Who would say no to like a panification in Hawaii?
My name is Jasper Wong and I'm the founder and lead director of Palau.
The artists go coming from all over the place.
Like, in the past years we've had guys come from Poland, from Germany, Australia,
from South Africa, from Cambodia, from Singapore, from Japan, from China,
all over America, Canada, from different countries in South America, like everywhere.
Like, we've probably pulled an artist from like almost every corner of the globe pretty much.
Yeah, it's like a lot of people from a lot of different places.
But that's the beautiful things that we all kind of share the same language.
Not the spoken language, but that we all just have a love for art.
And that's why we're together.
I'm born and raised in Hawaii.
And then I went away from college to San Francisco in the Bay Area.
And when I was living there, I got the opportunity to experience
just sort of how broad and how amazing sort of art was,
or the art community was in the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically.
I was doing a lot of art shows.
I was meeting a lot of artists.
And I decided to move to Oka.
And when I was there, I also still wanted to continue to do art shows.
So I would take my portfolio to like all the galleries.
I would show them my work.
And I kept getting rejected by everyone.
So they like had a reaction to that.
I started my own gallery.
We found an old abandoned restaurant that was unused for about a decade.
We painted the walls white.
We added a door.
We added a window and we called it the gallery.
And the very first show there was the very first powwow.
And where that name came from was from comic books.
Powwow being sort of like a punch in the face.
You know, like a powwow, like a Batman, you know, Adam West, like punch like powwow.
And then that's how I felt was the impact of art on a viewer.
You know, wow was the reaction to that.
But then powwow together was a Native American term,
a gathering to celebrate culture, music and art.
And we felt, you know, that's perfect for like what we're trying to do.
So we flew in a handful of artists from London, from France, from Taiwan, different places.
We put up blank houses in the gallery that we started.
And we collaborated with everyone.
And we opened up that process to the public as almost like an open studio.
Because I always felt that a lot of times the process leading to final artwork was a lot more interesting
than the final artwork itself.
And if people were to witness that, maybe they'd be inspired to do it themselves,
maybe they'd be more interested in art.
And so we opened it up.
And then at the end we destroyed a lot of artwork.
The reason why we did that is because it was a reaction to the finance nature of art
and how it was sold in Hong Kong.
You know, the kind of people invest in art like how you would invest in wine.
You would buy wine, hold it on to it.
And hopefully you would resell it for a profit later.
But that kind of defeats the whole purpose of wine.
You know, people make wine so people can drink wine.
And people make art so people can enjoy art.
Not to put in storage and to resell it later and hope for profits.
And so I was hoping at the same time to also remind artists of just the beauty of creating.
You know, like when we were kids doing art and drawing and painting,
we did it because we loved it.
We did it because we enjoyed it.
We didn't do it because we were trying to sell work or to make money or like make a living.
So that wanted to sort of remind artists of that period.
So we weren't trying to sell the work and we weren't doing it for money.
So we did it, painted it and then we destroyed it.
And a lot of those same ideals hold true now.
Like with the Powah White Festival or what it is now because we're doing murals.
We can't sell the buildings. We don't.
And we're not doing commission work during the festival.
So none of us are like getting paid to do it.
It's more for the community.
And we open up the process to the public.
People can come and watch people paint murals.
And they can hang out there all day long if they wanted to and it's totally fine.
And we try to push collaboration. We try to push people to work together.
Or the fact that we're all together.
One place just blocks next to each other, painting next to each other, sometimes right next to each other.
It kind of creates this sort of creative energy and people kind of feed off that.
They're inspired by that.
And it makes the artist better.
It inspires everyone around.
So that kind of those initial roots from Hong Kong kind of carry over to what we're doing to this day.
Like seven years later.
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So we took it to Hawaii, it was our first time doing it back here in my hometown, and
we weren't sure how to make it happen, because originally after the Hong Kong one we wanted
to make it like a traveling show, we wanted to take it to different cities, but then one
of my friends convinced me to do it back home in Hawaii and I said okay sure, let's make
it happen.
So with the lack of funding I was given three options, one, to go all the way, to scale
it down, make it cheaper, or three, to cancel it all together.
I chose the first, I just kind of decided to go all the way and I pulled out my credit
card and I started buying flights and paying for things, and I went into debt, but it was
kind of like a risk that I wanted to take and see where it would go, and I knew that
I wasn't going to make the money back, that I was just going to like lose it all, but
it was fine because it was a step in something that I was passionate about and I wanted to
make it happen, and that's how the first one in Hawaii came about, and that started
with we had like 12 artists, so I grew a bit from the Hong Kong one and we did one girl.
And now the most recent one is like, we've done up to like 120 artists and 70 murals
over a period of a week, and it's grown to Long Beach, California, to Japan, to Taiwan,
and we've partnered with South by Southwest to do projects in Austin, Texas, and it's
growing from there, and so it's changed a lot since those first initial humble routes
back in Hong Kong.
We spent a lot of our time raising money so we can cover all the costs for all the artists,
so we paid for the flights, or we get the flight sponsored, we pay for them, or the
materials are either paid for or sponsored, the hotels are the same, so we cover all the
costs for everybody.
The one thing that we can't really do is pay the artists themselves, which we would love
to do, but we just don't have that kind of money, but we pay for everything that they
would need to sort of make it happen.
We do our best to take care of them, they do an amazing mural, and people love it.
The idea was to make it worldwide, and to grow it that way, but no one ever really thought
that it would happen.
It was always like a pipe tree, it's like, yeah, we want to see where it can go, it could
be huge, it'll go all over the place, but it was like, yeah, but maybe it'll just end
up being a little art show that we do back home, and maybe not, and the thing is we've
always kept it kind of organic and fluid, where there was a set five-year plan, and
it was like, we know that within five years we'll be here, we never thought that way,
it was always like, let's just try to make things happen, and I always had to believe
that no matter what, it's going to go good, like if we bring in that many amazing people
and pull together that much trade of energy, like regardless of if all the walls were destroyed,
if nothing was there to paint on, just having that many people together in one place, something
amazing will happen, no matter what, and so I always felt like it was kind of a foolproof
plan, like worst case scenario, like no one paints or does anything, then we have this
amazing event, amazing sort of vacation with friends, and so that's not bad either, so
I never saw it in any way that it could fail, but I think we also wanted to always make
sure that everyone sort of enjoyed it here, and that everyone felt like family, when they
were a part of it, that we would come together for dinners, we'd come hangouts, we'll party
together, we'll do things together, and then it came like a larger family, and I think
from the process of us thinking along those lines where it wasn't about, hey, let's try
to make our money back, but hey, the value was that we were going to be richly friends
and that rich world was kind of helped to grow it in a way where everyone then had wanted
to support it, and then wanted to grow it, and so different communities around the world
then wanted to do it on their own, and then we would come and help them make that happen,
but then with those same mentalities, and then they loved it and people didn't in the community
want to support it, and it kind of grew on just the fact that everyone's, on the backs
of everyone's, and blood, sweat, and tears, and so it was, it became, it just grew to
this larger family that kind of spent the globe through just shared passion.
Thank you.
Well, my advice is always to, like, take those risks and see where it can go.
Like, like, power wouldn't be here if I didn't take those risks, too.
We didn't know what we were doing in the beginning and we learned throughout the years
and we're more than willing to share our knowledge because for us it's like less
about competition between festivals and different people.
It's more about supporting people's goals to sort of beautify their own
neighborhoods or to sort of spread art and keeping the art alive across the world.
So that's something that we believe in and something that I support all the way.
