AAPI Voices Amplified in "Dissonance: Repressed Tones" at Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
02.24.2025
Dissonance: Repressed Tones, an exhibition presented by the KCAI AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) group, is now on view at Leedy Underground Gallery II. The show will run from February 7 to March 28, 2025.
Description for Dissonance: Repressed Tones
"There exists a genetic predisposition to perfect pitch caused by the prevalence of tonal language in many Asian cultures. However, the societal expectation for English fluency overwhelms that internal resonance.
While the skill is exercised through music lessons and familial translation, the root of the sound is lost to an environment that sees little use for the ability day-to-day. With pressures to conform and, at times, performing to forget, how does one create harmony from opposing voices?
Dissonance expresses the conflict Asians in America experience between the sounds they live and the ones they leave behind."
Hyphenated Identity
The concept was developed through brainstorming sessions led by KCAI AAPI co-presidents Lucy Hodges (’25 Illustration) and Sarah Manuel (’25 Printmaking), exploring themes of Asian joy, memory, and longing.
Manuel explains, “There was this conflict with the hyphenated identity of Asian American—Are you Asian or are you American? We felt like the word dissonance captured the clash between the culture you’re born into and the life you grow up with.”
The following conversations feature three students discussing their work, its connection to the exhibition's theme, and their artistic growth and goals.
Image: Sophia Gaeun Lee, Can My Parents Join?
Missing Identity
At home, Lucas Nguyen (First Year Foundation) ate a lot of fish heads.
Just the mention of the meal would elicit strong reactions from classmates while growing up in Kansas. Even bringing out onigiri—simple rice balls—at the lunch table highlighted a perceived “weirdness.”
"Sometimes I’d be bullied or shamed for my cultural foods. And sometimes I feel like Asian Americans today lose that portion of their identity because of that shame or harsher experience they may have gone through,’ Nguyen says.
The connection between food and culture is a central inspiration behind Nguyen’s two pieces in Dissonance. One of them, a fiber sculpture, takes the form of a giant crocheted milk carton. Nguyen created the patterns, including the words “Missing Identity” and “Missing Culture” alongside the crocheted images of certain Asian foods.
Nguyen, a child of immigrants, describes their cultural background as Chinese-Vietnamese. While growing up, their grandmother spoke Cantonese, but Nguyen never fully learned the language—just as they didn’t pick up Vietnamese, which their parents could speak but not write.
Image: Lucas Nguyen, Missing Identity & Culture
"I feel like being able to squeeze it kind of provides the comfort—like how you can be comforted by food and your own culture in that way."
Connecting with Home Cooking
But, again, Nguyen’s art gives something to grasp onto. Their second piece in the Dissonance ties back to that family meal sometimes met with disgust from Americans—a large fish head, hand-woven on a loom with a needle felted eye and scales.
“I like that they’re these pillow-esque ideals that are very functional. I feel like being able to squeeze it kind of provides the comfort—like how you can be comforted by food and your own culture in that way,” they said.
“With home cooking, my grandma always made the fish head recipe and it was really good. I thought it was good! But then if I would like to share with other people…it was like I would be more open to their culture, but they didn't seem very open to mine.”
Image: Lucas Nguyen, Connecting with Home Cooking
Created Distance
Kansas City is 7,700 miles from New Delhi, a distance Yash Pratap Singh (Junior, Filmmaking) often thinks about. Born in Arkansas and having spent most of his life in India, he feels the separation in different ways.
For example, Singh is bilingual, having multiple accents as well. His mother tongue is Hindi—but when he’s in Missouri he speaks in an Americanized version of English. When back in India, he switches to his original dialect while speaking English or Hindi.
“It’s something I’m still navigating—why do I feel the need to change my accent depending on where I am? My father has been a big influence on me watching films. He always had Turner Classic Movies on, so I grew up with Western films, rather than just Bollywood. That’s shaped my perspective a lot,” Singh says.
Singh’s father (“A bit of a storyteller. Or he likes to think so.”) plays a large part in his contribution to Dissonance. 350-100-450 is an 8-minute, 24-second film in which the filmmaker deliberately created distance between all parties: Singh didn’t reveal much about the film to his father (reached in New Delhi by phone) or his collaborator, Noah Anthony (‘22 Graphic Design), until late in the process.
"I asked my father to tell me a story—anything he felt like—and I would then make a film to accompany that audio. I was very excited by how our distances and limitations in connection would undeniably create a contrast in the film, but I was also adamant that there would still be a tether in our ways of storytelling,” Singh says.
Singh’s father tells a story about a miscommunication involving a clothing iron—with guests saying they paid one price and his family claiming they paid far less. The guests are saddened until Singh’s grandfather reveals they bought a necessary piece separately and they all paid the same price. When his father takes the iron to college, he loses the cord within the first week, never telling his father, fearing disappointment.
“My father ended the story with the idea that, in reality, everyone just has the same thing, and we keep getting upset over nothing. It becomes existential, which is very much his way of thinking,” Singh said.
A Simple Gesture
For visuals, Singh experimented with an image of somebody walking into frame with a clothing iron, taking their shirt off, ironing it, putting it on, and leaving—a simple gesture with layers of symbolism including self-improvement, preparation, or transformation.
As for how it fits into the theme of the exhibition, Singh says, 'There’s a sense of discomfort in diaspora. I’ve lived more than half my life in India and keep going back. On paper, I’m a first-generation American, but I don’t have the cultural background of being fully American. I can’t look back two generations and say they were American. So, I do feel a sense of discomfort.”
"But I also love diaspora. I love experiencing different cultures—whether it’s hanging out with Baptist Christians here or returning home to Hindu traditions. It’s both exciting and uncomfortable at times, but the positives outweigh the negatives. I specifically wanted to learn filmmaking through an artistic lens, which is why I chose art school."
From a Place of Joy
The Tamagotchi is too big for any keychain. Milled out of Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) and spray painted reddish-pink before adding a plexiglass screen—Sarah Manuel (Senior, Printmaking) says the upscale comes from deeper thought on the concept.
“You are, like, the parent of this little creature that you raise. And you have to take care of it or else it will die,” Manuel says. “Kind of morbid.”
In her piece, Manuel describes the two characters as “the inner kids of the past” now all grown up. By having them say “THANK YOU FOR BEING OUR FRIEND,” Manuel relates it to saying “Thank you for raising us.”
“By making it large, I was thinking about how these feelings and imagery are almost too big to just carry around now—conscious or in the little pocket of my mind. I wanted to give it actual space,” she says.
Manuel, Co-President of the KCAI AAPI, incorporates a lot of text in her artwork—thinking in terms of what her characters would say. Those characters are often representations of an internal self, like an inner child or even an alternate version of herself. Much of her work taps into thoughts about her personal experience as an Asian American adoptee, born in China.
Avoided in her work, however, is angst.
“There is a lot of art out there that has to do with this reflecting or pondering of life in the motherland,” she says. “I kind of implement that in my work, but I also try to come at it from a place of joy or appreciation of my roots and or home. And then I’m trying to explore and have more positive feelings with it.”
In Manuel’s exploration, the result in Manuel’s art is an expression of her subconscious. “Vibes,” she says. “That’s how I work on the images. I kind of let them freeform come out.”
Image: Sarah Manuel, Tamagotchi Twins