “unsettling” for its merging of corporeality and technology. Likenesses of eyes, teeth, folds of skin, and unidentifiable orifices disrupt the paintings he began making in the 1980s. In cyborg-like fashion, they combine inorganic and organic material such as silicone and wood. Meanwhile, the smooth contours and rounded corners seem to foreshadow the aesthetic of the devices and screens that have become ubiquitous in all our lives.

For this reason, perhaps, the artist’s work has gained renewed appreciation from younger generations who consider his dystopian vision more pertinent than ever. In 2019, he was featured in The Artsy Vanguard, followed by a major retrospective at the Hammer Museum in 2020, and inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition “The Milk of Dreams.”

Hsu previously studied architecture and design at MIT before immersing himself in the East Village scene of the late 1970s. Bridging analog and digital aesthetics, his early tiled sculptures are reminiscent of obsolete appliances or furniture, while recent pieces with membrane-like surfaces push even further into the uncanny.

Michi Itami

B. 1938, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Sag Harbor, New York.

In many respects, Michi Itami’s legacy illustrates the entangled roots of Asian American art and history. Though she’s best known as a printmaker and painter, her practice traverses mediums as varied as ceramics and woodcuts. Elements of textiles, calligraphy, landscapes, and abstraction all make appearances in her work.

In the 1990s—an era when the desktop computer proliferated, along with digital cameras and Photoshop—the artist embraced these tools in order to make work about her family. The Irony of Being American (1992–93) presents three portraits of her father, including one of him in his army uniform. She superimposed the images over an Ansel Adams photograph of Manzanar, California, where, during World War II, the U.S. government incarcerated Japanese Americans, including Itami and her mother.

Revisiting this dark period of U.S. history felt “important to the formation of my own identity as a Japanese American,” she wrote. This complex identity also informs her process, she explained: “The way I work, using both my hand and gesture as well as the technology of the computer, is very much an expression of my interest in duality.”

Jin Soo Kim

B. 1950, Seoul. Lives and works in Chicago.

When Jin Soo Kim first started out as a painter, she often incorporated into her canvases discarded items she picked up on the streets of Chicago. In the 1980s, she began producing installations composed mostly of detritus that covered entire walls and filled the space from floor to ceiling. In Strata (1991) and Tacit Transit (1992), the recycled materials are contained within wire cage towers. Kim’s salvaging and repurposing of scraps is motivated by the economic struggles of growing up in post-war South Korea, as well as the American consumerism that must have been a jarring contrast for a new immigrant.

In these installations, Kim “bandages” these neglected objects as an act of healing and caretaking, recalling her training as a nurse, a job she held while earning her art degree. The intensive labor is still a part of her most recent sculptures, which are wrapped with copper wire or gauze. A seemingly mundane vessel, such as an empty crate, is thereby transformed into a thing of beauty.

Dan Taulapapa McMullin

B. 1957, Sendai, Japan. Lives and works in Hudson, New York.

“Identity is not something we claim, it is something that claims us,” wrote poet and artist Dan Taulapapa McMullin. Born into a U.S. military family, the artist spent much of their childhood around the globe, including in American Samoa, where they have native ancestry.

Through their interdisciplinary practice, Taulapapa explores the many facets of their Indigenous heritage. In the film 100 Tikis (2016), recently screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the artist spliced together appropriative and stereotypical images of people from the Pacific, including everything from old news reels to cartoons to Hollywood cinema to tourism videos. Still, other moments of everyday life and activism recorded in home movies and social media reveal a reality that eschews reductive depictions.

As part of that complexity, Taulapapa often brings their queer identity to the forefront in both their literary and visual artwork. Mixed-media prints and photo collages draw upon research into Mahu and Fa’afafine nonbinary people who are part of Polynesian cultures, while portraits rich in color demonstrate the artist’s skills as a painter. In this way, Taulapapa gazes toward a pre-colonial past so that they may also imagine a more hopeful future.

Wang Gongyi

B. 1946, Tianjin, China. Lives and works in Portland, Oregon, and Hangzhou, China.

Having already established herself as an artist in China, Wang Gongyi was in her fifties when she decided to move to the U.S. in 2001. A solo exhibition some years earlier had brought her to Oregon, a place that would eventually become her new home. It’s not hard to see how the moody landscapes of the Pacific Northwest might have appealed to the artist, whose work reflects an affinity for the natural world. Her ink paintings and watercolors evoke misty peaks, fields of tall grass, and rocky waterfalls, as much as they convey contemplation and pathos.

Grounded in her fine art training, Wang also reinterprets Chinese calligraphy, sometimes with a frenetic energy. She abstracts the classic art form into illegible scrawls, smudges, or blots, generating a new kind of language. Her work captures memory and tradition, and is imbued with the ephemeral nature of the everyday.