Lani Asunción

Artist and activist

Boston-based multimedia artist and community organizer Lani Asunción is a founding member and Producing Artistic Director of Digital Soup. This artist collective creates inclusive spaces that enable sharing of public performative works, multimedia art, video, sound, music, and art projects.

Lani Asunción (they/she) is a Boston-based multimedia artist. Lani engages public spaces with performance and socially engaged artworks, employing video, sound, costume, and movement to communicate a visual language rooted in their queer, multicultural, Filipinx identities.

In the 1920s, Lani’s grandparents immigrated from the Philippines to the island of Oahu to work on the sugar plantations. When Lani first moved to Boston in 2017, they found themselves living near the historic family home of James Drummond Dole, the man credited for establishing the Hawaiian pineapple industry built upon stolen land inherited by his cousin Stanford Dole. Stanford Dole was involved in the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy.

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Duty-Free Paradise | Isle of the Blessed is a 40-minute theatrical performance in three parts, created in the form of a post-colonial Filipinx epic.
Performance documentation by Sasha Pedro

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2021 Duty-Free Paradise performance documentation by Sasha Pedro
Headpiece by Timothy Manalo

Lani’s multifaceted project titled Duty-Free Paradise is a multimedia exhibition and series of performances that play on the tensions between lived and imagined Hawai’i. Through the lens of eco-tourism, around which the Islands’ economy heavily circulates, this work explores the contradictions between perceptions and realities of island life as a constructed paradise through American pop culture, down to the flora and fauna, underwritten by militarism and biopolitics.

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One of the ways Lani has explored, drawn attention to, and reclaimed the tensions between lived and imagined Hawai’i is through bright and highly designed athleisure wear. Drawing on advertisements of the 1960s created to drive tourism to the islands, Lani designs clothing that is a simultaneous play on and critique of eco-tourist essentials. Their clothing line includes flip flops, swimsuits, sundresses, and even a beach towel featuring a redesign of the iconic Dole Plantation maze and plants endemic to Hawai’i. The clothes are yellow and white to signify caution of racism still plaguing Filipinx inhabitants and the whitewashing of the Kanaka Maoli’ of the Hawaiian Islands.

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