This summer, passengers getting off at Raleigh’s Union Station will pass by a large, vibrant mural that celebrates the lives of several Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders based in North Carolina.
The mural was painted as a part of the Asian Joy project, an effort to use public art, oral history collection, and community events to explore the convergence of Asian and Southern identities. While Asian Americans comprise just 4% of North Carolina’s population, it’s the fastest growing racial group in the state. The largest Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders communities (AANHPI for short) are concentrated in the Triangle and Charlotte areas.
The idea for the mural came out of a desire to use art to build a space for Asian Americans, said Isabel Lu, a visual artist and public health researcher who co-led the project.
“We were looking really at these central Asian American hubs around the country, like Chinatowns or Little Saigons in New York or the West Coast,” Lu said, “and in North Carolina, we don’t really have those dedicated physical community spaces where we can see our own community members reflected back at us.”
The three-person team behind the Asian Joy project wanted to focus on the theme of joy, especially given the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic and racialized violence, such as the Atlanta spa shootings in 2021, had on Asian American communities. The mural is called “Ten of Cups,” a reference to the tarot card that represents emotional fulfillment, and shows multiple figures enjoying art, food and resting outdoors among flowers.
“We wanted to pivot from the trauma and trauma narratives to those that celebrate – there’s also joy and hope and collective care that’s happening in our communities,” said Sophie To, a co-leader of the Asian Joy project and a doctoral candidate in health behavior at UNC-Chapel Hill.
To, a field scholar at the Southern Oral History Program, also led the gathering of seven oral histories for the mural project. The project’s “narrators,” as the Asian Joy team called them, included Tori Grace Nichols, a Pilipinx performance artist; Lauren Bullock, a multiracial poet, teacher, and community organizer; Fianteluz Kuianialoha “Kui” Rivera, a Native Hawaiian dance teacher; Darany Samountry, a Laotian American and general manager of a local Asian restaurant; and Ravi Devarajan, an Indian American software engineer.
The narrators also weighed in on the design. Samountry, whose parents also ran a restaurant while she was growing up, said that the images of food resonated the most with her story.
“Food is a way for me to feel connected to my culture and to spread joy to other people,” Samountry said.
She also noted it’s taken time to be comfortable with her Asian American identity, with not seeing many folks who look like her outside of the Laotian Association community in the Triangle and seeing few Asian people represented in media.
“The most challenging part is making sure I am who I want to be and still being a part of my culture and respecting all the things that make myself Asian American, versus just being American,” Samountry said.
Devarajan, who has lived in the Triangle since 1988, said that the mural evoked memories of his childhood. He interpreted the large figure sipping from a bowl and the smaller figure with an armful of fruit as having a dynamic similar to him and his mother.
“I can see her (as the larger figure) and myself as the younger child leaning behind her in kind of contentment because I have my eyes closed,” Devarajan said. “I’m not really worried about life because I know she can take care of things.”
For Ina Liu, a visual artist and healthcare practitioner on the Asian Joy team, the most interesting part of the oral histories was hearing all the different ways that their narrators found belonging in the South.
“The thing we found to be really pivotal was our Asianness is not just our Asianness, but a convergence of all these other identities,” Liu said. “That was, for me, very beautiful — that we are all able to find belonging despite that Asian Americans here aren’t as concentrated compared to metropolitan cities.”
“People can hear a wide range of lived experiences,” To added. “It’s not all like, ‘Oh the South sucks and it’s racist to us.’ Throughout our stories, it’s so much more than that. They gave a more nuanced picture of what it means to be a Southerner and also Asian American.”
Lu, whose artwork explores their queer identity, said she felt emotional when hearing the stories of queer folks who participated in the project.
“Hearing about queer people and gender expansive people who are also Asian American and Southern, and how they created their sense of belonging through different forms of art, self-care and being in the community was really powerful,” Lu said.
The recordings are publicly available through the Southern Oral History Program and theAsian Joy project’s website.
The Asian Joy project received more than $20,000 in funding from the city of Raleigh, NC Asian Americans Together, the Durham Art Council, the Snapdragon Fund by VAE Raleigh, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. SEEK Raleigh, an experimental public art program by Raleigh Arts, was the main partner on the project and also helped the team secure the Union Station location.
“Raleigh is a really diverse and dynamic city, so having a space to honor Asian American and Pacific Islander culture is really important and highlights the contributions that they bring to the community,” said Julia Whitfield, community engagement coordinator for the city of Raleigh’s public art team.
In addition to the mural and the oral history collection, the Asian Joy project has also organized community and art-focused events over the last year to engage Asian Americans across the Triangle. The co-leaders said they don’t yet have any specific plans for ongoing engagement, but are interested in working more with AANHPI youth.
