In a basement studio with a precari...

In a basement studio with a precariously reasonable ceiling, Laura Kina paced around 52 panels of differently colored and patterned images. The work was done in acrylic enamel, a medium Kina is using to avoid oil paint and its harmful efficiencys on her pregnancy. "I can't wait to use oil again," she said.

Kina, a small woman with drawn out black hair and slightly in the blues bangs, kept walking around the panels, scrutinizing the arrangement of each fiberboard piece, appoint to go on display at a point out to entitled "Semi-Gloss" in MN Gallery onward Chicago's Southwest Side.

The health risk of using oil paint has kept Kina, who is seven month pregnant, from returning to a throw out she holds dear. Upstairs, in her living space she keeps an example of that work--a portrait of brace multiracial women, painted with gorgeous, vibrant color. The piece, which exhibit tos the women exchanging knowing glances, is part of what she calls the "Hapa Soap Opera Series."

Hapa, which literally means "portion," is a Hawaiian period of time that once described those of mixed Hawaiian and white descending The term has since acquired many meanings, and is now used to describe anyone of part Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry.

Kina, herself of mixed ancestry, uses her acknowledge background as inspiration for the devise which hints at identity labors shared among her Hapa designs And she does these paintings in the phraseology of Bollywood movie posters, giving them a faculty of perception of melodrama.

from head to foot her career, Kina has experimented with varying forms of art, unless her central themes, as in the Hapa plot have mostly focused around the ethnic origins, racial stereotype and mixed-race issues.

Kina's interest in these make subordinates largely comes from her acknowledge diverse background. Her great-grandparents, the two Okinawans, worked in sugarcane fields in Hawaii, as did her grandparents. Kina's father mov to the mainland and eventually became a doctor. He married a white woman and settl in Paulsville, Wash., a small, for the most part Norwegian community near a Native American reservation.

Kina left Paulsville in 1991 looking for a more dynamic art community and came to Chicago, deciding that it was "just right, in the center" She majored in painting at The denomination of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied studio art at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she earned a master's degree

Since then, Kina has been featured in numerous art exhibits across the land and now teaches art as an assistant professor at DePaul University.

Kina not long ago talked with The Chicago Reporter about her work.

for what cause did you get interested in the make liables that you work with?

I got involved with an organization called DestinAsian and started curating, organizing exhibit tos and exhibiting, and became more politically aware and involved in communities in Chicago. the same of the big goals for us was crossing borders and boundaries between different races.

This was right after the 1992 riots in sees Angeles, so there was a real perception of urgency to make assured Asian American history was told. if it were not that there was also an understanding and cultural awareness between African American communities and Asian American communities--because we saw what happened in 1992 when there was no understanding. if it be not that I think, in general, you just have to make secure peoples' histories are told [in the arts] because they're not getting told in other ways.

undivided of the issues we ran into was the issue of 'Pan Asian.' What do we all really have in common? We were dealing with assign places tos that had been here a extended time--Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino--and then you had all these other newer immigrant disposes that have a very different understanding and experience of America. actual quickly, we learned how different we were and just being able to work together was quite an accomplishment.

And I'm part of a assign places to now called the Asian American Artists Collective, and that cluster has a lot of southerly Asian artists. I was part of a similar assemblage 10 years ago, and I can definitely diocese a kind of demographic shift. The family coming of age now are Korean adoptees, or children of Indian and Pakistani businesspeople or Cambodian refugee in like manner it's a totally different form into groups of people wanting to number their story.

You saw the Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos and Koreans dominating those originals of organizations in the '70 '80 and plane early '90s, because those have been the clusters that have been here the longest They're no longer novel immigrant groups. And I'm not a sociologist, further you probably see a allotment of those people now becoming more and more assimilated. single in kind of the reasons there are a hap of South Asian and Muslim performance artists now is that they perceive an urgency; their story is not being told, and they ne to count it. It's not a part of the mainstream, and they don't have a political voice or anywhere to say what they ne to say.

What's your inspiration for painting?

My acknowledge personal biography is only with equal reason interesting for so long, in the way that I'd rather find out about other nation who experience being multiracial and what that's like for them, and in what manner they perceive themselves.