Konrad Ng misses Hawaii. But the opportunity to serve as director of

Konrad Ng misses Hawaii.

But the opportunity to serve as director of the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Program in Washington, D.C., was too good to pass up.

Yet thoughts of home tug at him.

“My family, the people, the state, the food, the weather, everything,” Ng says. “Really, everything.”

Ng, 37, became acting director of the program when his predecessor, Hawaii-born Franklin Odo, retired in 2010. Ng formally took the post in May.

Before he moved to Washington, Ng was a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Academy for Creative Media. He has also served as a film curator for the Honolulu Academy of Arts and coordinated the Hawaii International Film Festival. Incidentally, his brother-in-law is President Barack Obama, though the two don’t get a whole lot of time to hang out together.

“We both have very busy schedules,” Ng said with a smile. “Whenever we get a chance to overlap, we try.”

Now, on a cool mid-September morning, he’s sitting on a bench in one of the hallways at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, where the museum is showing its first major contemporary exhibit of Asian American portraiture.

“Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter” opened last month, but this particular day is special because each contributing artist is visiting the museum to discuss her or his work.

For Ng, this is the kind of exhibit that makes splitting time between Hawaii and Washington worth it. It’s the kind of work he hopes will help inform a conversation that he says more and more people in the United States are going to have in the future.

“We’re at a point in the U.S. where demographic change is predictive and Asian American communities are considered some of the fastest growing communities in the U.S.,” Ng said. “Over the next decade, we’re going to be asking this question more and more: What does it mean to be Asian American?”

That’s the question that permeates the new exhibit, which includes dozens of works by seven artists exploring Asian American experiences.

“People don’t realize how important Asian American contributions — history and culture — have been to the U.S.,” Ng said. “Part of the conversation is striking dialogues about what that means.”
Exploring Identity, Challenging Assumptions

The exhibit is, in a word, exceptional. It is serious and playful, painful and profound. Artists explore complex themes related to identity, belonging, stereotypes and cultural assumptions.

“There’s an inherent foreignness about being Asian in this country,” said participating artist Roger Shimomura, who lambasts racism in bright acrylic.

One of his works is a self-portrait in which he’s fighting off racist World War II-era depictions of the Japanese. Shimomura was born in Seattle, a third-generation American. He was 4-years-old when his family was held at Idaho’s Minidoka Internment Camp during the war.

Elsewhere in the exhibit, a video installation by Hye Yeon Nam explores the discomfort of feeling out of place in a new country. When she moved from South Korea to the United States, she knew she was different than many of the people around her, but then she began to question whether those differences made her “wrong.”

Hye Yeon Nam’s videos feature her walking awkwardly with thin flipper-like extensions strapped to her feet; repeatedly trying to drink orange juice from a glass with a hole in it and attempting to scoop cherry tomatoes into her mouth using a ruler-like utensil.

Another series of works in the exhibit are photographs by Cindy Hwang, who works under the name CYJO. She spent five years capturing 240 subjects for her Kyopo Project, which explores Korean identity.

Each photo has an identical backdrop, with subjects standing and facing the camera. The photos are coupled with snippets from Hwang’s conversations with her subjects.

“Being Korean-American is an evolving, ever-changing question,” said playwright Sung Rno, in the quotation that accompanies his photograph in the project. “It’s something to be explored, questioned, dissected, felt, tasted, remembered, rethought, and reconfigured.”

An excerpt from another one of Hwang’s subjects, Sung Ho Kang, an actor: “I am Korean first and last. American is the middle part.”

Another actor featured in Hwang’s project is the Hawaii resident Daniel Dae Kim.
‘A Noble Goal’ in Hawaii

The issues related to identity that this exhibit raises are familiar in Hawaii, where identity-driven questions are similarly complex.

“Understanding what it means to be committed to democracy, what it means to be committed to public good or public value, what it means to think of the dignity of recognition,” Ng said. “That’s helped by trying to address questions like, for example, Native Hawaiians trying to address questions about the plantation legacy, trying to address questions about the role of Pacific Islanders in the Islands and, of course, the role of the military.

“While Hawaii is very diverse, these issues continue to drive the conversation, and I think that will help us — I want to be optimistic about this — arrive at a more just and equal and free society. I think that’s a noble goal and I think Hawaii is well equipped to help push those questions and hopefully find some answers.”

Ng’s Pacific roots — he was not born in Hawaii, but considers it home — serve him well in his role leading the Asian Pacific American Program, he said.

“Diversity is saturated in Hawaii,” Ng said. “There’s a saturation of Asian American, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian identities all wrapped up in an American spirit. Coming from Hawaii — and taking how the conversation about identity takes place there, how representation takes place there — is a good example of how we can think about diversity at the Smithsonian.”

Ng also acknowledges that there is still “a lot of work that needs to be done” in terms of how Hawaii talks about its own identity. From Washington, Ng works to include Hawaii in a larger national conversation as well.

“The official American story takes place at the Smithsonian,” Ng said. “The more that we can show that the Smithsonian is — to borrow the phrase — of the people, by the people and for the people, the stronger the fabric of our heritage will be.”

Surrounded by works that evoke the sense of longing that sometimes accompanies questions about identity, Ng’s still-strong connection to Hawaii — some 5,000 miles away — seems fitting.

“I try to get back as often as I can, but work calls,” Ng said. “My family’s back in Hawaii, so I miss them. Obviously I love my family. I love Hawaii. But this was an opportunity that I could not turn down. The Smithsonian’s a terrific platform to shape the conversation of the United States.”