Nityasya Belapurkar, Joe Soonthornsawad, Anni Reffsin
My 4,500 Hexagons is a multimedia work (consisting of photographs of a quilt and a documentary short) that examines transracial adoption, Asian American immigration, family, and healing.
The quilt, by Anni Reffsin, is a woven mosaic of over 4,500 hexagons, composed of textile fragments collected from the artist's personal relationships, childhood, and creative projects in costume and apparel design from the past 7 years. The documentary, co-directed by Nityasya Belapurkar and Joe Soonthornsawad, follows the artist's journey to complete the quilt, in the process reshaping her relationship with her adoptive mother and herself.
All three artists were brought together over their shared experiences as Asian Americans in the US who are seeking belonging not just in a country that can feel foreign and hostile, but also in their own families as they grapple with feelings of isolation and estrangement. As they shared space and connected over commonalities in their lived experiences as artists, both works (the quilt and film) co-created one another and each work was completed in July 2023. Ultimately, the film became a document of two filmmakers forming a relationship with the artist and the process of creating the documentary caused ripples in each of their lives, inspiring them to make sense of their individual and shared experiences.
Both pieces will forever be interconnected and together they reframe what healing and care in Asian American families and communities can look like.
Nityasya Belapurkar is a South Asian multidisciplinary storyteller and oral historian from Mumbai. At the height of the pandemic, she co-founded Soup Canvas, a digital art benefit and gallery committed to ending food insecurity in the US. She created South Asian Memory Work, a multimedia digital storybook, in 2021 to celebrate the complexity of the South Asian American experience.
Joe Soonthornsawad is a Thai-American director and producer originally from West Chester, Ohio. Trained as an anthropologist and social computing researcher, he's interested in telling stories about Asian Americans living boldly in unlikely places. His debut short Grand Super Buffet will premiere in 2024.
Anni Reffsin is a Chinese-American textile artist. She learned how to sew at “In Stitches” (Greenfield, MA.) Mary Ellen Bradford Sailer encouraged her to join “Valley Light Opera” (Amherst, MA) to sew costumes. Ever since then, Anni has continued to costume and fabricate real and imagined stories.