An acrylic portrait of a monochrome masked girl stares back at visitors at Roski School of Art and Design’s Lindhurst Fine Art Gallery. Her face was marked with red words: “Hello I’m Not a Virus.”
The painting was one of the art pieces in “Red, White, and Black,” a multimedia exhibition by Abigail Choi, a senior majoring in design. On view through Tuesday, the show displays Choi’s Korean American identity and family history to confront discrimination.
Red, white and blue are the colors on the American flag, but “blue” was crossed out on the fliers promoting Choi’s exhibit, with “black” written on top.
“I wanted to manipulate it or switch it to bring more attention,” Choi said. “This was my experience living in America as someone who was seen as a foreigner even though I was born here.”
Choi said she created the portrait after seeing reports of older Asian Americans being attacked and hearing President Donald Trump call COVID the “Chinese virus in 2021.” Although Choi is Korean American, she worried that strangers who grouped East Asians might target her grandparents.
“It was really scary and saddening to see,” Choi said. “If they have to go out grocery shopping, are they going to be targeted too?”
That was not just Choi’s experience.
The FBI reported 279 anti-Asian hate crimes, an increase of 77% from 2019. However, the FBI report only includes offenses classified as crimes, not all incidents of harassment and discrimination toward Asian communities.
According to a 2025 survey by Stop AAPI Hate, 49% of Asian American and Pacific Islander respondents reported experiencing a hate act in the prior year.
Founded in 2020 in response to increasing racism, Stop AAPI Hate tracks discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and advocates for affected communities.
“This is now five years past the start of the pandemic, and folks are still experiencing that kind of hate,” said Jessica Kang, research manager of Stop AAPI Hate.
Hostility toward Asian communities has a long history in the United States. The country’s first immigration exclusion law, passed in 1882, targeted Chinese workers, and a series of policies which followed ended up excluding all the Asian groups.
“There was an assumption that people from Asia were inherently alien to the United States,” said Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, a professor at UC Irvine’s Departments of History and Asian American Studies.
“Even though these laws have changed,” Wu said. “whenever there are new international tensions between the United States and Asia, it exacerbates racial hostility.”
In Stop AAPI Hate’s survey, harassment and institutional discrimination were the most commonly reported forms of hate acts. Kang said institutional discrimination includes unfair treatment in workplaces or by representatives of businesses and organizations.
“Thank My Lucky Stars,” a part of Choi’s exhibit, shows another kind of less visible discrimination through a collection of papered stars, a tradition she shared with her siblings and later taught her younger cousins during the pandemic.
Each star is inscribed with everyday microaggressions.
One example was a negative term often used to describe a non-Korean obsessed with Korean culture, which Choi said she was called in high school. At the time, Choi liked K-pop and Korean dramas but didn’t speak Korean. When Choi explained she was Korean, the classmate told her it was “basically the same.”
“This is my culture, even if I’m not as connected to it as you think I should be,” Choi said.
Edited by Sean Campbell and Miranda Huang.