I am a mixed-race Okinawan American artist based in Chicago. My artwork focuses on themes of distance, belonging and the fluidity of cultural difference and the slipperiness of identity. I start with autobiographical impulses and collect images, stories, and histories, and I see what is missing, what is not being told, what is not obvious, and I go hunting for it. I am interested in the overlap, fusion, disjuncture, gap, and vibration that happens when I bring back the missing pieces and put them together. My recent series Holding On, which was created during a summer 2019 Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residency, features sacred, WWII memorial, and present-day military occupied sites in Okinawa, Japan and explores memory and affect through the genre of landscape painting.