By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
“Vitrified Orbs,” from Etsuko Ichikawa, courtesy the Wing Luke Museum
“I grew up in Highgrove, California in the Inland Empire, a very non-Asian, brown, working-class community surrounded by orange groves and built next to a landfill. I was a weekend Asian—we didn’t have other Asian families or communities in our town—so we’d make weekend trips to Rancho Cucamonga and Monterey Park to shop for groceries and eat Chinese food that tasted like Chinese food.”
That’s Seattle’s Shin Yu Pai, creator of the “Ten Thousand Things” podcast and overseer of the new “Ten Thousand Things” exhibit opening March 7 at the Wing Luke Museum. The exhibit, like the podcast, addresses art, artifacts, and ordinary household objects, and how such physical possessions shape cultural tradition, history, and personal identity.
“I would like people to look a little more closely at the objects in their own lives to excavate what hidden stories might be there,” Pai explained. “And to find everyday appreciation in the small things that we keep and sometimes hand down, or the things that we make. To ask the question of, what has meaning, and why?
“Objects in museums are always tied to meaning. Why are some objects collected and displayed in museums and others are not? What is meaningful? And what’s worth elevating and collecting and keeping—for the individual? And for the museum? How do these objects connect to the other items at the Wing?”
She came to Seattle in 2007 for a doctoral program in sociocultural anthropology, and eventually dropped out after a year before switching over to museum studies. She left the UW in 2009 with her degree in Museum Studies, to work as a curator in Texas Hill Country at the Wittliff Collections.
“I ended up briefly in the Little Rock, Arkansas region, running a small family foundation, before deciding to come back to the Pacific Northwest and Seattle. From a cultural perspective, Seattle’s been a lot more hospitable and manageable of a place to live, for me as an Asian American woman, with a mixed-race family.”
Pai worked with a small Community Advisory Committee (CAC), plus Wing Luke staff, to create the “Ten Thousand Things” exhibition. They consulted the museum’s existing collections and what was known about artifacts, as well as exploring and researching stories from the community through suggestions from the CAC.
From there, Pai said, the staff “organized the show loosely into a few groupings of different kinds of objects. For instance, there are found musical objects/instruments, culinary-related objects, everyday objects, and also objects that were made as works of art—such as a video recording of Anida Yoeu Ali’s ‘Red Chador,’ Etsuko Ichikawa’s ‘Vitrified Orbs,’ and Stewart Wong’s stamped and printed kapa cloth.”
And she’s brought a personal contribution to the show.
“My piece is a replica of a plaster mask that was made of my face when I was in my early 20s, by an artist who would become my future mother-in-law. She cast the piece, and I sat, unwillingly, as her model.”
Pai also has some long-range plans for the exhibit.
“We hope to refresh the exhibition midway through its run, with more objects and stories from the community that we hope to gather through oral history days, live shows, and social media.
“I am particularly intrigued by objects that are found or inherited, versus bought. And objects that have a use, though they may get used for something other than what they were intended for. I’m less interested in stories about antique heirlooms like pieces of jewelry or decorative objects. The weirder the better. You may derive some clues as to my tastes by listening to the podcast.”
“Ten Thousand Things” runs through May 31 of 2027, at 719 South King Street in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. For more information, visit https://www.wingluke.org/ten-thousand-things.