How Artists of the Asian Diaspora Are Drawing on Traditions from Their Heritage

Across various mediums, contemporary artists from the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora draw on traditional art techniques. From Kashmiri embroidery to Native Hawaiian kapa to Indigenous Filipino banig weaving, new generations are not only embracing and preserving these legacies, but also expanding the artistic possibilities of these methods.

While today, these cultural practices are frequently celebrated, for some, it has been a protracted struggle to have their traditions recognized as legitimate.

“There was a generally dismissive attitude towards non-Western art forms in 1980s Pakistan,” said Shahzia Sikander, who was born in the country and trained in Indo-Persian miniature painting. She pointed to binaries—such as East-West, Islamic-Western, or Asian-White—as being inherently Eurocentric and deeply exclusionary: “Artwork that does not sit comfortably within the Western visual canon is often othered as ‘less modern’ or ‘traditional.’”

For painter and sculptor Jiha Moon, “combining Western and Eastern” techniques reflects her art education in South Korea and, later, in the United States. “I never thought about my identity that much,” she said. Now having lived in the U.S. for over 20 years, she appreciates her unique position as an immigrant to contribute to the larger Asian American community.

Meanwhile, other artists, such as Jagdeep Raina, Nanea Lum, and Bhen Alan engage with their heritage as a way of reconciling the cultural erasure that occurred because of colonialism. Here, we highlight five artists whose practices are influenced by traditional techniques.

Shahzia Sikander

B. 1969, Lahore, Pakistan. Lives and works in New York.

Despite miniature painting’s rich history dating back to the 13th century, the tradition had become “stigmatized as kitsch and derivative” by the time Shahzia Sikander enrolled at Lahore’s National College of Arts in the late 1980s, she said. Her interest in pre-modern Asian manuscript visual culture would lead her to later become the first woman to teach miniature painting at the college.

Bringing a fresh point of view to traditional motifs, Sikander found herself wanting to address in particular “the difficulty of finding female representations of brown South Asians in contemporary culture.” Recurring images of women in her paintings embody both the mythical and modern. They simultaneously convey power and playfulness, while resisting the Orientalist and male gaze.

Sikander has since broadened her practice to include sculptures and multimedia installations, and recently unveiled several large-scale bronzes in New York City as part of the current public exhibition “Havah… to breathe, air, life.” In Witness (2023) at Madison Square Park, a larger-than-life female figure, with braided hair shaped into ram’s horns, appears to levitate under the domed frame of her hoop skirt. She exudes a strength that’s at once grounded and otherworldly. The works Apparition (2023) and Reckoning (2020), meanwhile, incorporate augmented reality and video animation, respectively, further pushing the boundaries of what was once considered an old tradition.

Jiha Moon

B. 1973, Daegu, Korea. Lives and works in Atlanta.

As part of her art education, Jiha Moon learned both traditional Korean and Western painting techniques. So it felt almost natural when she first paired acrylic paint, invented in the 20th century, with hanji paper, which has been around for thousands of years. Made from the bark of mulberry trees, the material is naturally absorbent, perfect for the bold colors and fluid brushstrokes that are her signature aesthetic. “For me, it’s a perfect marriage,” she said.

Even in her ceramic work, Moon treats the vessels—anthropomorphized with eyes and mouths, and ornamented with dumplings, fortune cookies, and fruits—as yet another surface to decorate. “My heart is always at the image,” she explained.

Just as Moon reveals herself through painting, the layers of materiality also mirror her autobiography as an immigrant artist. During the pandemic, she felt compelled to respond to the rise in anti-Asian violence, citing the 2021 shooting in her hometown of Atlanta that resulted in the death of six women of Asian descent as a real “wake-up call.” The exhibition “Stranger Yellow” (2022) at Derek Eller Gallery in New York gave the artist an opportunity to celebrate her Asian heritage, in particular by reclaiming the racialized color yellow and exuberantly flaunting it in her paintings and ceramics. Moon has continued this work in her shows since then, including “Nocturnal” at Mindy Solomon Gallery, which represents the artist.

Jagdeep Raina

B. 1991, Guelph, Canada. Lives and works in Houston.

Central to Jagdeep Raina’s practice is the idea of touch. “I’m interested in the ways in which humans touch one another and the residual impacts of that,” he said, adding that he was interested in “its restorative potential.”

For the artist, there is no better medium than textiles to work with his hands. He’s especially fascinated by the extensive processes involved, from weaving, to embroidery, to natural dyeing. “We’re living in a time where there’s such an addiction to speed, and so working in a medium that forces you to slow down and build a material practice with fiber is something that I’m really committed to,” he said.

The embroidery techniques that Raina uses originate in the northern region of South Asia, specifically Kashmir and Punjab, where his family is from. His first solo exhibition “Bonds” (2021), presented at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, showcased both drawings and textile works depicting the people and places that are part of his diasporic narrative.

There’s also a darker history to the craft, impacted by globalization and imperialism. Referring to the cultural destruction that happened during India’s decolonization from the British Empire, Raina said, “I had this urgency of wanting to learn textiles that come from those communities as a way to do what I can to revive and preserve the future of textiles in Punjab and Kashmir, on both sides of the India-Pakistan border.”

Now, Raina has also moved into filmmaking. Transforming his colorful drawings into animation, his short film Madhu’s Phulkari (2021) traces the journey of one woman’s embroidered shawl as it traveled from her great-grandmother’s hands in India before the Partition, eventually winding up in Canada. Through this new medium, Raina is able to continue documenting these stories and traditions binding him and his community to their cultural roots.

Nanea Lum

B. 1991, Honolulu, Hawaii. Lives and works in Honolulu.

Growing up, Nanea Lum felt the absence of a Native Hawaiian voice from her education, despite the fact that she saw her culture surrounding her everywhere. “Because of my Hawaiian heritage, it is more important to speak about being in Hawaii before describing the reality of being Hawaiian,” she said, acknowledging that her mixed heritage is a result of Hawaii’s colonial history. Grounding herself in Hawaiian culture allows her to bring together her genealogy and spirituality.

The loss of knowledge ultimately led to an act of recovery: As an art student, Lum began learning to beat kapa, transforming tree bark into a type of traditional cloth. “If you just look at the cloth by itself, which is what happens in a gallery, people tend to miss all of the in-between, which is actually the cultural DNA of that piece,” she explained. Using lithography to embed the temporal image back onto the object, she creates pieces that capture both the process and personal stories behind them.

Lum received her MFA from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and includes painting, printmaking, and time-based media as part of her practice. Her harvesting and handling of kapa was documented in a short film Ulul Kupu, directed by Tiare Ribeaux and Jody Stillwater. For Lum, passing on traditional art techniques provides a connection to her ancestral past.

“Sometimes objects in galleries can feel like they’re too protected, or their secrets are from the past, and they don’t have anything to do with you,” she said. “But I hope my pieces compel viewers to see themselves as the next part of the story of kapa.”

Bhen Alan

B. 1993, Tuguegarao City, Philippines. Lives and works in the United States.

Bhen Alan has always considered himself a maximalist, which would seem to clash with the minimalist qualities of banig (mat) weaving that’s part of his art practice. “Learning different techniques to create different forms of abstraction provides avenues to keep my maximalist style, while applying traditional beauty, elegance, colors, rituals, performance, and patterns of a banig,” he said. These intricacies are all apparent in the geometric and textured pieces made by the Filipino American artist.

Born in the Philippines, Alan moved to Canada as a teenager before settling in the U.S., where he went to graduate school for painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. He recently returned to the country of his birth as a Fulbright scholar, deepening his understanding of banig by living and immersing himself with the local community of Indigenous weavers.