Portrait/Young Woman, 1998
Offset Lithograph
Edition of 100
22 x 30 in
Collaborating Printer: Bob Franklin
At the center of this print is a young woman photographed in another era, her gaze steady and composed, her presence weighted with a history that was never fully recorded. Tomie Arai built this work from archival photographs, family stories, and oral histories, part of a larger series dedicated to recovering the human experience within the broader narrative of the Asian diaspora in the Americas.
The composition layers the photographic portrait against screens, scrolls, and motifs drawn from traditional Asian art, visual references that hold the past and present in the same frame, the foreign and the familiar occupying the same surface. Nothing here is ornamental. Each element is a thread in a larger argument about whose stories get preserved, and what it takes to bring them back into view.
Arai learned printmaking not in university studios but in community workshops, spaces like Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop and the Lower East Side Printshop, where artists worked alongside one another in a spirit of shared purpose. Her residency at Brandywine deepened that tradition. For Arai, printmaking has always been inseparable from community, a medium that multiplies not just images but access, ensuring that the faces and histories she recovers do not disappear again.
