Dani and Mary Iwami:
Molding the Resilience and Persistence of Heritage into a Multi-Generational Artistic Vision

By Aimee Kim

“She’s graceful, resilient, and passionate.”

The very traits that ceramicist Dani Iwami admires in the people around her are abundantly evident in her own life story and the dynamism of her artistic pursuits. Her work as an artist is a tribute to the women who have come before, who walk in stride beside her, and who will carry the legacy of grace, resilience, and passion into the future.

Born and raised in Seal Beach, California, Dani began playing basketball at the age of five and quickly grew to be a dominant player. She competed at the highest levels and became known to members of the Japanese American basketball community as something of a legend—definitely someone you would rather play with than against. She played college ball at Hawai’i Pacific and Western Washington.  But when she experienced critical, career-halting knee injuries, she was confronted with the question:  Who am I without basketball?

Coupled with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed as good a time as any to take stock and reevaluate where the next chapter of her life was headed. With her first knee surgery forcing a change of pace to her daily life, Dani allowed herself to, for the first time in 20 years, to set basketball to the side and explore her other passion: art.

Always drawn to the creative freedom in artistic expression, her next steps “ended up turning into ceramics really organically.” With studio training and experience from high school and college under her belt, she decided to pursue this passion project full time.

“It’s still a challenge,” she says, “learning how to balance being creative along with just being a human and an adult.”

After many years of watching ceramic throwing videos, her first experience using a pottery wheel back in high school has become a precious memory.

“So I go in there, and I was just trying to like pull walls and do it,” she says with a smile, recalling how even without proper training or technique, the experience of being in the studio and being able to create planted the seed for what became a full time career.

Despite her passion for ceramics and design, she says that her decision to major in environmental studies instead was a matter of practicality winning out over passion. Although she held significant interest in studying environmental science, through her entire course of study and after graduating, she still found herself drawn back to the wheel. Eventually, the practicality of operating her own business caught up with her passion for embracing her self-expression to form the brand now known as DANI KAWAII.

As the name implies, DANI KAWAII’s mission is to produce work that evokes emotional responses from their consumers and viewers.

“I feel like that’s my superpower: making things have a personality,” she shares as she shows off several pieces around her studio. Kawaii tends to translate in English as “cute,” but, for Dani, it’s not all about the kind of artificial cute of mass produced goods.

“It can be sadness or a deeper longing, something that feels like you’re connected to this piece—comfort is such a spectrum,” she says.

Still, reconciling the desire for a final product that exudes comfort with the discomfort of branching out as an ever-evolving artist has sometimes been a struggle for Dani. The growing pains of trying to find her identity as an artist while managing her own business even left her paralyzed for a while, she says.

But she isn’t alone on this journey.

“One of the difficult things at first,” she shares, “is that as a basketball player, I had mentors, coaches, professors, teammates constantly with me. To then go move back home and have to slowly build a new creative community was hard.”

Just one of the many challenges to starting a business in a pandemic is the inevitable isolation and not being able to branch out to show or view art in a physical exhibition. It’s no surprise, then, that she fell back on her roots by sharing her art with the other artist in her family: her grandmother, Mary Iwami.

Mary, an artist in her own right, is a major inspiration for Dani’s work and the creative vision that she hopes to continue pursuing.

“She was a painter herself. She could touch any material and make something of it. These kind of oriental shapes have been in my life for forever,” she says. “My grandma’s entire living room is filled with Japanese art.”

Mary, forced to live in an incarceration camp during World War II with her family from the age of seven, is nothing short of resilient.

“She’s passionate and warm, kind of stubborn and set in her ways, but just a really strong woman,” Dani says fondly. “I even think of her coming out of the camps and her family having to start out as sharecroppers—it was something our generation didn’t have to do. She sacrificed so much.”

Despite her humility, Mary doesn’t sell herself short when it comes to acknowledging her impact on her family and the Japanese American community around her. She recalls her time volunteering with Norwalk Youth Sports and the Southeast Japanese School & Community Center with so much love and pride, memory after memory pouring out of her.

“The Center was built in 1976,” she says, “I did the newsletter for twenty years, but it eventually got costly to print and mail, so we took a year to campaign to have people sign up for it online. We told them, ‘This helps the Center. You’ll see it online. You’ll see it in color.’ And we started out with maybe 600 people doing it online. But it was fun because we were doing something that was worthwhile and we had a lot of support. The people were great to be around because the same aspirations were there for all of us.”

As Mary talks about her volunteer activities—the pancake breakfast, decorating the hall for events, making hapi coats and hair pins—Dani chimes in with affirmations of her grandmother’s hard work in making their community welcoming and accessible to Japanese Americans of all generations.  It made belonging possible even for younger generations with fewer direct ties to their heritage, Dani says.

Even now, almost fifty years after the Center’s opening, Mary can say with pride: “We have a really good nucleus of support. Japanese School has good parents, and all these clubs that they sponsor have really wonderful support. They gift their time, and we have a good board. Any organization that supports the community is important for us to support, too.”

Mary, a Nisei, shares stories of her family: how her father immigrated at the age of 18, worked on farms to support himself and, eventually, his family; how her mother, born in Sacramento, returned to Japan as the eldest of nine children and was eventually arranged to be married.

In spite of all the questions never asked and the memories that have been forgotten, Mary says she will never forget her incarceration.

“During camp it was awful because I was at an age where I didn’t think beyond ‘I didn’t like that’ or ‘That hurt me.’ It wasn’t until I was older that I could understand why we had been put in that particular situation.”

In the years following their release, her family became sharecroppers, and she remembers enjoying her youth and her freedom.

“Once you get to high school, things change, and you get more independent. You get to enjoy life because there’s no threat of incarceration anymore.”

Dani listens attentively to her grandmother’s stories, which now have securely passed on to the next generation.

Still, being Japanese American is an identity-in-progress for Dani. She can’t help but feel a sense of distance as a fourth generation Japanese American.

“There was a whole generation that was like, ‘Get rid of anything that’s like home or traditional. We have to become American.’ No one from my dad’s generation has a Japanese middle name,” Dani says. “And I don’t know Japanese either. Especially now that society is wanting more color, and we’re vibrant people, it’s a shame that things are getting lost.”

In March of 2023, the Iwami family traveled to Japan for a cousin’s wedding. Although it was Dani’s first time there, she says, “I felt like I was going back to my roots.” Having spent her college years in Washington around very few Asian Americans and very little Asian influence, those 12 days in Japan provided a sense of familiarity.

In Japan, even things that seem small or insignificant to the outside observer became inspiration for her artistry. She felt particularly drawn to the fruits, especially melons “and how treasured they are there, how they sit so perfectly on little thrones in the supermarket.” She shows off her own treasured melon jar collection—not yet perfected but certainly effective in tapping into the nostalgia of a Japanese American childhood.

Her collection of satsuma-inspired teapots, tea cups, and planters have a similarly comforting energy, sitting clustered on the table like real fruit laid out by a grandparent for the kids to eat. As much as her ceramic artistry is for herself, Dani’s vision is to honor the people who came before her and the people who, like her, are just finding their footing in their complex, hyphenated identities.

“I want people to celebrate my grandma,” she says of the next collection. “That’s what I want it to be about: being Japanese American and being resilient.”

Paying homage to the family’s matriarch is a daunting enough task, but to pay tribute to Mary’s artistic spirit adds an additional layer of complexity. Mary is a collector of art from all over the world—she proudly shows off prints and pots and cups from places like Hawaii, Korea, China, and Russia. She shows off several prints with familiar iconography of koi and calligraphy, and although some she’s never had translated, she highlights one with a deep personal meaning. There are fish, painted to look like silk with the script “kinu you ni, meaning ‘like silk’” to represent her Japanese name, Kinuko. Connected to them to form a full heart is her husband’s last name, Iwa. The frame securing the print is lined with a haiku.

Dani and her penchant for ceramics is drawn toward a set of teacups that Mary bought in Japan.

“I don’t want to use them and get them stained,” Mary says, and Dani lightheartedly offers to make some teacups for her grandmother to use instead. As they debate the material that the teacups were made from (“Is it porcelain? It doesn’t sound like porcelain.” “I think it is porcelain; it’s just got heavy glaze on it.”), they come across a piece with the kanji for dream written across it.

“Japanese calligraphy has so much artistic value,” Dani admires. “There are some with really nice flow and extensions, but there are other parts that are direct and bold.”

Mary adds, “There are fluid ones, but I like this one because it’s dynamic. It stands out. ‘Dream.’ Your life should be filled with dreams, and you should pursue them.”

And the conversation comes full circle. DANI KAWAII, a brand founded on the desire to shape meaning and connection between the artist and the audience into a physical form, is built on the strength of the bond between Dani and the generations of people who have changed her life.

“You’re making things that are meaningful,” Mary says, acknowledging and affirming Dani’s artistic vision. “I don’t buy art just because it looks pretty. It has to be meaningful.”

For Dani, some pieces are made to sell and maintain the business, but others are a quest to find the right balance of artistic preference and personal meaning, to be able to say, “I’m trying it and doing it, and I enjoyed how I felt making it.” In an ode to her family’s heritage, she has created her own sense of meaning and belonging in her first original character: Kinuko, named for her beloved grandmother.

“Kinuko the character is a three-legged orb that can shape shift and transcend time,” Dani explains. This character lays the foundation for a project to honor the lifetime and legacy of the original. Its design integrates details that may not be apparent to the outside observer but that hold a deep, personal significance to Dani and her family.

“Each of the three things it’s holding represent Uncle, Auntie, and my dad,” she shares with her grandmother. “All of it is encompassing your energy and persona. It’s a character inspired by you.”

Kinuko’s initial form as a mountain draws on the Shinto beliefs of mountains as sacred: a way to articulate and capture the “grounding and comforting” fortitude of a natural earthen structure through a deliberately crafted earthen medium.

But the connection runs deeper than an allusion to Shinto iconography. There is symbolism in Kinuko’s design that may not be apparent to viewers of a younger generation, those whose knowledge of the Japanese language has been lost to the silence of their elders.

Dani may not be fluent in Japanese, but she recalls Mary “always telling me how our last name ‘Iwa’ means cave.” Although she doesn’t know the full history, not having had enough chances to exchange stories with her mother in law before she passed, Mary shares what she does know about the Iwami family history.

“They lived in a little town called Iwami, near Yamaguchi-ken, and there was a samurai in the Iwami family. In those days, they used to stop at the silver mine and stay over in the little resting place. I’ve never been there, but I’d like to go.”

The appreciation for knowing and connecting to her heritage through a name that has persisted for generations makes itself evident in Dani’s work. Kinuko isn’t just a nameless mountain; she is the cave-shaped cliffside befitting the grace, resilience, and passion of the Iwami family matriarch herself. She’s a consistent, yet newly vulnerable, piece of Dani’s identity as an artist. She exudes comfort and connection, but she is also deeply personal. And the prospect of showcasing her and other artwork for the very first time is an intimidating one, Dani shares in anticipation of her first in-person exhibition.

There are still details to be worked out, but her excitement is infectious. “This is something I’ve wanted for so long, and to be able to showcase work that means a lot to me in such a notable gallery is an honor.”

The DANI KAWAII brand may be just starting out, but there are already big plans to continue growing in new and meaningful ways.

Dani embodies a layered and complex persona, multi-dimensional beyond a constant mantra of “I am Japanese American,” but this doesn’t diminish the way that her identity continues to shine through her work. By drawing on her experiences as a Japanese American person, it flows naturally and becomes an intrinsic part of her artistic style.

It’s a daunting task to pursue art in a way that transforms traditional symbolism and function into new forms, but Dani is up for the challenge. “I feel like the biggest thing is to just try. Once you get stuck just doing one thing, it’s really hard to break out and find renewed creativity.”

“You have to have goals, you have to have aspirations,” Mary adds. “Enjoy the journey and always appreciate. You have to appreciate because appreciation allows you to enjoy it, you know? Bounce the ball when you’re ninety. If you can shoot the ball decently and at least hit the rim, you’re good. If it makes you smile, do it.”

[20] Stepping out of her comfort zone and pushing forward in her own practice is how Dani pays forward everything she has gained from her family and her community. It’s how she honors where she comes from and where she hopes to continue moving toward: if comfort is the intended function, her pieces are certainly doing just that in all of the rooms and spaces they occupy.

Although she is unsure of what the future holds for her as she continues to develop as an artist, she welcomes the challenge with open arms. Without uncertainty, there is no risk taking, and without risk taking, there is no way forward.

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