For this month’s theme of “More than one”, I wanted to create a piece that expresses my personal experience with being mixed-race, Japanese and African-American. It features a portrait of my father and I during a Japanese holiday called “Shichi-go-san” which takes place in the Fall, with a gradient of Autumn leaves falling in the background. The levels and transitional shades in the gradient symbolizes how mixed-race people shouldn’t be put into limiting, harmful boxes and labeled as one or the other, but instead be acknowledged as both, or “More than one.”
