Kite Festival Artists

Artist Maria Maea presents two unique kites borne of the connective threads between Latin American and Oceanic cultural traditions as a first-generation Mexican and Samoan artist. The kites are an anchor to the spaces Maea has sown roots in: her places of origin, Los Angeles, sites her art practice have led her to create in; she adapts the visual symbols of each and makes them her own. Their flight celebrates connection beyond borders, where open airspace and ocean channels become conduits that bridge these geographies to one another.

After the Micronesian nautical practice of rebbelib, a navigational guide that charts ocean currents and bodies of land with bamboo and shells, Maea created a bamboo frame and an internal spiraling arrangement of Oaxacan carrizo reeds. Outlines of figures from personal photos emerge as an extension of stenciled geometric patterns, a gift from the artist’s mother from Samoa. They are spraypainted onto mulberry paper, a material link to siapo, a Polynesian textile made from the inner bark of mulberry trees, and in doing so, Maea interprets and personalizes graffiti culture’s histories of art and resistance in Los Angeles.

To create the second kite, Maea wove palm into a triangular body reinforced with paper sails. Its horizontal axis fans open like wings outstretched midflight, and its form takes inspiration from the lupe, also called the pacific pigeon, which is a culturally significant bird in Samoa and vital to rainforest ecologies as a seed disperser. Foraged from the streets of Los Angeles, the palm is both an iconic emblem of the city and an often disregarded fixture of our urban landscapes, and the act of harvesting and weaving forges a kinship with the material that is then transposed into the work.

Fabrication and test flight supported by Yaeun Stevie Choi.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Maria Maea (b. 1988, Long Beach, California) is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, film, and sound. Maea deepens her connection to land, somatic memory, and ancestry through artworks that act as a residue of her lived experiences as a first-generation Angeleno of Samoan and Mexican heritage. Using repurposed objects, living and dead palm fronds and other organic matter, concrete, and rebar, she builds film set-like sculptures that offer dimensions of multigenerational duration and nonlinear narrative-making. Maea’s work has been exhibited or performed at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2024); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Lisson Gallery, New York (2023); Murmurs, Los Angeles (2023, 2022); and more. She was an artist-in-residence at the Palm Springs Art Museum (2022) and is a recipient of the Artadia Award and the Mohn Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) grant.

Yaeun Stevie Choi, “Fight for Flight,” Bangpaeyeon Korean Fighter Kite (Edition of 3), 2024. Metalized BoPET film, acrylic paint, bamboo, 24 x 32 inches.

Artist Yaeun Stevie Choi created three large-scale Bangpaeyeon, a traditional Korean fighter kite known for its distinct bowed rectangular form and a central vent. The sails are made of metalized BoPET film, used to protect equipment, perishables, and bodies, and the artist’s designs emerge where the aluminum coating is stripped away. Each kite represents a species endemic to Los Angeles currently threatened by privatization and development: the Least Bell’s vireo songbird, the El Segundo blue butterfly, and the La Tuna Puma, a North American cougar in the connectivity area between the San Gabriel and Verdugo mountain ranges.

A diasporic Korean artist living in Los Angeles, Choi connects the colonial legacies in Korea to the ongoing processes of environmental degradation in her new home. The Bangpaeyeon was deployed in the 1500s to communicate during invasions, and later as an everyday craft and object of play. When the kites were banned under the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 1900s, kite makers continued to craft them, such as Noh Yoo-Sang, who constructed a kite honoring the Siberian tiger, a native species and national symbol systematically eradicated during the occupation. Choi works within these historical precedents where land is connected to its people and their liberatory struggle against dispossession and extraction. In “Fight for Flight,” the Korean fighter kite, a symbol of agency and defiance, becomes a vehicle for ecological protest. To quote Palestinian anthropologist and engineer Dr. Hadeel Assali, “We cannot have environmental justice without reversing the harms of colonialism.”

Special thanks to Erin Min.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yaeun Stevie Choi is a sculptural artist, based in Koreatown, Los Angeles, who reimagines objects from her memory through historical research and art making. She specializes in the making and study of Korean kites through which she investigates human flight, affect, and diasporic personhood. Choi co-facilitated a kite workshop with LACMA in May 2022, co-fabricated handmade kites and was a Kite Master at Clockshop’s Community & Unity People’s Kite Festival in 2022 and 2023, and co-taught a public kite workshop with Candice Lin at Frieze London 2023. Choi received her BA in Art from UCLA.

Misa Chhan, “Land is Kin,” Edo Kaku-Dako Kite (Edition of 3), 2023. Cyanotype on Thai Kozo and Manila Hemp.

Artist Misa Chhan created Edo Kaku-Dako kites, rectangular traditional Japanese kites, crafted from handmade Mino-gami paper made of Thai kozo and Manila hemp. The kites are treated in a cyanotype print, one of the oldest photographic processes that utilizes UV light to develop monochromatic prints of objects placed directly on light-sensitive paper, creating a brilliant blue hue that alludes to the skies.

At the center of the kite, Chhan stylized “Land is Kin” with an organic type treatment encircled by cyanotype prints of native plants foraged from Los Angeles State Historic Park. Chhan’s kite design references Indigenous knowledge; the concept “land is kin” was introduced by Rudy Ortega Jr. (Fernandeño Tataviam) at a Clockshop program, Dreaming Land Back into Reality. This concept asks us to consider unceded land as lost relatives for First Peoples who seek to reconnect with and recover their relationships with them. Also guiding Chhan’s process are frameworks from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ around honoring ourselves and the land as inseparable from one another. These kites remind us that when we begin to see land as a community rather than a commodity, we learn to value it with more love and respect.

To see how the kite was designed, watch this video.
Fabrication and test flight supported by Yaeun Stevie Choi.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Misa Chhan is a Los Angeles-based artist who works with natural dyes, textiles, printmaking, and artist’s books. Through her art practice, Chhan aims to create a container of pure joy to demonstrate our fundamental interdependency with nature, thereby challenging the extractive mindset of domination. Chhan spends her time gardening; practicing how to coax color from plants; composting; researching natural dyes, minerals, and materials; and finding ways to be resourceful with what already exists. Misa Chhan received a BA in Book Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Audrey Chan, “Protect Public Lands,” Rokkaku Kite (Edition of 5), 2022. Block print on Japanese mulberry paper.

Clockshop commissioned artist Audrey Chan to design five large-scale Rokkaku kites, which are traditional six-sided Japanese kites crafted from Japanese mulberry paper. In the spirit of the Kite Festival, Chan designed the message “Protect Public Lands,” which was hand-stenciled on mulberry paper with a block printing ink. The design is inspired by Chinese paper cutting and Mexican papel picado, two culturally significant traditional crafts. The stenciled images on the kites draw from the rich cultural histories of Los Angeles Historic Park and the surrounding neighborhoods. Storytelling through allegorical imagery, Chan designed abstractions of a Tongva reed dwelling, plants native to the Los Angeles River, a water wheel connected to Zanja Madre, and Kite Master Tyrus Wong.

See the kite in action in the Los Angeles Times.
Fabrication and test flight supported by Yaeun Stevie Choi.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Audrey Chan (b. 1982, Chicago, Illinois) is a Los Angeles-based artist, illustrator, and writer. Her research-based projects use drawing, painting, public art, and video to challenge dominant historical narratives through allegories of power, place, and identity. She received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BA with Honors from Swarthmore College. Public art commissions include Will Power Allegory for LA Metro at the Little Tokyo/Arts District Station and The Care We Create at the Los Angeles offices of the ACLU of Southern California, where she was the organization’s inaugural artist-in-residence.

Los Angeles-based watercolor artist Sterling Wells demonstrates the process of plein air painting unfold in a real-time performance at the 5th Annual People’s Kite Festival. Painting en plein air (“in open air”) is a method of composing onto a surface while outdoors in the landscape itself to capture the natural light of the scene. Wells, whose practice considers the city’s waterways and the social forces that affect them, will paint on the hilltop beside the Roundhouse Bridge, bringing into being the skyscape of kites in flight, the cultural hub of Chinatown’s stretch of Broadway, and the greenery of Elysian Park’s Radio Hill.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sterling Wells (b. New York, NY, based in Los Angeles) takes an unconventional approach to plein air painting, immersing himself in the neglected urban waterways of Los Angeles to make lush watercolors using water from these sites of environmental, social, and cultural confluence. His work has been exhibited recently at Night Gallery, LAMOA at Commonwealth & Council, the Armory Center for the Arts, among others, and he has presented public programming with Fulcrum Arts. Wells attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018 and was a recipient of a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.