CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Artist Rikiya "Riki" Asai listens to a story being told by his mom, Miwako, as he paints. Riki, who has cerebral palsy, often smiles and moves his paintbrush in rhythm with her voice as she talks rapidly in Japanese.
Watercolors give
voice to disabled artist
Rikiya "Riki" Asai couldn't hold onto a paintbrush when he first started dabbling with watercolors about 14 years ago.
Now the 18-year-old Waikiki resident with cerebral palsy will hold his 32nd art exhibition starting Friday at Ward Warehouse.
Rikiya Asai art exhibition
Who: Rikiya Asai, paintbrush artist
What: Joy of Life Exhibition, free admission
When:
>> Friday -- 5-8 p.m.
>> Saturday and Aug. 4 and 5 -- 10 a.m.-8 p.m.
>> Aug. 3 and 6 -- 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Where: Kakaako Conference Room, 2nd floor, Ward Warehouse
Sponsors: VSA (Vision, Strength, Artistic Expression) Arts-Hawaii, Consulate General of Japan in Honolulu, Victoria Ward Centers
Information: Call 594-8915; 753-4462
Riki has sold a few paintings privately to sponsors and friends. The paintings at the show will be available for sale, along with postcards and T-shirts decorated with his art.
Asai's mother, Miwako Asai, has also published several books about him and his painting of flowers and abstracts, and he was featured in a Japan television documentary in March.
Miwako Asai and her first husband, Tadao Asai, moved with Riki from Japan to Hawaii in 1989 because the warm climate was better for their son's health, and for treatment at the Shriners Hospital for Children.
She also said the attitude toward Riki in Hawaii was far more accepting than what prevailed in Japan at the time.
She used to push her son around in a wheelchair on the streets of Tokyo "as if I was hiding from something" -- usually stares or "stink eye" when they took too long going up and down curbs, she said. No one would even lend a hand as she struggled up stairways when there were no elevators, Asai added.
Even Riki's principal told her it was inconvenient and useless for him to keep coming to school because he was absent so often because of illness or for treatment.
"So many times I lost hope," Asai said.
But the move to Hawaii changed everything. When Riki was about 5, they were at the Ala Moana Center and he latched on to a cheap watercolor set and "wouldn't let it go ... It was very strange. I tried to convince him he would not be able to use it because he couldn't hold the brush."
But because he was insistent, she bought it, and taped the narrow brush to his hand. "That's how he started painting. The boy who could not speak" expressed his joyful, sweet spirit through his painting, Asai said.
"He's an angel. He's so sweet. He makes me happy ... He never has a negative emotion ... I'm a very, very lucky mother ... I'm happiest being allowed to live with him and work with him," she said.
Asai assists her son with his painting "like a maid" -- she cleans up after him and helps him uncap and recap his tubes of oil paints.
But her most important role is as a storyteller. While Riki paints, she tells him stories, usually based on Japanese ninja cartoon characters, with happy endings, lots of action and conflict, which he loves. Asai varies the tone of her voice as she talks rapidly in Japanese, building the excitement as she makes up the story. Riki smiles and works away at his canvas, his paintbrush keeping time with the rhythm of her voice.
At one point, he looks at her and laughs; using sign language, he says, "You're teasing me!"
Riki introduced his mother to her second husband, Mike Lueck, who was Riki's special education teacher at Jefferson Elementary School's Orthopedic Unit.
Lueck said he also started helping with baby-sitting Riki, then 9 years old, and ended up falling in love with Riki and his mother.
Riki, who can now walk short distances, climbs into Lueck's lap as if he were still a toddler instead of a gangly teenager. He wraps his arm around his stepfather's neck, and kisses him on the cheek, then offers his cheek to be kissed back.
"This is normal; this happens all the time," Asai said.
The exhibitions, mainly in Japan, started out as Asai's "mission to prove to the people in Japan that her son had value," Lueck said, to which Asai added, "to change the world" toward giving "love" to handicapped people.
Much of the prejudice in Japan she experienced has fallen away, and now these exhibitions are merely "an invitation" to meet Riki and see his art, he said.
