This week on Arizona Illustrated speaking up against antiaging, hate and violence in America.

If they would go out and see the lives through other people's eyes, then I think they would understand.

Well, not so different.

After all, a first of its kind exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art.

The energy in this exhibition is just palpable new ways of seeing in the future.

I'm personally very interested a developer in this place to help people and a Lebanese love song.

Welcome to Arizona Illustrated, I'm Tom McNamara.

Thank you for joining us for our first episode of the new season.

Good to be back with you.

You know, since the start of the pandemic, there's been an alarming surge in violent attacks against AAPI communities.

The violence has been linked to public rhetoric, blaming Asian-Americans for the spread of COVID 19.

And while the number of reported attacks has risen dramatically.

Women account for 65 percent of the reported cases.

Here in Tucson, we spoke with two leaders of the Asian-American community about how their friends and loved ones are coping with and responding to potential threats.

- We are here standing together because we are sad.

We are angry and we are exhausted by the roller coaster ride of emotions that we've all been dealing with today.

(somber music) - [Interviewer] How are you.

- Sorry, many years ago, we chose to come here, not just to assume the education, but also to pursue freedom.

And this country used to be the country all people look up; the humanity value, all people are equal, doesn't matter the skin color, doesn't matter where you from, that's a value we believe too.

I never feel afraid feared of anything, I feel equal to everybody else, but all of sudden, I was like, why does the ratio thing become such a big concern for the whole country?

Why we're being targeted and we're being to be attacked, to be pointed finger to?

(soft guitar music) We heard so much the terrible attacks to the elderly and women, especially in San Francisco and New York.

People worry, they say, if something threat to your life and to your parents, your sister brought us, shall we call out for her?

(dramatic music) When I saw those discussions and concerns, and I said, maybe we should reach out, we'll sit down with Tucson PD and we invited some politician from different department to listen to our concern, to listen to the communities' questions.

(dramatic music) - What is a legal grounds to defend myself or my loved ones with a legally owned firearm?

- I am not interested in buying a weapon, but I do here for my life right now.

- The treatment towards Asian-American Pacific Islanders is uncalled for, it's unjustified, it should be denounced.

- I'm wondering if there's educational efforts out there to help make that happen and to bring greater awareness and visibility to the Asian-American community.

- A lot of the times people say, "Ah, those Asian groups they would not complain, "they would not, you know, they're the majority."

And I think those times have passed.

- We have to first start to understand what the term Asian-American means.

You know, when they say API, what does that mean?

That means everybody who have heritage from the Asian-Pacific region and that involves more than 40 plus countries if not more, some of them were natives, they were born here in the United States.

So I guess people have to understand the group itself, what it means.

And then talk about the contribution.

Chinese-Americans have been here since the 1800s, Korean-American have been here probably since the '50s and the '60s as well.

So they need to understand, yes, this virus came from China, but it could have came from Africa, it could have came from England.

Would you discriminate against anybody from England, if it started in England, first?

(soft music) - Chinese labor do the humongous contribution to the transcontinental railroad from the west to the east side, it used to take six months to seven months.

After the railroad bill, seven days, that make this country jump to a totally different stage.

(dramatic music) This history was not being put in the education part, so a lot of people don't know the thing Chinese come here to take things away, but we're now with generations here, we may all contributions, including Indian, Korean and Japanese people that involved in the technology, science, entertainment, and they're all made the contributions to this country.

So I think all the ethnic groups do something.

Do they share?

- Being an immigrant myself, I think every time I think about the opportunity that was given to me by my parents to go to school here, to make a living here, it's extraordinary.

Just like all the friends and families and everybody that I know, a lot of them were born and raised in the United States, a lot of them were very grateful, but I also have a lot of people that don't understand what they have and they don't understand why so many people want to come here legally or otherwise, it's because they don't have what we have here.

So if they would go out and see the lives through other people's eyes, then I think they will understand we are not so different after all.

- And my communities, I hope deal will stand up for whatever the problem that encounter, any buyers on a discrimination.

You know, when something like pandemic happened, what I understand is people as all the people live in this country, in this land, should work with each other, help each other to get over this.

Because from time to time, there's pandemic, but pointing to each other, doesn't help, doesn't resolve the problem, helping each other will.

United will make us more powerful and stronger.

(dramatic music) - I wish everybody health and stay well throughout this next, however many months and when we can get together safely again, I invite everybody to come back to the Chinese Cultural Center to visit so that we can share our stories and get back together and go back on the road to normalcy.

- As Dr. Martin Luther king stated so eloquently, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; "only light can do that.

"Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

We must participate actively in the dialogues that create a light to overcome racism and support healing in our communities.

(soft music) One way to learn more about the Asian American community is to visit the Chinese cultural center in Tucson, where they offer classes, programs and events for all ages.

To find out more, go to TucsonChinese.org To find out more, go to TucsonChinese.org A first of its kind exhibition is showing at the Tucson Museum of Art for solo artists from southern Arizona.

Selected by four TMA curators, making up one powerful and diverse showcase with work that's focused on personal identity, politics and the social issues of our time.

This is four by four.

- My name is Willie Bonner and I'm an American artist.

A lot of people like to associate me as a black artist.

Black is my culture, but I am American.

- When you walk into this exhibition.

I think the first thing that I see is an explosion of color.

The energy in this exhibition is just palpable.

I find the work positive, colorful, exuberant, and joyous.

Willie and I have known each other from actually many years but in 2000 he was finishing up his Master's Degree at the University of Arizona.

And I was working as a curator there.

So I mounted an exhibition of his work.

- She was such a breath of fresh air and how she received me as an artist and my work.

And it was the type of person that always dreamed of meeting in my journey as being an artist.

- We got reconnected through his inclusion in the biennial and I said, you know, I need to see your new work.

This is wonderful what you're doing and paid a studio visit and was wowed and then brought our CEO Jeremy Mikolajczak down to see the work.

And that was actually the inspiration for 4x4.

- I didn't choose art.

Art chose me.

Art will always bring me back to recording what I feel, what I experienced daily.

And it was something that I couldn't shake.

The bittersweet thing is that I see everybody as a human being, the systemic racism was kind of like divided us from our humanity.

So when you look at some of these pieces here there are portholes that are left open.

So if you look at the whole canvas, you'll start seeing that you can go not just at the surface, but the layers under it.

You know, so it's taking into a deeper thought.

When I'm painting, I'm just gauging the sensibility of being human.

Just on the person that look at the work to choose where they stand.

- I was hiking last week and I realized that I'm only looking down because I'm more worried about the crawling things (laughs) that co-exist with us in the desert.

And I realized that, oh, that's very interesting because in the studio I've been also looking down a lot.

The work comes from my experience, living here as an Iranian American living on the border land and having to deal with everything that comes with this particular place.

It's geography, it's politics, it's ecology.

Like all of these things are very important to me.

- For me as a curator, I'm always interested in artists that are sort of working in between things.

And I think with Nazafarin's work, it's really about the negative space.

When a viewer walks in, they may not necessarily understand what's in front of them.

However, there's this sort of sense of discovery that they have to try to figure this out.

- I was born and raised in Iran and I finished my undergraduate at the University of Tehran.

And then I moved to Chicago for graduate school.

My work changed a lot since I moved here and I work very slow.

Since I have spent more time in the natural world, I think there has been a natural interest into learning more about the landscape and learning more about the history of this place and finding my place in that.

And the work you see here really comes from that research looking at the earth, looking at the geological formations.

- What was it like to work together?

- I don't know.

(laughs) - So, Jeremy was very easy.

Whatever I said, he said, yes.

So, that's great.

- The role of the curator is really to seek out the unique, the sort of the things to seek out the unique, the sort of the things that are coming forward.

Sort of the trends of the nuances that sort of happen.

- He said that, oh like maybe it can be just a photograph and the sculptures.

And that really helped me to like ease my anxiety of like feeling up this space which can be a very large space but that was not my intention.

- [Jeremy] The way that you enter the space.

We actually specifically moved a wall in front to really force viewers to walk through the space in a specific manner.

The whole installation is meant to be walked around, investigated.

- I heard from my mother, (speaking Spanish) - I heard from my mother, (speaking Spanish) which translates to, Do you have a cactus on your forehead.

My mom was critical of that.

Like, you trying to Americanize yourself and you're obviously assimilating, but you're kind of forgetting where you came from.

There were definitely responses to that and that inner struggle that I definitely have and many other people do.

- I actually first met Alex around three years ago.

We were both living in Texas' Rio Grande Valley.

And we were both on the faculty at a university there.

I moved here literally a year after Kristoper arrived, and I knew that he had a job as a curator somewhere, but I couldn't remember that exactly in the Tucson Museum of Art.

- [Kristoper] Then when we had this idea of doing this show for Tucson artists, I thought this was just kind of a perfect moment to highlight someone who had a lot to say about living in the border lands.

- [Alex] Everything just fell into place.

And I was just really excited to participate in basically my Tucson debut - [Kristoper] Alex and I kind of come from the same place and my mom is Mexican.

I grew up speaking some Spanish.

So the phrases that we see here, the kind of ideas I felt like I could, they're yours, but I felt like I could follow you and see where you were going.

- [Alex] I just want to add, it was definitely a collaborative effort and he was straightforward with me, which I love.

So across a lot of the works, you'll see this like literal division.

And the division itself acts as a metaphor for the division between south Texas and Mexico.

At the same time I'm critical of assimilation and the process of it.

And it's almost seems like an erasure of history in culture and this very traditional Mexican background But at the same time, I'm also celebrating both sides.

- I think as human beings, we all experienced something so similar.

Like we speak different languages but we all try to convey the same thing.

The medium that I use in my work, kind of spanning from photography to video performance and installation.

And the focus of my work is about the experience of being immigrants in connection to home tradition country like personal politics and cultural differences.

- I actually knew Anh-Thuy before I knew she was an artist.

We were both working as students at the Center for Creative Photography.

So she was getting her undergraduate degree in Photography and I was getting my Master's in Art History.

- So we just what's first.

- So this one and that one should be switched - And the body of work that's on view here, I've been involved with since the beginning through conversations and kind of talking about locations and issues she's dealing with.

- [Anh-Thuy] A lot of these work on view right now, they are work that's been created within the last 10 years.

- [Marianna] It's presented in a really poetic way, right?

Like it is not overt, not specific enough in locations that I think people can find this access point to be related to.

- I love that fact that push and pull between material, - But that what the whole series is about.

- Yeah, it is like emotionally being pushed and pulled away, all of those experiences we have in life, regardless of geography, where we come from and how different we are.

It's all very similar to each other, visual art, creative writing, all the art forms and even like the right conversations.

Be able to activate that sense of mutual emotions.

- It's really important that we see that visual artists, painters, sculptors can really lead the way in this conversation helping us to figure out who are we and what are we doing here?

And how do we relate to this place?

It's one of the things that I really love about Tucson and that is this place where people are coming up with answers to this question.

- It is a privilege to work with artists.

It's an absolute privilege.

And for myself as a director of an institution, not necessarily my full-time role is not a curator.

To have the space and ability to do this is really going back to what I love about museums.

This just goes to show how diverse this region really is and really the amazing professional artists that are living and working here.

- [Photographer] Awesome.

To learn more about the artist and their work, visit Tucson Museum of Art dot org.

This is the University of Arizona's Weyandt College of Optical Science, it's a team led by U.A.

Professor Hoong, who is currently busy developing the next generation of wearable display systems for virtual and augmented reality technologies.

These new systems promise to enhance both what we see and how we see it.

- 30 Years ago when I was in the first year of my college, my initial fascination was to develop telescope systems and look in outer space.

And then when I saw this article talking about a virtual reality that can put you into another space digitally, the imagination attracted me.

- My name is Hong Hua and I'm a professor at the Wyant College of Optical Science at the University of Arizona.

My work here is mainly working on optical technologies for enabling advanced verbal displays for virtual reality and augmented reality.

So 'virtual reality', you can think of it's a technology that puts the user completely immersed into a computer generated environment versus 'augmented reality' or nowadays people like to call it 'mixed reality,' is trying to insert the digital or the digital avatar or digital objects into physical reality so that you have this harmony between your digital world and physical reality.

That's one of the first variable light field display systems that we developed a few years ago but one of the major things that we are working on is trying to, how can we shrink down the volume.

Every time there is a new macro display technology coming up or there is another components I would take that opportunity to develop a new system.

(violin music) (indistinct talk in background) In the last few years, I'm leading a group of graduate students working on optical technology that it can potentially address the most challenging problems that exist in VR or AR display systems.

One of the challenges is to render contents that give the user ability to focus at a different distance because in real life, your eye is able to focus far away or look at something really close So one of the approaches is to be able to creating a stack of focal planes dynamically, either time sequentially or spatially, so that you are able to render 3D volume in a range from very close to very far away.

And then we are trying to render, geometrically, the light field or the light directions that are presumably coming from the 3D objects.

So this device actually had a, we called it an intregal imaging unit, giving you the ability for your eye to able to see the 3D objects rendered by the display appear to behave in similar ways as your real world physical objeject Some of the particular areas and applications that I'm personally very interested in is developing displays to help people And one particular project that I have worked recently was the work with E-Sight.

E-Sight is a Canadian company that developed a variable assistive technology for people who have compromised vision that are not able to see their surroundings with their naked eye but they have some residual vision When you put this device on, you would be looking through the camera and look at your real world through the camera.

And then I, if I look at your face your face will be a few times bigger than what I would normally be able to see with my naked eye.

Some other application areas that we had worked on in the past was to develop a anatomy visualizer for doctors, to be able to show their patient how their surgical procedure is going to be So to me, my motivation of helping people is kind of probably coming from my family value.

I grew up in a family where my father passed away at a very early age and my mom was a elementary school teacher.

So you can imagine she does not make a lot of money, but however, one of the things that she has taught me was education can change your life When you have education, you need to learn to give it back It doesn't matter where you come from Other people cannot tell you what you can do or what you cannot do.

Only yourself can.

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Now we bring you a performance by Tewson violinist Fatih Iskhandar playing a Lebanese love song at Sweetwater Wetlands on Tucson's North Side.

(violin music) Thanks for joining us on this first episode of the new season Here's a look at a story for next week's show.

It's funny, it wasn't till the pandemic that we started doing gigs together, playing for a couple of songs.

So much fun.

But when you really get locked into it for hours, different things happen.

We've worked out a way of playing.

It's kind of like telepathic thing, you know, what they're going to do on a dime.

I'm Tom McNamara.

See you next week.