Ripple Effect: Lani Asunción Confronts Colonial Pasts While Envisioning Liberated Futures

On a July evening on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a public park that receives millions of visitors every year, an audience sits on blankets and towels, waiting. City dwellers, visitors, commuters, and athletes pause on the sidewalk, sensing the anticipation. Something is about to happen. Some stay, even if they don’t know what they are waiting for. Which perhaps is the point of public art: to encounter beauty and magic out in the city when you least expect it.

The performance that’s soon to begin will activate SONG/LAND/SEA (2024), a work by Filipinx interdisciplinary artist Lani Asunción that warns viewers of the impact of environmental racism and climate change on vulnerable communities. Supported by the Greenway Conservancy’s Public Art Program, the installation spans two blocks and consists of two parts. Hanging from the Greenway’s light blade structures are Binakol Blessing Banners + Flags, a series of digital images printed onto four large-scale fabric flags and twelve fifteen-foot-tall vinyl banners. The patterns rework US military camouflage while layering traditional Ilocano woven binakol designs. At one end of the parcel stands Asunción’s WAI Water Clock, an eight-foot-tall sculpture with a suspended cement vessel, an etched brass bowl, and sailors’ rope that visitors can pull to ring a brass nautical bell—a blessing, a warning, a call to action. The sculpture is a kind of water clock, which humans used for thousands of years to measure time based on the flow of water, and the brass bowl is etched with a map of Boston’s coastline surrounded by a message in binary code: All that is solid melts into air.

“The current installation on the Greenway is the first time I have shown work at this scale in public,” explains Asunción, who worked with a team of fabricators, master craftspeople, artists, and designers across New England on the project. “This public work echoes my father’s architectural practice of working on both civic and public community projects,” they add. “I was able to put everything I have learned as a sculptor, printer, designer, and social practitioner into practice.”

Within sight of the installation, one can see the harbor a mere block or two from the Greenway, and if the breeze is just right, one breathes in the salty ocean air. Asunción now lives and works not far from here, just across Fort Point Channel in the Midway Artist Studios, the largest affordable live-work building for artists in Boston. “Every time I take a break or I take a walk, I’m on the channel. I’m looking at the water and I’m thinking about the water,” Asunción says. They think about how water powers factories, how ships on these waters traded goods and people who were enslaved. The channel was also a site of protest, the setting for the Boston Tea Party during the American Revolution.

This is the same water that will rise and rise if nothing stops it. About the installation, Asunción remarks, “There is hope if we all work together to figure out ways to change. How can we shift the direction? How do we offer resolutions of change?”

Through layers of sounds, still and moving images, performances, and installations, Asunción incorporates archival research into hidden histories of colonialism while highlighting contemporary conditions and the reverberations of inequalities. In addition to their personal practice, they’re the curator and public art manager for the Pao Arts Center’s Un-monument | Re-monument | De-Monument: Transforming Boston project as well as a founding member of Digital Soup, a collective uplifting those working in performance, media arts, and the underground nightlife scene in Boston.

Born in the Bay Area in California and raised in Tennessee, Oahu, Hawai’i, and Okinawa, Japan, Asunción moved to Boston in 2017, several years after earning an MFA in art from the University of Connecticut. Blocks away from Asunción’s studio and living space in Jamaica Plain, the Hardcore House on Green Street, they discovered the Dole House, the historic home of James Drummond Dole, founder of Dole Food Company. The company’s logo is so ubiquitous that it is almost invisible. I see this logo every time I shop for food and open the pantry and refrigerator: cans of tropical fruit, bunches of bananas, frozen produce, and juice. Asunción reminds us of Dole’s impact on the land and the people who labored on its plantations. In their performances and installations,

Asunción asks viewers to consider the stories of those who are integral to, for example, sugar and pineapple production, and yet disappear from the consumer’s view. Asunción’s connection to these plantations spans generations: Their father was born and raised on a sugar plantation, and their grandmother lived in sugar plantation housing in Kahuku until she died from heatstroke in her garden. In their essay “Looking Through the Mirror of the Imperial Gaze on the Philipina Diaspora” for the Harvard Peabody Museum, Asunción writes, “I sometimes wondered if she dreamt of going home as the sun overtook her, and if she was ever able to find her way back across the sea, back to all she left in a country ravaged by the post-war colonial aftermath.”

As a writer, I am deeply engaged with concerns similar to Asunción’s in my own practice. Since I published my memoir, The Body Papers, I’ve been told several times to meet Asunción, as we both weave our relationship to the Philippines into our work. Finally, during “Duty-Free Paradise,” a solo show surveying fifteen years of their work curated by J.R. Uretsky at Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts earlier this year, I had my chance.

I stepped into the exhibition from a bright spring day into a wall of sound; a human voice wailed and moaned, crackling through the single microphone over ominous electronic music. Droning tones and guttural bursts blasted from two heavy speakers as big as dormitory refrigerators, which framed the doorway. Weaving through the crowd, I walked amid Asunción’s pieces, which reflect on the connections between Hawai’i and New England, places where they have lived. I met Asunción’s eyes first through their self-portraits, arresting stills with the artist at the center, their black hair another frame around their eyes, challenging the viewer to look closely.

In Big Luau Give Back Aloha (2021), Asunción stares at the viewer while pointing a glass gun filled with white crystals of tubó, Filipino for sugarcane, and wearing an orange vintage bathing suit and a necklace heavy with a 3D-printed pendant of the Old State House. And in Dole House (Self Portrait) (2021), they meet the viewer’s eyes through the reflection in a mirror. Here Asunción is dressed in a barong tagalog, a translucent top tailored with both a man’s sharp collar and a woman’s terno, the butterfly sleeves that former First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos popularized during the twenty-year reign of her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos. Imelda wore dresses with these iconic puffy sleeves for state events, posing for photos next to the company she and her husband kept, including world leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Fidel Castro. Asunción’s self-portrait layers butterfly sleeves and military equipment to visually marry as well as criticize the reverberations of empire in the Philippines.

I recognized Asunción’s shirt from my own life: My father wore a barong tagalog woven of piña cloth for formal occasions, including my wedding, and in one of the only photographs I have of my grandmother young enough to have black hair, she wears architectural butterfly sleeves. In the self-portrait, Asunción wears this queerly tailored top over a black military harness and gun sling, visible through the sheer shirt. During Spain’s three-hundred-year reign over the Philippines, the colonizers wanted the colonized to wear the barong as a way to quickly distinguish the power relationships. There are multiple frames around Asunción’s figure—the oval mirror, the white crown molding, Asunción’s black hair—bringing the viewer back to the figure’s eyes, which hold a steady gaze. I imagine a voice: I see you seeing me. Nothing is lost on me.

In the gallery, the real Asunción sat on the floor in the center of the doorway behind a video monitor and in character as the Sirena, a mythical Filipinx figure—part mermaid, part witch. The Sirena shimmered in an iridescent blue and purple one-piece bathing suit patterned with fish scales, evoking a water creature. Over their face, they wore a mask layered with moss, flowers, sequins, leaves, and other natural items: a landscape where one expects a face. The Sirena forces the viewer to look at climate change and asks us to protect the most vulnerable from its impact.

I’ve looked at art all over the world, but I’ve never experienced an exhibit that was so personally resonant with my experiences as a diasporic Filipino: the preserved rooster’s feet reminding me of that time that I observed a sabang, a cockfight, with an older cousin in the Philippines, the chiming of kulintang as Asunción walked through the crowds striking the wooden beater against the knobbed metal gong. Kulintang is the sound I associate closely with my older sister, ethnomusicologist Mary Talusan Lacanlale, who learned to play from the late Guro Danongan “Danny” Kalanduyan and recently co-produced with Theodore S. Gonzalves the double album Kulintang Kultura for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings to honor Kalanduyan’s legacy. In a small-world moment, as I’m writing this article, my sister tells me that she spoke with Asunción about this traditional gong music of the Southern Philippines. It is a music of celebration and ritual, but also resistance.

As I encountered Asunción’s pieces in the solo show, for the first time in an art gallery, I didn’t feel like an outsider. I didn’t have to scan my art history courses to remember what I learned in school. I didn’t need to look up translations for words not in English. My lived experience as an immigrant from the Philippines was enough for me to understand. Despite a lifetime in this country, I still feel like a foreigner. Perhaps all of us feel on the margins in some way, but in that gallery, I felt centered. I connected deeply with Asunción’s perspective even as their work in transmedia storytelling and multimedia practice is unlike anything else I’ve encountered.

Around a corner in the back of the gallery, I came upon a wooden crate the size of a shoe box, standing on its short end. I peered inside between the slats and couldn’t quite make out what was imprisoned inside the crate.

Is that a pineapple? It is.

The wooden crate reminded me of the shipping containers that made it possible for people far from the islands to taste its fruits. But how many consumers considered the labor required and the people whose lives were tied to plantations, their bodies shaped and bent over so that others could eat this yellow ring of tart fruit?

Asunción’s piece The Local (2015–2022) is a petrified pineapple that represents the last pineapple plantation, an artifact symbolizing the end of almost 150 years of Hawai’i’s production of this monocrop. I’ve thought about that lonely, drying pineapple in The Local many times since I first encountered it. The pineapple is still recognizable—the crown, the orb—while it has also become something else over time as it has grayed, aged, and dried out. A fragile piece, it travels for exhibits. “I always worry about it,” Asunción says. “Sadly, one got shipped back and it was dust. It didn’t make it.”

In that moment, a line from my Catholic upbringing returns to me: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Back on the Greenway, Asunción’s performance Tabi Tabi Po (May I Pass) begins with a mele blessing from the dancer Noelani Kaluhiokalani Miranda, adorned with leaves and ropes encircling their head, wrists, and ankles. When the musicians play, everyone turns at the other end of the lawn. We strain to see the blue-clothed bodies beyond the fountains. They move like waves until they arrive at the WAI Water Clock, where they invite the audience to line up in front of the sculpture, a kind of altar, to receive a cup of water.

I remember the thousands of Sunday mornings that I stood in a similar line at the Catholic church of my childhood for the Sacrament of Holy Communion, to eat the bread and drink from the cup. But in Asunción’s installation, instead of drinking from the cup, I pour it into the basin: a reversal, maybe even a queering of the ritual. Our cups of water flow together. Asunción says, “I did that last part as communion, but like how a river is communion.”