Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 6, Number 1, 1 Ianuali 1989 — Queen Emma Gallery Show [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Queen Emma Gallery Show

"Manamana" — lnner Reflections On Heritage

by Deborah Lee Ward Editor, Ka Wai Ola O OHA "Manamana — The Branching," is the title of an exhibition of 16 paintings by Hawaiian artist Kawena Young at the Queen Emma Gallery of Queen's Medical Center this month. The exhibition through January 28 is in honor of Queen Emma's birthday, January 2. It is also a tribute to Manamana, the plaee name of the Queen's Hospital site. The theme of "branching" is reflected at Manamana on several levels. Hospital building names bear the genealogy of Emma and her family. The many trees on the grounds whieh make up a diverse botanical collection also represent a branching out. And artist Young views this, her first show, as an expanding from her favorite subject matter, horses. While horses in the traditional Chinese brush style are featured in the show, it is Young's other paintings in a very different style that reveal a highly personal approach to her Hawaiian heritage. Momi Kawena Young was born in Hilo and grew up in Kona, Kohala and Hilo. Her genealogy is traceable to Queen Emma through Kalimakahili, who Young says ran away from Maui and had two children, Keliiaea and Kaholo. Her family descends from Keliiaea. Though she is still known by some as Momi Williams (from her late husband), she recently took her aunt's name Keahiwena, or Kawena, as more connected to her family. Young says her family are "Pele people," and her typical dress is red, black or white — red for life blood, black for spirituality and white for strength.

She discovered she could draw in second grade when she handed in a picture copied out of a textbook and was punished by her teacher who insisted she had traced it. Despite the humiliation, she vowed to continue drawing and to get better. A watercolor displayed in a store in downtown Hilo gained attention for Kawena in eighth grade, and a later watercolor portrait was selected to represent Hilo Intermediate at an island-wide exhibition. The painting was selected by the Honolulu Academy of Arts to be shown in Europe, as was a later painting done while Young was a junior at Hilo High School. Young began to study medicine at Lake Forest College in Illinois but decided to switch to psychology at the University of Minnesota. Along the way she left off painting, married, began a family and started to work. Not until 1980 was she to paint again. That year she met Hong Kong artist Kun Kim Ching, who had studied painting with monks in China. During a two month stay in Hawai'i he began to teach Young, and wound up staying six months — a time of concentration in whieh he felt

they had accomplished two years' work. This experience taught Young a profound philosophical lesson whieh affected her outlook on life. She promised her teacher she would eoneentrate on two subjects — the lotus and the horse — but that she would only paint after understanding their life cycle. However, by that time Ching had left, and he has never seen a completed painting by Young. "I like to paint horses," she says. "They are my first love, for they move powerfully . . . They flow well from my brush, whieh is an extension of my arm, whieh expresses from my spirit. I feel my horses from inside." "I see it as the beginning of spiritual enlightenment," she muses. "1 have painted since in that manner. There are no sketches made beforehand, no guidelines or a single mark on my paper. I look into my paper and meditate. I 'see' what I must paint, and then begin." "If you are looking for technicality, you will find that lacking in my paintings. They are spontaneous creations of what I am feeling. They are also thoughts, ideas that must be expressed." "Some say that I paint with great strength and ■ r . : . m m &&ēēssl. ~ ;utaJVJUL

power — 'like a man' — I say I paint with spirit." In January 1987 Young spent a month in the Cook Islands of Rarotonga and Aitutaki, at the suggestion of painter friend Rick Wellen, a Cook Islands resident. She befriended the loeal divers and eame back to Hawai'i feeling she had rediscovered her childhood roots and feeling for inI digenous people. Wellen encouraged her to paint these feelings. In February 1988 Young's paintings began to express a visual diary of her feelings. They integrated her cultural experiences as a Hawaiian not totally at home in Western society, and her spiritual feeling of oneness with an extended reality of the elements and universe. Young explained that in summer 1988 she read an interview in Honolulu magazine with Dr. Noa Emmett Aluli, and thought, "Oh my gosh, he's saying in words what I have been saying in pictures." "I am expressing my feelings as an indigenous person." Her hope is that other Hawaiians will eome see her show and they will say they understand what she feels about being one with nature. Young was spiritually inclined even as a youth, attending church in Olaa and Haili Church in Hilo. Today she is a Bahai, a faith whieh she feels brought together both her cultural and spiritual feelings and helped her to re-identify with her Hawaiian culture. She says this spiritual integration allowed her to feel free and to release a flowing spirit inside her that comes out in her paintings as a feeling of mana. Young is now most interested in exploring her link to nature, mankind and God, with painting as a part of that growth. Young balances her artistic life with work as a respiratory technician at Straub Clinic. She is a member of the E Ola Mau organization of Hawaiian health professionals. Young was widowed several years ago, and is the mother of a son, Keahi, a student at Willamette University in Portland, Oregon. / ' " _ ' . • 44 4

Momi Kawena Young

"Na Maka'ainana "

"Wai Maka Helele'i" by Kawena Young, part of the exhibition, "Manamana, The Branching" at Queen Emma Gallery, Queen's Medical Center.