From February 9 to March 20, Dear Asian Youth (DAY) Club and South Asian Culture Club (SACC) held their own art festival, featuring a wide variety of Asian cultured artworks that were available to view in the school library.
DAY Club has been an active group on campus whether that be hosting events to make stress balls for kids in Vietnam, or attending trips to Koreatown and Chinatown to promote Asian culture. Likewise, SACC has the same initiative in informing students about South Asian culture and hosting events like a Henna event to promote engagement with the heritage. With both clubs spreading awareness of Asian heritage and news, the collaboration through an art gallery seemed like a perfect opportunity to spread South and East Asian culture collectively through the form of art.
“This year, we just wanted to collaborate because our clubs are kind of similar in the sense that they both revolve around Asian culture,” SACC President Shreeyaa Phate (11) said. “[Dear Asian Youth] incorporates South Asian and East Asian, but [they focus on] more East Asian culture. South Asian culture hasn’t been seen so I thought it’d be cool to combine both of them, just so we’ll have a variety [of pieces] on the display.”
As DAY launched their art festival for the first time last school year with booming success, they knew that they wanted to continue the tradition, but with an added twist through collaboration with other clubs. The DAY x SACC Art Festival featured art from both cultures with the hopes of showcasing the shared Asian identity, despite the geography that might separate the two regions.
“Overall [the festival] was just to give a chance for people to show their culture, [but the pieces didn’t] even have to be culture-related,” Phate said. “It was anything that revolves around the Asian community and showing that [culture] through artwork.”
Of the pieces featured, there ranged digital art pieces representing the vastness of Asian culture, to pieces crafted from red envelopes to show a mixture of art forms. For many Asian artists on campus, this was seen as an opportunity to get their work out there while situating their pieces in a festival that carried the piece’s meaning: Asian culture.
“There are many different meanings behind each piece since they all revolve around different aspects of cultures,” Aneeza Laqueo (11) said. “For specifically one of [my pieces], I talked about dancing and then I want to touch up on how different dancing was in Asia versus Western culture. The overall mood I wanted to show with my art is how different Asian culture is compared to any other culture in the world.”
Other students who express their artistic side in other outlets took the unconventional route and submitted physical pieces that tied together a fusion of cultures.
“The piece that I submitted was a collection of red pockets for Lunar New Year, as well as origami creations of the 12 Chinese zodiacs,” said Naomi Loh (11). “This combines both the Japanese art of origami with my Chinese-Malaysian culture for Lunar New Year.”
If you didn’t get the chance to see the gallery in the library, don’t fret! This photo gallery shows the pieces that were featured in the festival so you can enjoy them with ease here.
