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A visit to the Pacific Asia Museum in late summer presents visitors with many options: a tidied jade collection; an interactive gallery on the Silk Road designed for families; the newest installment in their summer film series, if it’s a Thursday night; and, for those who were lucky enough to catch it before its completion on Aug. 23, an experimental, community-based exhibit called “Pacifika: Young Perspectives on Pacific Island Art.” The exhibit, the first in a series of community-oriented projects the museum hopes to continue, explored young local Pacific Islander artistic ties to their communities.

“Going in, we knew we really wanted to work with Pacific Islanders and we knew we wanted to work with teenagers. This exhibit brought that together,” said exhibition coordinator Julian Bermudez.

For the exhibit, the museum partnered with students from the Carson High School’s Pacific Islanders Club and members of the Pacific Asian Student Association at UCLA.

Those involved were invited to the museum to pick out objects in the museum’s collection and provide interpretation for them.

To Bermudez’s surprise, the students, of Samoan, Fijian, Tongan and Hawaiians descent, didn’t necessarily choose objects from their own culture to provide commentary on. “A Samoan, for example, didn’t write about a Samoan object, but rather a Tongan object,” he said.

One highlight of the exhibit was a 19th century Hawaiian necklace crafted from unorthodox materials: sperm whale tooth, coconut fiber and the intricately braided hair of Hawaiian royalty. It was this piece that spurred Bermudez’s interest in the exhibit’s subject matter.

Other objects of note included Samoan tapa cloth made from the bark of the mulberry tree with a design motif that, according to Bermudez, hints at the influence of Western stained glass.

Traditional Tongan, Haka, and Tahitian dance costumes designed by the students from Carson were also on display.

Bermudez explained that the exhibit was purposefully done in parts. The objects in the collection were set apart from the museum’s usual clinical take on pieces through the students’ lively interpretations. An audio component, in which the students discussed and dispelled common misinformation about their culture, echoed the themes of the exhibit, and a video, featuring stills from the Carson students’ traditional dance performance, brought to life the teenagers’ connection to their heritage.

“One of the goals of this exhibit was to deepen the understanding of Pacific Islanders. There’s a perception that some hold that they’re trapped in time, so the hope was to invigorate,” Bermudez said.

Next for the museum is “Confucius: Shaping Values Through Art,” an exhibit on the role art has played in passing down Confucian philosophy, for which the museum worked closely with the surrounding Confucian community. As a contrarian complement to the exhibit, the museum will also be hosting “The Offering Table: Women Artists/Activists from Korea,” which focuses on the feminist art of Korea in Southern California and the marginalization of Korean women in a patriarchal Confucian society.

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