Step into the Pao Arts Center in Chinatown before Feb 17th of 2024 and you will be greeted with colorful walls covered in metal lunchboxes with phrases painted on them. The phrases are distilled from stories by people in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community who attended workshops with artist Aime Bantz. She wrote down the encounters they shared with her during communal meal times throughout their lives. Some of these encounters were positive moments of cultural exchange, but many of them were overwhelmingly negative– some cruel, or outright racist. The gallery label clarifies, “This visual representation of storytelling showcases the Asian American experience. It empowers marginalized voices by providing a platform to raise awareness and find commonality….. all in an effort to reduce hate and increase love toward the AAPI community.” Sampan sat down with Aime Bantz to ask a few questions about the show:
Sampan: What inspired this exhibition?
Aime Bantz: My mom is an immigrant from South Korea, and my dad is white. Most of my artwork has to do with exploring my biracial identity and being a Korean American growing up in the States. A lot of my artwork has to do with food, because when I think about the moments in my life where I felt the weirdest or when people called out differences, these were always moments when I was eating a meal. In 2021, when anti-Asian hate occurrences were happening and there was the shooting in Atlanta and those Korean women were killed at the Gold Spa, I usually turned to art making to help process emotions. And at that moment, it was heavy. I knew that I needed to make something to help just clear my head. But it just felt a little too much to touch the violence and to touch themes around COVID and around the over sexualization of Asian women. When I was thinking about how to create an art piece surrounding what I was currently feeling, I again turned back to food, and I started exploring and talking to my peers because we were all going through this thing. The more I was talking about food, the more I realized I’m not the only one who ate a lunch meal that my mom packed for me at school and had a weird reaction. And the more that I connected with the AAPI community, the more I realized that every single person had a story to tell. The show started with just six boxes, which were my story and my mom’s story of when we were eating lunch that was traditionally Korean in the lunchroom, there was a reaction, and then from there, it just kind of grew, and I started collecting more of these stories, and it just felt like an access point that wasn’t as daunting as violence and anti-Asian hate. And it felt a little bit more accessible to the public to help educate and encourage people to learn about Asian culture in a way that was digestible and welcoming.
Sampan: You mentioned that you’re biracial, and your bio says you’re the first biracial person to be born into your family. How has that identity influenced your work?
Aime Bantz: So heavy. I grew up kind of all over and shifted from really diverse urban neighborhoods to most of my life, transitioning in middle school and high school and undergrad, being in mostly rural white neighborhoods and populations. I think it was in that latter stage of adolescence and growing into adulthood that I started to feel the weight of being biracial. I say weight only because I started to notice it more. I think as I was aging and when I started my journey as an artist, I just kept going back to these themes around being part Korean and part white. I was a teacher, so for student teaching, I went to South Korea, to Seoul, to do my student teaching. And I thought at that moment in time, ‘this will be my time. I’ll connect with my people, and they’ll get me and something will click and I’ll feel less weird.’ But there was a stigma when I went there that I’m a dilution of Korean genes and I was not accepted very well. It kind of perpetuated this feeling that I’ve had my whole life of feeling too Asian against my white friends and too white against my Asian friends. I just didn’t have anyone to talk to about that. I didn’t have any peers that really looked like me. I grew up in the 90s, early 2000s, where there weren’t a lot of resources like there are now. So art making became my outlet to try to make sense of all of that.
Sampan: What’s a story from the show that really sticks out for you?
Aime Bantz: There’s one story that makes me really emotional, and it’s this girl who shared the story with me that her dad used to pack her dal, an Indian dish, every day. Not every day, but frequently when she went to school. And her father, later in life, ended up passing away. When she was telling me the story, she was getting emotional over the sentiment of ‘I would do anything to have that meal again, to have him here to make that lunch for me. As a kid, I was so resentful that he did that, and all I wanted was American food. And if I could go back and just appreciate it more, I would do that.’ And I think that that really sticks with me. I resonate with that. That seems like a common emotion that I hear a lot of, just people wanting to be nicer to their parents.
Lunchbox Moments- Pao Arts Center
The exhibit opens: Friday, October 27, 2023 – Saturday, February 17, 2024
99 Albany Street, Boston, MA, 02111
https://www.paoartscenter.org/events/20 23/lunchbox-moments-1
