All Kin is Blood Kin
Coyote Park

August 12 – September 15, 2021

Aupuni Space presents All Kin is Blood Kin by Coyote Park, an intimate exploration of what family means within a queer context. Family comes in all forms. Family shifts like the tides: drawing us closer to people, drifting from others, but always carrying us collectively. All Kin is Blood Kin is a love story to Park’s trans family, honoring all of the people that remind them of what family means.

While drawn from a larger series by the same name, the photographic selections on display highlight Park’s connection to Hawai‘i, having grown up on the island of O‘ahu. Park is Indigenous to Northern California (Yurok), and has been deeply influenced by growing up in Hawai‘i where their family immigrated to. 

Where is the place we come home to as people born from a nation of immigrants? Where do we call home when we are othered due to who we love and who we are?

These questions are where Park’s work emerges from as a 2Spirit, mixed race (Korean, White, Native American) person. Asian and Indigenous diaspora in Hawai’i has shaped a culture of togetherness in the way that community holds one another and shows up for each other’s joy, as well as hardships. Park’s photography documents the act of holding in different interactions with their partners, friends, and chosen family. Thinking of the body as land and tending to it is important to Park, having undergone trans affirming surgeries, such as top surgery, as documented within the series. Finding that safety within their vessel and in the hands that hold them is life saving. It is a feeling of coming home.

Select prints from exhibition available for sale here.