Cultural Collage : Mural Is Reminder of Campaign for Asian Studies Courses at UCI

A dragon and a phoenix fly at each other, brilliant in green and gold. A Hawaiian laborer gathers sugar cane. Japanese American soldiers prove their patriotism in World War II as their families wait in internment camps. A Chinese immigrant labors on an American railroad.

Darryl Mar’s 5-by-15-foot mural depicting images of Asian American history--inspired by a student campaign for more Asian studies courses--is finally completed and ready to be installed at UC Irvine’s Cross-Cultural Center more than two years after Mar began it as an undergraduate in 1991. A dedication ceremony is scheduled today.

“It feels like a homecoming,” said Corina A. Espinoza, director of UCI’s Cross-Cultural Center. “It’s coming home.”

Added Mar, a 1991 UCI graduate who is now pursuing a master’s degree in Asian American studies at UCLA: “It’s supposed to be very accessible, a collage of various Asian American histories.”

Last summer and fall, Mar displayed the mural to classes and community groups at UCLA, UC Riverside, Cerritos Community College and elsewhere. The mural is his first painting, he said, adding that suggestions from participants in workshops on art, politics and cultural heritage helped shape the final product.

“It is a collaborative effort,” he said.

The idea for the mural grew out of campus activism in 1991, when students at UCI began to intensify their demands for more courses in Asian studies. Inspired by a mural in the office of a campus Latino organization, Asian students decided they needed one “to represent what we were fighting for,” said junior Eileen Chun, president of the Asian Pacific Student Assn.

Mar, then artistic director for Rice Paper, the campus’s alternative Asian magazine, agreed to do the mural.

“He was always the budding artist,” Chun recalled.

The mural started out almost as a personal project, Mar said.

“My great-grandfather worked on the railroads,” he said. “At first, (the mural) was just me.”

Mar said he originally drew an image of Frank Chin, a controversial Asian American playwright who inspired him. But when fellow students at UCI and later at UCLA responded to the work in progress, “it changed the content of the piece,” he said.

In response to student input, Mar took out the Chin image, and added others such as Hawaiian and Filipino laborers. And some of the images of Asian Americans became less specific.

“The people are not explicitly one race or another,” he said. “I’m now trying to portray an egalitarian notion of Asian American history.”

John Liu, an ethnic studies professor who will speak at the dedication ceremony, believes the mural represents all Asian Americans. “What we’re talking about is a manifestation of an emerging Asian American culture, not just a Chinese culture, or Japanese, or Korean. . . . The mural, in a sense, represents some of the changes Asian Americans have gone through.”

Chun sees the mural as political art and as a reminder of the student campaign for Asian studies courses, which culminated in a hunger strike last year that led to UCI’s agreement to hire more professors and add more courses.

“Students made Asian American history,” she said. “You don’t hear much about Asians voicing anger at the institution.”

Having the large mural hanging permanently at UCI for students to see daily will serve as a symbol and a reminder of that campaign, she said.

“It was well worth the wait.”