Editor’s note: This is the inaugural column for Jenny “Jeta” Tang, who has written Community Voices for us in the past but now becomes our newest columnist, with a special focus on many facets of arts and culture here on the islands.

My artist name “Jeta” is a portmanteau combining the first two letters of my first and last names. It also means “life” in Albanian, a fitting coincidence given the new life I was forging in Hawaiʻi. 

The First Life

When I moved to Oʻahu in 2022, I was still a software engineer at an AI startup. If it had been up to me, I probably would have found my way to art and writing much sooner. But my immigrant mother didn’t risk her life as a Vietnamese boat person so her daughter could become a struggling creative.

I cultivated a lucrative career in tech instead, spending years inside an identity that felt off-kilter. Then I ended up in Hawaiʻi, nearly a decade after my mother’s death. It was the first time I’d lived anywhere other than the Bay Area.

Working in Silicon Valley, I was deeply unhappy, suffocated by problems I was obligated to care about but found utterly meaningless. Tech companies often boast grandiose missions of building the future, but after you’ve worked for enough of them, as I have, you stop drinking the Kool-Aid and start seeing through the fog. In the end, you’re left feeling like an empty cog in a machine manufactured for someone else’s purpose.

Screaming Without Words

Calling these islands home eventually led to my exodus from tech and into a second life as an artist. Since embracing this new identity, I have healed in ways that a lifetime of talk therapy could never fully touch.

Many artists advocate for creating art for its own sake, detached from the rules, logic and expectations that dictate our daily lives. But I can’t seem to work that way. As an artist, I don’t create for no reason. I do it to scream the words I cannot say out loud: Everything has to mean something.

When I attended my first burn at Burning Man in 2025, I brought my art from the tropics to the desert. Founded in my hometown of San Francisco, the festival has become so dominated by tech workers that many feel it has deviated from its original values. I showed up as an artist from Hawaiʻi.

My sculpture, lovingly named “The Asscent of the Divine Ass,” placed a cast of my derrière on a shrine, deified for satirical effect. Each day, I held meditation sessions at the site as a ritual practice, inviting a small following of worshippers (aka cult members) to honor the Divine Ass. The project was born from a desire to reconcile with past trauma and body shame through the literal worship of my body. Unbeknownst to me, it would unearth a form of healing that could only be accessed through art.

After that, I only wanted to keep exploring.

Looking Beyond Myself

It started as a personal inquiry and gradually expanded into a curiosity about Hawaiʻi’s overarching arts community.

On the playa, I found myself drawing parallels between Burner and Hawaiian cultures. A global event built around fire as a cleansing ritual should include more artists from the very region where fire is sacred. But it doesn’t — why?

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

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The question lingered with me long after I left Black Rock City, becoming the subject of my first Community Voice submission to Civil Beat.

As I dug deeper and wrote more, I began to notice the stories, connections and histories that define our local arts scene. The artists who represent our creative ecosystem do more than paint pretty pictures. They are civil organizers, activists, changemakers and cultural practitioners who collectively carry and heal our communities.

Their stories deserve to be told, and I want to help tell them.

The idea of punditry in Hawaiʻi’s art scene feels wrong. Maybe it’s because I’m a transplant, or because I had only come out as an artist and begun practicing in 2024. Or perhaps it would be outright hubris to claim any authority over a cultural landscape as complex and layered as the Hawaiian Islands.

Whatever the case, I see my role as an active observer, guided by meaning rather than hot takes, sharing stories above all. My column will serve to illuminate Hawaiʻi’s arts and amplify voices within its creative communities. This work, for me, is simply to keep listening.

I’m open to ideas. Get in touch with via my website or by emailing me at columnists@civilbeat.org.