By Reia Li
The mural depicts a dragon with lime green and rose pink scales. Smiling, the dragon offers a glowing yin yang to the viewer. In the background, yucca and saguaro line hills in various shades of pink.
Shela Yu, 36, who also goes by Shellshaker, is a visual and musical artist. Around a dozen of her murals can be found all over metro Phoenix. But this particular mural, painted on the side of Mekong Plaza at the intersection of Dobson Road and Main Street in Mesa, is special to her.
“A lot of my other pieces, I don’t think I get to express this key component of my identity, of being Chinese American and this experience of being raised in the Southwest,” Yu said in an interview with The Arizona Republic.
Born and raised in Mesa, Yu grappled with internalized racism early in life, feeling like she had to deny her family to fit in with kids at school. “Being a minority, you feel the weight of it,” Yu said. She noticed that her cousins in California, who grew up surrounded by other Asian Americans, didn’t have the same cultural identity crisis.
In her quest to belong, being a self-described “weird artist kid” didn’t help. Her dad taught her how to use a sewing machine when she was 12, and she’d make her clothes to wear to school. “I stuck out like a sore thumb,” Yu said, laughing quietly. “On the one hand, I wanted to have my own identity, but I also wanted to fit in.”
In 1990, Asians and Asian Americans made up only 1.5% of Mesa’s population, according to Census data. While their presence in the city has increased only slightly over three decades — 2.4% of Mesa’s population as of 2023 — there are more and more visibly Asian American spaces like Mekong Plaza.
Yu is proud that she gets to be part of the wave of increasing representation of Asian Arizonans. When she designed a T-shirt for the Phoenix Suns game on Chinese New Year in 2024, she drew dragons but added rattlesnake tails. For another T-shirt, in honor of the inaugural 602 Day, she modified a dragon from one of her murals by making its horns saguaro cactuses.
Tony Ce, a graffiti artist and the founder of LocalBuzz, has known Yu since she became a full-time artist in 2021. One of Ce’s favorite things about Yu’s murals is how she chooses to represent Asian American culture. He particularly loves her spray-painted mural in the Oak Street alley, which features a girl — perhaps a being is more accurate — wearing a fanged dragon mask. Her eyes are bright green and lack pupils. On the side, traditional Chinese characters spell out: “I am the descendant of a dragon.”
“She’s found her magic, man,” Ce said. “It’s Asian representation without making it look stereotypical.”
The mural that kick-started her career
When Yu was little, she loved drawing characters that she made up in her head. Her mom, a piano teacher and classical singer, encouraged her and her brother’s interest in the arts. Still, she hesitated to call herself an artist until just a few years ago.
“I had this negative belief that being an artist meant I was selfish,” Yu said.
She studied studio art briefly at Arizona State University before switching to anthropology at the University of Arizona. But she found that conventional schooling didn’t work for her and, before being able to graduate, threw herself instead into her massage therapy practice.
Yu was a massage therapist for 10 years until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to shut down her business. Stuck at home with large stretches of uninterrupted time, she painted for hours and learned to play guitar.
“It reminded me of when you’re a kid in the summertime,” Yu said. “I wasn’t intending to do full-time art just from that experience. But I think it jump-started something in me.”
In late 2020, she applied to paint a mural in the Tempe Youth Library. “I told myself that if I got this mural, then I would quit everything and do art full time.”
She did.
On the wall of the library, a dragon follows a girl whose nose is buried in a book. She walks up a staircase of books toward a collection of mythical creatures painted in hues of blue, green and pink. “The piece is about the mythical places that you get to go to and all the worlds you get to explore when you read,” Yu said.
Yu is known for bringing dreamscapes to life. She wants her art to feel otherworldly. “Access to imagination is a way to envision a new future, which I feel like we desperately need,” she said.