The women are sisters, Sarah Nguyen, 33, and Anne Nguyen, 35. Before arriving at the preview on this evening, they didn’t know anything about the Wing Luke's new exhibit, Where Beauty Lies. Coincidentally, their Vietnamese mother was an aspiring model, which they say instilled vanity as a value very early in their life.

The exhibit looks at beauty standards and stereotypes in the Asian Pacific American community across age, gender and sex. But Where Beauty Lies is also a celebration of how the community has taken back that beauty and redefined it. This duality is emphasized by the double meaning of the exhibit’s title.

The collected works examine how the perception of Asian American beauty is influenced by colorism, a legacy of colonialism, its media caricatures, pop culture exoticism and generational traditions. In doing so, the Wing joins the current national conversation about Asian American representation, from the film Crazy Rich Asians to Saturday Night Live welcoming its first Asian American cast member. Locally, the conversation has surfaced this year with The Paper Tigers, a movie shot in Seattle that takes a nuanced approach to the kung fu genre, as well as Theater Off Jackson’s production of 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Susan Lieu’s one-woman show about dealing with her mother’s death, which resulted from a botched plastic surgery.

“We grew up in this, and in my case I never really stopped to realize that other people went through this, too,” Sarah Nguyen says of the feelings that arose while exploring the six-room exhibit.