Honolulu, HI
Honolulu's Kakaʻako neighborhood is one of the most mural-dense districts in the United States, its industrial warehouse blocks transformed by the POW! WOW! Hawaii festival into an outdoor gallery of global significance. Founded by local artist Jasper Wong, POW! WOW! brings dozens of international muralists to Kakaʻako each February, and the accumulated work of a decade of festivals has made this neighborhood an essential destination. Chinatown and Waikiki complete the picture.
Featured Artists
All artists →Jasper Wong
Honolulu-born illustrator Jasper Wong founded POW! WOW! Hawaii in 2011 with a simple idea: bring the world's best muralists to Kakaʻako and let them paint. A decade later, the festival he created has spawned chapters in cities from Long Beach to Taiwan. "Aloha Spirit" — Wong's own contribution to the Kakaʻako walls — is a large-scale illustration that synthesizes Native Hawaiian visual traditions with the graphic design vocabulary of Wong's commercial illustration practice.
Tristan Eaton
Tristan Eaton's "Pacific Tide" is one of the largest works in the Kakaʻako portfolio — an eight-story composition on a Ward Village residential tower that depicts a Hawaiian woman's face assembled from the flora, fauna, and cultural objects of the Pacific: hibiscus, humpback whales, outrigger canoe paddles, and the navigation star charts of the Polynesian wayfinding tradition. The scale makes the face visible from Ala Moana Beach Park.
Tatyana Fazlalizadeh
Fazlalizadeh brought her portrait practice to Honolulu's Chinatown for "Chinatown Voices" — a series of five large-format portraits of women from Honolulu's Asian and Pacific Islander communities, each figure accompanied by a text that speaks directly to the viewer in the tradition of her "Stop Telling Women to Smile" series. The work honors the largely invisible labor of the women who have sustained Chinatown through multiple waves of displacement and gentrification.