'Low Tide / High Root' exhibit highlights cultural balance for Asian Americans living in the US

DUNEDIN, Fla. - At the Dunedin Fine Art Center, a new exhibit is showcasing the divide and balance for multicultural Asian Americans living in the U.S.

"Low Tide / High Root: APIDA Diasporic Perspectives" is on display until Feb. 22.

"It's about their perspectives as people who live here, but also perspectives from where they come from," Dunedin Fine Art Center Curator Danny Olda said.

Dig deeper:

APIDA stands for Asian Pacific Islander Desi American. Seven artists are part of the exhibition and their pieces range from large pieces to groups of smaller works. 

Samo Davis and Petra Gurin, known as The Moss Girls, collaborated on a large, partly-alive display of plants.

What they're saying:

"The live plants and the non-live plants, the preserved plants, coincide together to be representations of both growth and decay. I was hoping that people would see the way that these plants were originally alive, but now are kind of memories that are falling off but the face that's behind it will always be the same," Davis said. "There's a little bit of blending but at the same time, it's trying to get accustomed to your landscape."

Joo Woo's work encompasses a whole wall of the show, filled with several red, cut-out pieces of paper.

"My new project that I started, 2023, because 2023 was my 20th anniversary of immigration. These iconographies came from my 20 years of childhood memory in South Korea and 20 years of my adulthood in the U.S.," Woo said.

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Many of the cut-outs are familiar cultural icons. Two standout collages feature the phrases "Too Korean To Be American" and "Too American To Be Korean" on top of them.

"It's a very in-between," Woo said. "Every decision I make, is that right to be American? Is it right to be Korean? There's always struggle and emotional difficulty."

The thoughts highlighted by those phrases are a common thread throughout all the exhibition pieces.

"It's a theme that kind of runs through all of these shows, the idea of not quite being at home where we came from, not being quite at home, where we're at, but carving out a home for ourselves anyway," Olda said.

What you can do:

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