Three large panels suspended from the ceiling greet visitors at Thacher Gallery’s most recent exhibition. The first panel is a carefully scrawled mass of thin blue, black, yellow and red strands that create an ovular form which reads “There is a moment when it is all quiet, and you begin this game where you try to remember the earliest moment in your life.” The next panel becomes far less colorful, with only slight white and blue lines emanating from the oval. At the last panel, the oval clears up to mostly white, with ill-defined blue figures and a single sentence reading “Here it is.”
There it was indeed. Rina Ayuyang’s opening scenes from “Blame This on the Boogie,” which chronicles the story of a Filipinx American girl who romanticizes her childhood through the lens of disco songs and dance numbers. Thacher Gallery’s newest experience is full of scenes that create the idea of a journey and its beginnings.
“Long Distance Relationship,” displaying art by Ayuyang, Eddie Ahn, Tessa Hulls, MariNaomi and Thien Pham, has been on showcase in the gallery since August 12 and will continue until November 10. The exhibit dives into the cartoonists’ stories of complexities involving their cultures, families and communities, throughout various different mediums.
Hidden behind the entryway columns on a blank stretch of white wall plays Thien Pham’s comic style short film from his work in “Family Style.” The video flicks through scenes from Pham’s childhood, with comic stills and action shots of Pham drawing out the images and Pham at his home. Pham takes the audience back in time through his immigration journey from Vietnam as he and his family sail out to the states, with a sequence of opening scenes from “Family Style” outlining his memories, including the taste of a single rice ball his mother had managed to take on the journey, the only food he had on the trip.
To the right of the exhibit is a winding hall displaying Eddie Ahn’s work. Ahn, a San Francisco based environmental justice attorney and non-profit worker, is self taught and has been publishing in comic zines since 2010. On display were scenes from his graphic memoir, the “Advocate”which depicts Ahn’s life post college as he shows how he got involved with non-profit work and the way it brought him to the West Coast, how he’d calculate his life based on the price of a burrito during his penny-pinching post-grad years, and even talks with his parents as he tries to get their support on his artistic and social justice dreams.
On the left of the gallery lies more of Ayuyang’s pieces, where her Filipinx American perspective on the Depression noir time period of San Francisco can be seen. These include scenes from “The Man in the McIntosh Suit,” which was her take on Manilatown San Francisco’s Filipinx American neighborhood Manilatown, as well as more behind the scenes and in progress drawings of her acclaimed work “Blame This on the Boogie.” Her showcases are particularly relevant, as October honors Filipinx American Heritage month, according to Kasamahan’s Cultural Relations Director Graciella Trivilegio. Kasamahan is the largest cultural organization on campus that aims to unify and solidify the Filipinx American community on campus.
“Seeing my people being uplifted in a space we’re not always recognized in, is so so amazing to see because our work in the representation that we need, in whatever spaces it may be, is super super important so it is something that I love to see,” Trivilegio, a senior biology major said.
She continued, “It makes me really emotional to see this traditionally across the board field, where we [the Filipinx community] are misrepresented or not represented at all. So seeing people of our community being able to present their work in the way that is most authentic to them is really amazing, honestly.”
Deeper into the exhibit are pieces from MariNaomi, author and illustrator of books such as “Asian Goth Punks Rule the World” and “Kiss and Tell,” which were both showcased at Thacher. “Kiss and Tell” is less about the Asian American experience and more a darker take on romance with black and white comics from the prologue and epilogue. “Asian Goth Punks Rule the World,” MariNaomi’s lighter work, is a lighthearted collection of stories of their characters Aya and Chris, who the artist dubs “my favorite fictional queer punk and death rock teens.” Thacher Gallery also has black and white scenes from this book in glass boxes.
Art by Tessa Hulls, the mixed race daughter of two first generation immigrants takes up most of the wall vertically. This is to represent the enormity of her relationship with her mother, which she explores in the work “Feeding Ghosts.” Her section also has a glass box where it shows other scenes, and in progress sketches as well as brightly colored sticky notes entailing her thought process of her piece.
At the exit, behind the panels with Ayuyang’s “Blame it on the Boogie,” scenes from Pham’s “Family Style” bid attendees goodbye after their full immersion in a multicultural Asian American experience.
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