BELLEVUE, Wash. — In just a few weeks, Sound Transit's Spring District light rail station will be open to the public, connecting Bellevue to Redmond.
The public art there is created by Chinese-Indigenous artist Louie Gong.
Gong has created a parallel phoenix and dragon that adorn the walls of the new light rail station.
"To me, those two together represent balance and harmony," Gong explained.
Gong is the founder of Eighth Generation, the first-ever Native-owned company to design 100 percent Native products. He tells KING 5 that Puget Sound Transit tapped him to work on this project many years ago.
Gong is not just Indigenous. He's also Chinese and White. He said all of his art reflects that mixed-race identity.
"The design itself is a mix of Coast Salish design and Chinese papercut, and I think the result is really cool," Gong explained. "It's something that people haven't seen before, it's at the same time both of those things, but also neither one."
"'At the same time both, but also neither.'" Gong said he often felt that way, growing up as a person of mixed race, navigating the ignorance of systemic racism.
"I would sometimes get teased for having the last name Gong, and then I would go home to the tribal community, and sometimes people will say 'well you don't look Asian,'" Gong said. "Then I would go to the all-White public school and people would say, 'What are you?'"
It was a question filled with hurt and confusion. For a while, Gong said he thought he was the one with the problem.
"What I realize now is that it wasn't me who had the deficit, it was my community," Gong said. "Sometimes it was my own family because they didn't have the basic information for talking about race and identity or the frameworks for sharing it with the next generation."
Today, there's more exposure to mixed-race people: The population is exploding.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, 9 million people identified as two or more races. In 2020, it was 33.8 million, an increase of 275%.
Professor LeiLani Nishime, author of a book about mixed-race Asian Americans in media, confirms Gong's experience.
She found, even with prominent multi-racial celebrities like Keanu Reeves, Chrissy Teigen and Bruno Mars, people in the U.S. have a hard time recognizing and understanding mixed Asians. She said it's difficult for Americans to accept the roots of systemic racism: how many places the U.S. took over.
Bruno Mars is Nishime's prime example.
"We should actually be pretty familiar like be able to recognize him because he's Filipino, Puerto Rican and his folks lived in Hawaii," Nishime explained. "All three of those places were colonized by the US in the last part of the 1800s. We don't think of ourselves as a colonizing country."
"We don't have that history, we don't have that memory and so it's more difficult to recognize folks who are mixed-race Asian," Nishime added.
Gong is aiming to use his art to bring being multi-racial into focus.
"There's an opportunity to use mainstream presence like this art to validate the experience of people of mixed heritage," Gong said.
A friend of Gong's tells us how powerful his art is, in her mixed-race experience.
"For me personally, it is not just validating, but it's a gift. because it's a gift that bears witness to not just my story, but about my children's story, my grand children's story and the story of all of us," Sharyne Shiu-Thornton said.
Thornton, too, is Chinese and Indigenous.
"So I'm pretty excited about people of mixed-heritage, or anyone that can connect with the idea of intersectionality stepping into the station and 'pow' this giant dragon is presented to you," Gong said. "Like I'm not quite sure what is it? Just like you might a person of mixed heritage."
As public transit connects the region, Gong said he hopes his public art will connect people.
The station is scheduled to open Saturday, April 27.