Christina J. Hahn (she/her) is an artist and cultural organizer based in Dallas, TX, and the founder of the Dallas Asian American Art Collective (DAAART). Find her at christinajhahn.com and DAAART at daaart.org.

This profile is part of a series introducing the artists and cultural workers in the Outside In Arts and Culture Fellowship, a part of Smart Growth America’s Outside In project. The project documents the histories and futures of suburban Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities across Atlanta, Dallas, and Memphis.

Christina J. Hahn works in paint, soft sculpture, and increasingly film, but her most significant medium may be the North Texas cultural ecosystem itself. As founder of the Dallas Asian American Art Collective (DAAART), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit connecting Asian American creatives dispersed across the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) region, she has spent three years building infrastructure essential to supporting these artists.

In North Texas, where the Asian American population is concentrated in suburbs—Plano, Frisco, Carrollton, and Richardson—that are cities in their own right, Christina’s work helps center them in the region’s cultural and creative life.

The conversation below has been organized and condensed for clarity.

Tell us about your creative practice and what you’re working on right now.

DAAART connects local AAPI creatives by providing space and opportunity for connection, offering educational workshops—how to write an artist statement, how to apply to a grant—and running public programming that educates both the public and our own community that Asian Americans are artists, that Asian American is diverse and pan-Asian, and that the art we make spans literary, visual, and performance work.

In my own practice, I do painting and soft sculpture, and lately I’ve moved more into video art and filmmaking. My short film is a kind of time capsule of what North Texas art looks like in the 2020s: There’s a central figure—the Traveler—who moves through different Texas landscapes, but all of those landscapes are actually large-scale artworks by my peers and contemporaries here in North Texas. So it’s a film, but it’s also a love letter to the North Texas art scene.

You grew up in Seoul. How do you understand your relationship to the suburban AAPI communities Outside In is documenting?

I’m a city kid through and through, so the suburbs didn’t shape me the way they shaped others, except when I’d visit my grandparents in Orange County in Southern California. But what I’m seeing is that Carrollton, Plano, and Frisco are honestly starting to look like California because we have so many Asian and Latino people in all of these areas.

Dallas has a complex relationship with its suburbs—a lot of them are very self-sufficient and well-funded. Plano has a huge East Asian population, Frisco a huge South Asian population, Carrollton a lot of Koreans. The suburbs are where a lot of people live, where a lot of people call home. Everyone makes the pilgrimage out there to get groceries, to feel like they’re back home. And if you’re in the suburbs, it’s very easy to stay within your Asian American community, whether that’s religiously or educationally rooted.

So for us, the work is: How do we get them , out at City Hall, and visible in front of their peers, so we’re part of that discussion?

When I ran an internship program at the Dallas Asian American Historical Society, we had high school students who were almost all Asian American, and they had radically different experiences. Some grew up where all their peers were Asian—a very Asian American dominant reality. Another was the only Asian person in her entire high school. Two realities within the same couple of zip codes.

How have you been building community through DAAART, given how different those experiences are?

What links all of us in the collective is that our main identifier is creative. It was artist. For a lot of Asian Americans, even though we’re vastly different, it comes down to certain foundational things: economic security, nodding to past generations who worked so hard to secure a more stable future for us. And because of that, riskier endeavors aren’t encouraged—and art is considered risky.

So there was this bonding element of “I feel different from my community because I practice art.” That was our first bond, and we cannot take advantage of our collective strength if we are not a collective first. Building an Asian American identity that’s multivocal across ethnicity and across class is how we take full advantage of our civic power.

Drawing on the Texan identity has also been really effective. People from the suburbs and people from the city are all united by the fact that they claim Texas—for all its flaws and all its beautiful parts. Uniting under that banner has been powerful. You don’t have to go to California or New York. We have talent here.

Has anything from the Outside In fellowship sessions stayed with you?

As a Texan, you only really think about Texas, so it’s been cool seeing Asians from other places across the South. It’s expanded even our own understanding of what Asian American communities look like in the region.

Why does the Outside In program matter?

This program matters because it’s taking a magnifying glass to a community that’s often left out of discussions of race and representation in this nation. It might sound surprising that there’s a strong cohort and network of Asian American activists and artists in the South, and Outside In gives light to the existence of these communities—first, by showing that we exist at all. And second, by connecting folks who’ve been working in silos to work together and understand who our contemporaries and allies are in the South, so we know we are not alone. It connects us to our neighbors.