Chinatown
Honolulu's Chinatown is one of the oldest in the United States, its grid of late-19th-century masonry buildings west of downtown housing a layered community of Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Native Hawaiian residents alongside the galleries, bars, and night market stalls that have made it Honolulu's nightlife anchor. The mural program here draws on the neighborhood's pan-Asian Pacific identity — work that refuses any single cultural frame and instead reflects the specific visual languages of the Pacific Rim diaspora that has shaped Honolulu across two centuries.
Featured Artists
All artists →AIKO
"Pacific Rim" places AIKO's large-scale female figures against the overlapping visual traditions of the Pacific — Japanese woodblock, Filipino baybayin script, Hawaiian kapa patterns, Chinese New Year red — in a composition that renders Honolulu Chinatown's specific cultural density as an explosion of candy-pink and electric-blue pattern that reads differently depending on which tradition you bring to it.
Estria
"Maunakea Market" documents the Maunakea Marketplace — the covered lei and fresh produce market that has operated in Chinatown since 1904 — with portraits of the market's vendors rendered in a style that merges the scale of Hawaiian kapa cloth with the density of a street market scene, an act of community portraiture that names and honors specific individuals.
Gaia
"Nuʻuanu Stream" maps the ecological history of the Nuʻuanu Stream that bisects Chinatown on its way to Honolulu Harbor — the native ʻoʻopu fish, the freshwater mussels, and the native plants that once lined its banks before channelization — in Gaia's natural history documentation style, rendering the buried stream corridor as a ghost landscape beneath the city's concrete.