(This is only a partial listing of recent, current and future shows. We encourage all of our active membership to keep in touch with news about your events and exhibits. For more member exhibition information, see Chapter Chat and NAWA Awards in this issue.)

Denise Shaw

Ghost Paper
Acrylic with collage on wood panel
36 x 36 in.
2022

COS Gallery

Visalia, CA
March 7-29, 2023

Anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S. are accelerating and Asian American communities are grappling with grief, anger, anxiety, and fear. The crimes include the horrific hazing of Danny Chen by the U.S. Military in Afghanistan, ultimately leading to his suicide, the 2021 shooting spree in Atlanta killing six Asian women and recently the stabbing of an 18-year old Asian student on a bus in Indiana where the suspect told police she stabbed the victim because the victim was “Chinese,” adding that it “would be one less person to blow up our country”. In Manhattan, where I live, I observe Asian women carrying clubs in proactive self-defense walking on the streets. “Ghost Paper” brings awareness to the killing of Asian-American Michelle Go in 2022. She was pushed into an ongoing subway train by a man on the Times Square subway platform in New York City. Spirit paper or “ghost paper,” a very thin orange paper with gold or silver squares, is burned as currency for the dead in the afterlife in Chinese funerary traditions. I partially burned a ghost paper and collaged it on the painting in the upper left corner. I chose to paint a beautiful, mandarin-like jacket, fiercely shredded, arising from the tracks, perhaps like a spirit. The jacket dominates the pictorial space to emphasize the immensity of a beautiful life so forcibly taken. Perhaps it is a somewhat “poetic” image to minimize this otherwise horrific act of violence.

deniseshawpaintings.com