Between 2004 and 2008, celebrated Sāmoan writer Albert Wendt held the Citizens’ Chair in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. By 2007, Wendt had completed twenty-seven paintings, each one a visual ode to the land and people of Hawai‘i. These paintings were featured in his first art exhibition, held at the Louis Pohl Gallery in Honolulu in 2007. This piece is a review of that exhibition, Le Amataga: The Beginning, along with an interview with Wendt that took place soon after the exhibition opened.

In the Hawaiian language the term ‘ae kai refers to the place where land and sea meet, the water’s edge or shoreline, the beach. It is, as Pacific historian Greg Dening has written, an “in-between space…an unresolved space where things can happen, where things can be made to happen. It is a space of transformation. It is a space of crossings.” This expanded definition of ‘ae kai serves as a cogent touchstone for examining Adrienne Keahi Pao’s and Robin Lasser’s most recent installation work Dashboard Hula Girl: In Search of Aunty Keahi, which featured in the Smithsonian’s Culture Lab exhibition ‘Ae Kai: A Culture Lab on Convergence in Honolulu, July 7–9, 2017. In the following writing, I invoke a sort of ‘ae kai of my own in which I merge scholarly analysis with visceral first-hand experience of Dashboard Hula Girl. The result, I hope, is a richly textured exposé that simulates in written form the enigmatic domain that comprises the convergence zone—that is, the ‘ae kai—of intellectual understanding and felt encounter.