Mia Nakano: The Visibility Project

May-June, 2019

Desai | Matta Gallery

 The Visibility Project | Mia Nakano 

This is who we are.

Two hundred portraits, ten years, 26 cities, 20 states, and 20,000 miles. 

We live in a moment saturated with self-portraiture. We document and curate our own public presence at a pace and a scale for which there is no precedent in human history, images exchanged virtually and instantaneously within our self-selected social networks. But the photographic portrait like those in The Visibility Project still stands apart, promising something meaningfully different. 

For the viewer, these images are an invitation to look, to stare even, unabashed, locating what’s familiar—the expression that reminds us of a friend or loved one—or what’s distinct and made strange. While the steady gaze returned by the subject can make the act of looking seem reciprocal, in fact we have permission to be the voyeur, locating the vulnerabilities in our obstinately temporal bodies, or the signs of youth, or those that hint at the work that fills our days, or what folks we might call family. 

For the subject of a portrait—one who participates in the making—it’s an assertion of presence, a refusal of erasure. It says, I am here. The Visibility Project, the work of artist Mia Nakano, is a nationwide project that aims to amplify the stories and images of the queer Asian Pacific American women and transgender community across the United States. They say not only that we are here, but we have been here. 

By sharing their histories, they change the present. The Visibility Project is a community story told through the power of individual images and narratives. The pictures stake out a place for inclusion in a group, while resolutely asserting the pluralism of identities within, the diverse expressions of gender, sexuality, age, cultural history, and experience. 

Nakano and her subjects have extended an invitation, a call to a more inclusive representation, a call for the possibilities of complexity, and a call to start conversations between subject and viewer and among audience members, building connections through the nourishing of relationships and dialogue. 

Two hundred portraits, ten years, 26 cities, 20 states, and 20,000 miles. 

Deirdre Visser, Curator 

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you. ~Frida Kahlo

The Q/T Asian Pacific American community has often been ignored, disenfranchised, and silenced. We (VP) provide a platform for queer and trans Asian Pacific Americans to share their stories and shift this dynamic. 

When people see our portraits, they see themselves, they see their family, they see their friends.