Mandy Boose

Photo by Trippy Sanders {@trippysanders}

One half Korean immigrant mother, one half French-American farmworker father. A multiracial product of war, sacrifice, and resilience.

The Great Wave motif in my work {a tribute to Hokusai} represents identity and interrelationship through water: a divine element that links all life forms, the substance that envelops us within a mother’s womb, a tribute to growing up in the Bay. For those of us from immigrant families and diasporic histories, whose bodies have crossed oceans and been (re/dis)connected from loved ones, we tend to consider water as the point of separation from our homelands. What if we reimagined the ocean, instead, as the linking force between our cultural motherland and new home? What if every divide was actually space to re-imagine exchange and interchange? What types of ways could we move the world by flipping our understandings of “blank” space as, instead, very active and ever-changing? We could uncover so much more within the world and within ourselves.

I understand my spirit’s placement on this earth, at this moment in time, is not by chance and not unintentional. I understand my place within my family’s ancestral history is one of resistance: for the colonized and dislocated, thousands of our ancestors needed to survive and persist for our generation to exist now. I want to pay tribute to the legacies of those who came before us, our bloodline, our community members, our past warriors who fought for our freedoms and dignity.