Hoʻākea Source 2025 Grant Awardees

The Renkon Project

Noe Tanigawa
2025 Grant Recipient

In Japanese culture, the Renkon or lotus root symbolizes the ability to see clearly into the future. For this multi-day, multi-venue, multimedia project, the Renkon is also being used to look back 80 years ago at the propaganda, misinformation and racism used by the United States to justify the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like a lotus flower arising from the mud, it is their hope that illuminated minds and strengthened connectedness between ourselves and all living beings will move us towards a clearer understanding of what we need to do together to prevent future annihilation.

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An award winning journalist, for nineteen years Noe Tanigawa covered art, culture, and ideas for Hawaiʻi Public Radio. She studied what people in Hawai’i make, think, and do, while maintaining an active art practice. In 2015, Tanigawa served as artist-in-residence in Palau for the U.S. State Department’s Arts in Embassies program. Interested in Pacific perspectives, she was on a communications team with FEMA on Guam after a series of cyclones in the 1990’s.

Tanigawa’s 2021 radio series, “Unsheltered in Honolulu,” won an Edward R. Murrow Regional Award for Excellence in Reporting. That same year, she and a team of unsheltered artists received the 2021 Emerging Artists’ Award in the Honolulu Museum of Art’s invitational Artists of Hawaiʻi Now! exhibition.