This blog post is authored by Biblio Lotus Team member Niki G.
May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage (AANHPI) Month and is a time to recognize and celebrate contributions made by AANHPI individuals. Asian Americans are often left out of the stories of artists. The Biblio Lotus team wanted to spotlight three Tucson artists and share their work with the community. The following local artists were interviewed for this blog post: Makoto Takigawa, Rina Yoon, and Anh-Thuy Nguyen.
Makoto Takigawa
Born and raised in Japan, Makoto Takigawa pursued his higher education in the United States. Receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His cultural background, where appreciation of nature is integrated in everyday life, combined with years of paleontological work further developed his sense of closeness with and ideas about nature. His inspirations arise from observations made while in natural surroundings. He explores time’s progression and endless movements of nature through his brush strokes and colors, while focusing on the visceral aspect of the imagery. He hopes to create images where the viewers experience their personal connection to nature through his paintings. Makoto Takigawa is also a Board Member of Odaiko Sonora, Tucson’s Japanese ensemble drumming group.
Niki
Tell us a little bit about yourself: What is your background and what was your journey from Japan to Tucson like?
Makoto
I originally came to the U.S. to study criminology. I went to the ESL school in Connecticut first and then I relocated to Fresno, California and enrolled with Fresno State University ESL. I was especially excited because I had never heard of this city. I was curious what Fresno had to offer, and I didn't want to be around Japanese people while I was studying English, since they tend to congregate with each other because people seek familiar culture. Ideally it was a win/win scenario for me.
While pursuing a Criminology Degree, I took a few art classes at Fresno City College. I found a passion I hadn’t realized was there, a thrill to create. One of my teachers convinced me to change my major to art. I was awarded a scholarship to go to the San Francisco Art Institute.
After graduating, I moved to LA to learn about the art scene the city had to offer. I started working for the auction houses Bonhams and Butterfield. It was a fantastic way to see inspiring art outside of the museums. As a crew member, moving furniture, art and other properties, I was able to venture into a Natural History Department within that auction house. The director of the department had a private company dealing with fossils and minerals. I was hired to work in the warehouse, and my art background helped me get into preparation and restoration of the fossils, which is more in-depth than people might realize.
Since the owner is highly involved with the Gem and Mineral Show, he decided to move the operation from LA to Tucson, which is how I ended up here.
Niki
Which artists were influential in your work? Do you have a favorite medium? What is your art process?
Makoto
Artists like Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler and I think the biggest one is J. M. W. Turner.
Oil painting has been my main medium, but I do like using ink and graphite. I usually have two to three paintings going at the same time, so I can go back and forth. I go through phases where I work with a certain color or composition, try them out to see if I like it or not. It's always a learning process.
Niki
Are there some favorite landscapes in the area that you feel more drawn to?
Makoto
It's more like the feeling than just the landscape. During the monsoon, you get that special feeling associated with the atmosphere or the color. It’s not a specific image.
I have a general idea of what color I want to use based on how I felt about that image. All my paintings have their own kind of life. Once I start painting, I don't really follow or try to recreate images. If it takes on its own life, I'm okay – I’ll just go with it.
Niki
Do you have an open studio or do studio tours?
Makoto
I participate in the Open Studio Tour yearly. My living room is converted into a gallery space, and one of the bedrooms is my studio. People can contact me anytime to arrange to view my art.
Niki
Do you have any advice for young artists who want to pursue art as a career?
Makoto
I think they should treat art as a business. It would be nice to think that art is separate from the commercial part but if you want to pursue it, you need money to support that passion. I don't like to think of it as a business, but that allows you to keep pursuing your art.
Rina Yoon
Rina Yoon is a Korean born visual artist and received her BFA in Fine Art from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and MFA in Printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis. Yoon focuses on non-traditional printmaking methods including large scale prints, paper installations, multi-media work combining video and sculptural elements with printmaking. Yoon’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States as well as South Korea, China, India, Italy and Poland. Her work will be viewable at Tucson’s Untitled Gallery located at 101 W 6th Street from April 5 through May 24.
Niki
Can you share a little bit more about your journey from South Korea to Tucson, Arizona?
Rina
I came by myself to the United States when I was 17. After I finished high school in Maryland, I went to college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas to study art. My family situation at that time was such that I would not have been able to major in art in Korea, so I thought I’d give the U.S a try—and it worked out. I moved on to Washington University in St. Louis for my MFA, where I focused on printmaking. and WashU really helped me solidify my reasons for pursuing a career in art. Then I got a teaching position at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design to teach printmaking and taught in the Fine Arts department for 25 years before I retired in 2024. My husband and I moved to Tucson in 2020, first as part-time residents, and now live here full time since 2024.
Niki
Can you talk about the show at Untitled Gallery in Tucson?
Rina
This is the Spring Invitational 2025, and I am one of the eight artists. I chose work for the show specific to my experience in Tucson. I am showing three pieces from a series called Mesquite. The Mesquite tree, which is very common in the Southwest, is known for its deep roots and long lifespan. Native peoples converted its sap and roots into a number of medicines. An ancient and revered tree!
Another work I’m showing (Remains of the Bighorn Fire) presents a glimpse of Tucson’s 2020 Catalina Mountain fire. Two years after the event, I visited the burn-site and studied the aftermath of the blaze. The scarred trees were still very visible, but at the same time there was an astonishing amount of new growth. That was a surprise. As my work has much to do with embracing our environment as an extension of our bodies, I made a wall installation as a tribute to the Bighorn loss. But I also see this as a way of celebrating new life.
Niki
You seem to include symbolism of the body in a lot of your work. What is the meaning of the body in your art?
Rina
Being a transplant and immigrant, I was thinking about and searching for answers about identity and belonging. What does it mean exactly to be “Korean American,” “man,” or “woman”? These terms felt like narrowing categories, and I began to search for a more expanded idea of self. Instead of using geographical or cultural definitions, maybe we can open ourselves up to dwelling on this planet. My body goes through changes and evolutions as nature does. I’m part of everything: this nature, the earth, everything is included in me. I make many comparisons in my work to earth and rivers, situated both inside and outside the body’s boundaries. I don’t see my body as an isolated, autonomous thing but part of an interconnected world.
Niki
Do you have a preferred medium?
Rina
I allow the materials that I work with to inform the way I compose my content. It seems I respond best to paper, which comes directly from nature. I have the mindset of a printmaker. I use a variety of techniques, some of which hark back to traditional Korean art. For instance, a coiled paper technique called Jiseung, which was used centuries ago to make baskets and teacups, often taking advantage of recycled paper. I learned this technique several years ago and haven’t stopped since. Lately, I have explored paper-casting, working directly with pulp and molds. You would think that I’m returning to my roots. Maybe that’s partly true, but the fact is when I visit Korea, though I am fluent in the language, Koreans recognize right away that that I'm different. And that's okay. I kind of like situating myself between these two worlds, America and Korea.
Niki
What advice to you have for future artists?
Rina
Stop trying to decide whether what you are doing is valuable or not, and stop asking yourself am I making art or is this any good? Instead, commit yourself to practicing art around the clock. Make a habit of it, no matter how tired you are, and spend at least 15 minutes every day, even if it’s cleaning your brushes.
Niki
Aside from your website, how can people view your body of art?
Rina
If anyone is interested in seeing what I'm doing, they can feel free to reach out to me. I am thinking about participating in the Open Studio tour that happens in the fall.
Anh-Thuy Nguyen
As a Vietnamese-American artist, Anh-Thuy Nguyen’s primary artistic source material for the last decade has been her personal history and experiences as a female immigrant. Through her artmaking, she investigates her cultural identity as well as her migration story through photography, video, installation and performance art. She has received grants and fellowships from the Arizona Commissions for the Arts, Art Foundations for Tucson and Southern Arizona, Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, and the Oklahoma Center for Humanities. She received her MFA in Photography/Video from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona; and a BS in Economic Geography from the University of Social Sciences & Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Recently, she was awarded the 2023 Second Sight award from Medium Photo and her work are in the permanent collections of Amarillo Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, the Center for Photography at Woodstock among others. She lives and works in Tucson, Arizona where she is the head of the photography program at Pima Community College.
Niki
Tell us about your journey to Tucson, and how you got involved in the art scene here.
Anh-Thuy
I was born in Vietnam. In Vietnam, you learn the family trade, so if you are in a family that isn’t artistic, you cannot go to art school and become an artist. My parents were both small business owners, but my mom was able to send me to a very good elementary school because her friend was a teacher. I was lucky that the school taught English when I attended. I also learned visual language from a teacher who came in once or twice a week. We learned shapes, design, and color theory, which was rare for students that age. When I came to the United States at age 22, I took a basic design class and a drawing class at Pima Community College, and then I got interested in photography. Then I attended the University of Arizona where I got my BFA and majored in photography and afterward, went to graduate school where I got my MFA at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. I got married and then taught for six years at Rogers State University in Oklahoma. A position at Pima Community College to teach photography opened so I came back to Tucson – it’s also the birthplace of my husband and my sister was a refugee and had also relocated here so we had a lot of connections with Tucson. Since it was my starting point, I wanted to come back and build a family and my artistic practice here. I like Tucson because I like cities that have empathy and culture embedded into them. It’s small but a well-connected city and people try to understand each other and be mindful and caring.
Niki
In the interview with the State of the Arts Arizona on KJZZ, you talked about the immigrant experience and about being in between two different cultures. How did this inform your art process?
Anh-Thuy
I believe my artwork reflects my life experience. I tell my story and visualize that experience and that's how I approach my work. My culture and everything that happened to me is embedded in my way of thinking. I live my life as a human, a daughter, a woman, an immigrant, a person of color, and a mother and I take those experiences and sculpt them, look at them and I try to find a way to visualize them into artistic practice. I've been here since 2006, but it has taken time to integrate and even now, I don’t feel fully integrated. It's very hard to just uproot and like a plant, it takes time to grow after coming from a different culture.
Niki
What is your process for creating art?
Anh-Thuy
I love the photography medium, but in some ways, I don’t really like the way photography works. I use photography as a tool to sketch what I want visually and examine if that composition works. That's when I started to build it into a visual, such as a video installation. I will make prints because those are very accessible. A lot of what I do is conceptual. Sometimes photography doesn't work out or has a limitation and so I’ll find different mediums to help me express the idea. Though photography is recording what is happening in our lives, the manifestations of the medium are shifting and are more complex. I teach my students the history of the technology from box camera to now and how the medium progressed, but I still focus on the visual element. Photography is different than painting and sculpture, but it’s still the act of observing and looking. That's why everybody thinks they are photographers, but holding the camera doesn't mean that you know how to make pictures. I teach them how to be mindful and present, how to learn and engage, and determine what is important to capture before they just press the shutter.
Niki
Are you working on any projects?
Anh-Thuy
I secured the Night Bloom Art Grant from the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson through the Andy Warhol Foundation in 2023. So I did a soft two-week run for a nail shop that is also an art space. This project, vietNAIL, is to raise awareness of the health risk issues among the Vietnamese American nail technicians. My sister is a nail tech and a refugee who entered the nail profession, just like thousands of Vietnamese immigrants who work in this industry, they have been exposed to chemicals in their workplace and that affect their health. For example, if you use too much acetone, you're going to have skin rash or you got exposed to formaldehyde a lot, you will get cancer. I list the ingredients used in the industry from OSHA and I pulled data from American health journal articles and translated them into visual design for the decoration of the nail shop display. When the viewer came in, I would invite them to participate in a performance. I hired my sister, who is a certified nail tech to give a dry manicure and apply the nail sticker which has information about lung issues, miscarriages, or other health issues on their fingernails.
I invited people to come in and read the history of why the Vietnamese are the highest at risk, 54% in the industry, with mostly women and how is that affecting their children’s health? Their children have asthma, or they miscarry and that is the information I would like to include in my new show. Hopefully I can secure new funding to turn it into a mobile nail salon so I can drive it to different places and engage with different community about the project. I want to take the mobile salon to where people go to be healthy – like the farmer’s market, to show that what you put on your body can affect other people, like the salon techs. Consumers can demand corporations create healthier alternative materials and products that are not toxic to both nail techs and consumers.
Niki
Where can we see your art?
Anh-Thuy
One of my "Boat Journey" images is displayed at the Tucson Museum of Art in their Art of the American West's Permanent Collection. I was just part of the Center for Creative Photography’s pop-up exhibition called "Building Health Resilience: Reflections on Care, Consciousness, and Community that ran March 18 through April 12 - I contributed a 30 second video interview "What is your community?"
My work is currently displayed at Tucson Desert Art Museum, "The Twisted Road: Finding Home in America that runs until June 28. Nine of my "Boat Journey" images are displayed at AZ Capitol Museum as part of the Museum of Arizona Artist's exhibition "Many Lives, One Community" until August 22.
Niki
Do you have any advice for young artists who want to pursue art as a career?
Anh-Thuy
As a career, it's not easy. It depends on the person. If you really want to make a career out of art, it requires a lot of commitment, and it depends on what kind of lifestyle you want. It's a different career, but it’s a career to help you live a meaningful life. If you feel joy in making art, then keep doing it. But if you feel nothing in return and it's beating you up every day because you don't have money to fulfil your lifestyle, then give it a try for five years, and if it doesn't bear fruit, you need to be brave enough to drop it and do something else meaningful in your life. Art should not be a burden - It should foster, bear fruits and bring you joy and happiness, in my case, add a dab of peace.
