Stop API Hate Illustrations

MIXED ASIAN MEDIA - MAY 19, 2021

By Nash Holcomb

Over the past year, I, like many others, watched helplessly as random individuals of the greater Asian communities in the West have been brutally victimized, targeted, attacked, even killed. I tell myself that at least these acts of hatred and racism are finally being noticed by the mainstream. But as soon as the mainstream finishes its coverage of the latest attack on our people, asking all the while why such horrific acts are happening, they then move on to stories of how the Chinese government will surely doom us all. Long ago, it took the murder of Vincent Chin to unite the AAPI community in a way that it never had been before. We’re once again upon one of those moments, and it feels like nothing has changed since Chin’s murder decades ago. I wanted to dedicate these pieces of artwork to the most common victims of this assault on our people, the elders and the women, both seen as the most vulnerable among us. The obstacles may seem insurmountable; the hawkish government policies, the poverty that breeds desperate and violent crimes, a system built on white supremacy pitting people-of-color and the lower classes against one another, but we cannot let this movement go to waste. We finally have their attention. What will we do with it?

Nash Holcomb was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area to an Anglo-American father and a 5th generation Chinese American mother. He graduated from San Francisco State University, majoring in Cinema and minoring in Animation, and currently resides in the Los Angeles area, making food for a living and artwork for fun, hoping to one day reverse that trend.