Linda Nishio grew up as a Sansei, or third generation Japanese American, in a household where mostly English was spoken. Although Japanese, the Sansei tend to embrace mainstream American ways of thinking and behaving because of their generational distance from traditional Japanese customs. This has undoubtedly informed Nishio's artistic interest in the relation between language and context. Over the past 25 years, Nishio's diverse practice has included sculpture, photography, video, performance, printing, drawing and digital images. What unites these diverse approaches is the artist's ongoing interest in recontextualizing language. In early works, the incorporation of text was a dominant theme. In 1989 Nishio created an installation-cum-intervention on the electronic Spectacolor board in New York City's Times Square. Sandwiched between various ads were strange words such as "FOO'-gee," "KNEE'-sahn" and "Tow-YO'-taah." Japanese words that are familiarized through the massive repetition of a brand were thus rendered "foreign" once again. Nishio's more recent works have eschewed this type of recontextualized word-play in favor of symbolic forms of representation.