Nina Vichayapai

2024

An ongoing project connecting Asian Americans to explore Asian American art, history, and culture in rural places through organized road trips.

Silk Road Trips: Anacortes and Deception Pass State Park

A day of beach-combing, memorial making, and exploration into the rich Asian American history of Anacortes and surrounding areas. From visiting Deception Pass State Park, the site of entry into the United States for many Asians from the 1800s to the 1900s, to exploring the local treasures of downtown Anacortes like Sujin’s Kimchi, this trip dives into the impact of Asian Americans in this unique area once filled with ginseng farms, salmon canneries staffed with Asian laborers, and more.

Thanks to Christina Nguyen for photography, appearing in the following photos, and trip support!

Please reach out to nvichayapai@gmail.com for more information about joining future road trips.

An art gallery on the dashboard of my 2008 Saturn Astra. This gallery currently features artworks that were created during road trips by friends and family. The Astra will expand to include submissions on themes of travel and identity.

2023

12 ft x 4 ft

Fabric on wood panel

This piece was created in collaboration with ecologist Roger Fuller for Surge: Mapping Transition, Displacement, and Agency in Times of Climate Change at the Museum of Northwest Art.

Fir Island Farms Estuary Restoration Project, completed in 2016, set back 5,800 feet of dike and restored 131 acres of tidal marsh and tidal channels in the Skagit Delta. The project also incorporated protections to reduce flooding, maintain drainage, and prevent saltwater intrusion on surrounding farmland.

This piece illustrates the collaboration that goes into environmental restoration projects. This project provides an example of community stakeholders with different, sometimes conflicting perspectives, coming together to accomplish a project that increases the resilience of both ecosystems and human communities to the impacts of sea level rise and storm surge.

Collection of Online Museums

2021 - Ongoing

A collaborative project in which I invite people to create online museums in representation of themselves. Collections in these museums, chosen by the creators, range from personal curiosities, memories, favorite sights or sounds, family photographs, and more. In co-creating these museums I introduce people to the platform and collaborate with them in deciding the curation of their museum.

2023

3 ft x 4 ft

Watercolor paintings and fabric woven on wood panel

Created for Deception Pass State Park as a culminating project made during my time as the park’s inaugural artist in residence. This piece weaves together watercolor paintings of park wildlife with paintings of people recreating in the park, along with paintings in reference to historical photos of the park and its century long history.

2022-2023

Hand sewn and painted soft sculpture with Pacific Northwest wildflower seed papers

Interactive installation created for Remix at the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park. Handmade seed papers containing native wildflower seeds were provided to participants to write wishes to the earth upon. The seed papers were then sewn onto the cloud throughout the event as well as distributed to participants to be planted at their own homes and gardens. Based on the concept of cloud seeding, this project encourages people to make positive environmental interventions.

This sculpture has gone on to be shown with Spaceworks Tacoma , Mini Mart City Park in Georgetown, and the Museum of Flight in Tukwila. Many more seed paper contributions were collected along the journey.

Thank you to all who have shared their seed paper wishes with this project!

2023

Hand sewn soft sculpture installation

An ongoing interactive project that invites viewers to take photos with these handsewn tiger sculptures as a way to provide fun and cruelty free #tigerselfies in place of harming living animals.

This installment, shown at the Museum of Museums in Seattle, makes reference to the paintings of French artist Henri Rousseau whose tropical themed paintings have made lasting and mostly false impressions of tropical places in the public canon.

2020

Lighted display of objects, photographs, and illustrations

A miniature museum dedicated to the diverse communities of Redmond, Washington. Inspired by Redmond’s Bear Creek Site where the oldest dated artifacts of human life in Western Washington has been identified, Your Story Our Story imagines what the archaeological artifacts of our time might look like.

Members from the local community were asked to share meaningful everyday objects. These objects were then immortalized through being embedded in resin or imprinted into clay. People were also invited to submit photos. These photos, along with drawings of the local flora and fauna, became the resin portraits on the outside of the box.

This public artwork was made possible by the City of Redmond, the Redmond Historical Society, and the many participants who shared stories and images.

2021

200 ft.

Mixed media mural

Collaboration with artist Monyee Chau created for Meta Arts Bellevue.

This piece explores the cultural impacts of globalization and imperialism through the subject of fruit. Combining paintings by Monyee with soft sculptural fruit made by myself, this multimedia installation utilizes both playful forms and powerful imagery to depict the range of cultural associations tied to fruit such as: strawberries farmed by Japanese Americans in Bellevue prior to incarceration during World War II, agricultural worker protests signs, and nostalgic memories of being served cut fruit by friends and family.

Thanks to Jae Eun Kim for art support, Lele Barnett for curation, and Meta Arts.

2020

4 ft x 10 ft

Soft sculpture on steel panels

A fabric garden of non-native plants which have naturalized in the Pacific Northwest. This work represents extensive research into many different plant species and their connections to people who often spread these plants during journeys of migration.

This project began while in residence with Rockland Woods on the Olympic Peninsula. Home Here has been shown with Shunpike Arts as well as the Henry Art Gallery as a part of Set in Motion, a show which was displayed on Seattle Sound Transit buses during the Covid pandemic in 2020. This piece was then translated into an augmented reality art installation in the form of an edible blackberry and lemon balm flavored popsicle as part of Augment Seattle 2022, curated by Future Arts.

2021

3ft x 3ft x 3ft

Illustrations in resin and on postcards with native plant garden

Temporary public artwork commissioned by Friends of Lake Sammamish State Park. This box contained a native plant garden as well as illustrations of native plants and animals which can be found in the park. A free brochure was also distributed as part of this project which details key plants and animals and the threats they face from increasing urbanization.

2018

20 ft x 8 ft x 3ft

Soft sculptural installation in snow

A walkable garden carved out of snow which led to sculptural fabric representations of 90 different medicinal plants in connection to the 90 days of winter. I researched medicinal native and non-native naturalized plant species in the Pacific Northwest to draw connections between traditions of healing and wintertime perseverance in cultures across the world.

This project was created while in residence with Caldera Arts in Sisters, Oregon, and was open to the public during an open studios event.

2019

20 ft x 12 ft x 3 ft

Soft sculptural installation

Under Maintenance celebrates the multifaceted lives of people working in maintenance. Bringing these identities to the surface of the uniform through embroidered patches, these identities are showcased as a way to humanize maintenance workers. These used jumpsuits, provided by my father who worked as a mechanic and restaurant owner, is embroidered with words collected from interviews with various close friends and family who work in a range of maintenance roles.

This show was displayed at the Meydenbauer Center of Bellevue as part of Shunpike Arts Storefronts Program.

2017- ongoing

Mixed fabric on wood panels

This collection of fabric portraits draws from several family photos as reference. These photos span a wide range of time and places, showing our family before and after immigrating to the United States. As documentation with great personal significance to our family, these photos hold great importance to me and I abstracted them through recreating them in fabric as a way to capture the nostalgia, warmth, and distance I experience when looking at the photographs.

2018

Soft sculptural installation

A solo exhibition created while in residence with Inscape Arts and Cultural Center of Seattle, an institution located at the site of Seattle’s historic Immigration and Naturalization Services Building.

Permeable Moment suspends in time a moment of permeability in the act of migration. Border areas, immigration services, and the buildings designed to moderate the flow of immigrants are defined by their lack of permeability. For those who are detained or deported, a moment of permeability never comes.

For my family, our permeable moment came in 2003 when we received our citizenship at this exact INS building. In creating this piece I imagined what it was like for immigrants to start their journey in the United States by first dreaming of a life beyond this building with it’s colossally imposing brick walls.

Through symbolism which combines non-native naturalized plants and their abundance with recreations of the INS building bricks as soft pillows in disarray, this installation imagines a dissolution of structures which act as barriers to the dreams of many immigrants.

2017 - present

Altered jumpsuits

An ongoing project of altered uniforms which reflect the dynamic and often numerous shifting identities which uniformed workers assume in their lives. Inspired by my father’s work as a mechanic in which the jumpsuit was his daily uniform yet represented only one of many different roles in his life.

2017

Mixed-media installation

Tropicana is a love song to the eclectic immigrant home I grew up in. A collection of installed work created during three years worth of investigation into the various childhood homes I grew up in, I explored these sites as charged with both the private embrace and rejection of assimilation. Through sculpture, printmaking, painting, and more, I recreated artifacts of personal significance and presented them during this solo show at Hubbell Street Galleries in San Francisco.