The unifying factor in Infinite Possibilities, the current exhibition continuing through May 24 at Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, is something most people handle daily without even thinking about it, a humble material that can be solely practical, or artistic, or something in between: paper. It’s a material with many cultural associations. In the US alone, “paper” is slang for money, having “papers” is a reference to documentation and to citizenship status, and “the paper” refers back to an increasingly rare analog way of getting news. 

Paper is cheap, familiar, renewable, and can easily be archived. Even in the digital age, it remains ubiquitous. Yet the works in the aptly named Infinite Possibilities depart from this familiarity, investigating paper to explore new methods and complex ideas. As an exhibition exclusively featuring work by artists who are American Asian Hawaiian Native/Pacific Islanders (AAHNPI), it addresses intersections between identity, family, and materiality.  How can paper hold traces of bodies, memories, and histories? How can paper be made, and remade, to tell new stories? Is the material still “paper” when pared down to just pulp, or when its qualities are mimicked and expanded by other media? Through questioning and experimentation, the eleven regional and international artists in Infinite Possibilities explore the symbolic, formal, and aesthetic properties of this medium to “reclaim paper as an act of resilience and defiance.” 

Much of the work in Infinite Possibilities addresses the complexities of memory, both in the sense of personal and shared histories. Love (not hate) Heals, a standout work by Eugene-based artist Sandra Honda, is near the exhibition’s entrance and establishes this theme from the outset. The work is an installation of over 30 delicate, paper tea bowls as well as scraps, as if from bowls that have been deconstructed. The delicate, translucent bowls are arranged in neat rows on two glass shelves set against a large window. The works are striking on their own; fragile, tactile, and beguiling in the sense that they are so clearly tea bowls but also subvert expectations of what a tea bowl–a necessarily water-tight vessel–can be. They truly come to life in the bright sun, when some of the bowls almost appear as if they are floating, weightless, the sun piercing through them to reveal fine fibers in the handmade mulberry paper. 

The work can be appreciated on a purely aesthetic level for Honda’s superior craftsmanship, but the light coming through the tea bowls is also an apt metaphor for Honda’s desire to shine a light on histories that are often so complex and difficult that sometimes they remain hidden. Honda writes, “The chawan, or teabowl, is a recurring symbol [in] my work excavating the intergenerational trauma resulting from the World War II mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans. My family was among them.” 

In an artist talk at the Reser on April 19th, Honda spoke about coming to greater knowledge of this history only as an adult, when she started to understand the passing references her parents made to “camps” when she was a child, the follow-up questions that went unanswered. She spoke of feeling like she once had to hide her identity as a Japanese-American, to assimilate, realizing only once she retired from a career in the sciences to pursue artmaking full-time that what she is doing in works like Love (not hate) Heals is a kind of catharsis. In her words, she is, “Not only excavating paper, but I was also excavating myself.” It’s a political work that connects one of the darkest moments in US history to the present. 

In confronting the enduring generational trauma of sending Japanese Americans to concentration camps, Honda’s message is not simply educational, but also an offering. “Love is the message that I needed to send,” she said, noting that the work, much like sharing a bowl of tea or rice as an act of hospitality and generosity, is “an offering of comfort to community and acknowledging that I know, I’m not the only one that knows, we know this, together.”

Like Love (not hate) Heals, some of the most moving works in the exhibition are those that invite viewers to share in quite personal, intimate experiences. Satoko Motouji’s works combine textiles and paper in vertical, hanging works that look like something between a tapestry and a garment. The works are collaborative: the textile portions were made by the artist’s mother, who retained her ability to knit even as her battle with Alzheimer’s made it hard to complete other tasks. In front of these soft, sumptuous knit pieces, Motouji added long strands of handmade paper, their ends gently twisted into organic shapes. The strands overlap, creating a kind of thicket or tangle, a visualization of “her mother’s fading memory.” Yet for me there is something hopeful in the midst of work that is about loss. It is also about what Motouji’s mother could still do, the way her hands still knew things even if her mind did not. The bramble of paper strands can also be read as roots, reminders that there is life deep below the surface, and things that remain powerful and strong even when we can no longer see them. 

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While Motouji directly involved her mother in her artistic process, Helen Liu’s Circles of Approval responds to her mother’s calligraphic work. The confluence of two events–Liu’s finding newspapers on which her mother had written, followed shortly by her mother’s unexpected death–led to Liu’s work developing “a more personal tone.” In Circles of Connection, Liu forms a rectangular grid by affixing nine newspaper fragments, each painted over with a single Chinese character in black ink, to a paper backing. The work is strongly tactile, as the newspaper pieces have warped slightly and started to lift off the backing as if about to peel away and burst out of the frame. The calligraphy creates movement in the rhythm of the graceful, swooping brushstrokes and the subtle changes in the ink’s opacity. Reading some of the newspaper article words that peek through but unable to read Chinese, I thought about this work in terms of a play between legibility and illegibility, and the way that the subtle warping of the newspaper–both as part of its natural aging process and where the paper has warped because of once wet ink–also calls to mind the ways in which we register, or fail to register, the subtle changes that mark the passage of time. 

There are 43 works featured in the exhibition, a wealth of things to look at and perspectives to consider. Work that does not directly address family and memory still asks us to take a look around and consider the world from different perspectives. From Mika Aono’s clever repurposing of recycled denim and harvested Japanese knotweed, an invasive species found in much of Oregon, to Menka Desai-Crawford’s tiny painted landscapes embellished with beads and embroidery, the works as a whole push the boundaries of paper as a medium, reframe everyday life, and open up complex questions about connections to place and to each other. The cliché that there’s something for everyone is true in this case, as Infinite Possibilities balances complex, heavy themes with lighthearted creativity.

Infinite Possibilities, which opened on April 4th, is the first exhibition at the Reser’s gallery since severe water damage sustained in early 2024 caused a temporary closure. It is a phenomenal comeback: wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and displayed to great effect in the Reser’s large, light-filled space. It’s a treat just to see works on paper in the sunlight, as opposed to the darkened rooms museums typically favor because of the fragility of the medium. Infinite Possibilities fully delivers on its title, showcasing myriad ways that artists use paper to create vastly different visual and conceptual confects, and gesturing towards the ways that even this exhibition is just the tip of the iceberg. Paper has been around for millenia, but in the hands of this group of talented artists, it feels brand new. 

The Patricia Reser Center for the Arts is located at 12625 SW Crescent St, Beaverton, OR 97005. It is open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 6:00 PM and admission is free. Infinite Possibilities is on view through May 24th.