Photographs stitched together with fabric, oil paintings, a conversation between a daughter and a father: All offer glimpses into the meaning of home and belonging at the Wing Luke Museum’s new exhibit, “Lost & Found: Searching for Home.”
The exhibit, which opened Nov. 15 and runs through Sept. 14, 2026, invites viewers to grapple with themes of home, identity and belonging as they walk through rooms filled with the work of 15 artists from the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander diasporas who explore the question of what defines home. The works delve into elements of daily life — food, textiles, language, for instance — from which each artist derives a unique meaning of home. And this, in turn, provides different lenses through which viewers can think about what home means to them.
The idea originated from a proposal submitted to the museum last fall by Islanda Naughton, a Seattle-area resident who worked for the museum in the aughts. For Naughton, the concept of belonging and home has never been straightforward. After her parents escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, she was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and brought to the United States at 3 months old. “I’ve always felt like I’m other, never feeling belonging. Whenever you go anywhere, people are always asking, ‘Where are you from?’ and I always wondered, ‘How do I answer that?’” she said.
Now the mother of two biracial kids, questions about home, belonging and identity seemed more pertinent than ever. At home, she and her husband discuss how to create a sense of culture and community for their children. “I thought it would be a really cool thing to bring together so many different cultures and communities to hear how we have this really similar lived experience.”
Throughout the exhibit, a video installation by artist Safwat Saleem, illustrations by Julia Kuo, a zine by Bunthay Cheam, and additional visual and mixed-media pieces by other artists are interspersed with community stories and places for museumgoers to write down their responses to prompts inspired by the art.
It was important to the Community Advisory Committee, the community group that developed and curated “Lost & Found,” that this “be an art exhibition layered in with community stories,” said Jessica Rubenacker, the director of exhibits at Wing Luke Museum who worked with the committee.
The first work in the exhibit, by Japanese American artist Lauren Iida, is a three-panel piece made of hand-cut paper painted with watercolors inspired by stories that people sent in responding to a call put out by the museum surrounding questions of home. “Throughout the entire piece you can see plumeria flowers, the white flowers with the yellow-orange inside,” said Iida. In her work, plumerias represent childhood innocence. “There’s this common thread throughout the refugee experience, immigrant experience, deportation, exile, adoption, all these different things that might separate somebody from their ancestral homeland or force somebody out of where they feel home is or maybe create barriers for them to go back to their ancestral homeland,” said Iida. “How does all of that take away the innocence of being a child and not knowing where you’re going to end up, then ending up somewhere and having to reconcile that for the rest of your life, basically.”
Safwat Saleem explores the theme of cultural loss and belonging in his video installation “22 Words,” an eight-minute conversation between him and his 6-year-old daughter, whom he is teaching to speak Urdu. Sometimes his daughter knows the meanings right away; other times, she needs a hand. “I’m proud of you for trying,” Saleem tells her. He asks her if she can tell that he has an accent when he speaks English. She can’t. In his other work, “Anxieties of an Immigrant Father,” he worries she’ll find his accent embarrassing. Word No. 15 among the 22 Urdu words Saleem is teaching his daughter is pronounced “boozdil” — someone who is afraid. They talk about their fears. Saleem says he fears that when he dies, nobody in his family will speak Urdu anymore, to which his daughter replies, “I’ll try to speak as much Urdu as I can.”
For Chinese, Chamorro, Filipina American artist Hilary Lee, bold, bright digital prints of food have been a part of a personal journey to reclaim elements of her identity she used to want to hide. Her piece, “Pritong Isda,” named after a Filipino dish of fried fish, depicts the dish on a Corelle plate with a rim of green flowers. Lee said that piece in particular resonated with a lot of Filipino Americans who had grown up in households that used that very set of Corelle plates. Through her art she learns about and celebrates her identities and invites others to do the same: “I just want people to know that there’s a lot more of us who are mixed-mixed than you think.”
Spotlighting her culture through food has been inspired by her efforts to decenter whiteness and understand how the impacts of colonization have shaped her life. “There was a lot of shame associated with being from an immigrant family growing up,” she said. Her father, who was first-generation Chinese American, would tell her: “‘Do not have an accent. Be an All-American girl.’ And that’s a survival thing,” she said. While she tried to conceal the parts of herself that made her “other,” she also often felt that she wasn’t Chinese enough, Chamorro enough, Filipina enough. “I don’t speak Chinese, I don’t speak Chamorro, I don’t speak Filipino. All I could feel confident in was food.”
In Bunthay Cheam’s zine, “អាយុវែង / [ayou veng]” which means long life or longevity in Khmer, he uses poetry and photographs to explore the idea of home through experiences of families torn apart by genocide. Around the corner from Cheam’s work, Ravleen Kaur’s multimedia installation plays a poem on loop, detailing the challenges of those who emigrated by choice. “I built my life here, just like I always wanted. Why is it so hard to follow dreams?” the poem goes, “Will I ever belong? Here? There? Anywhere?”
Michelle Kumata, the museum’s interim director of exhibits who filled in for Rubenacker for several months of the exhibit’s planning, hopes that visitors will gain perspective from the diverse stories featured in the exhibit. “My hope is that visitors will come and see this and view it as not just Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander stories, but human stories,” she said, “We’re not foreigners. We’re part of this country and we’re contributing to this country. I would say that message seems incredibly important, especially now.”