Vivid animation and thermal imaging recapture vanished Japanese Canadian history at Surrey Art Gallery
Cindy Mochizuki: Autumn Strawberry reflects on Fraser Valley farms, while Henry Tsang sees Hastings Park buildings through a haunting new lens
An animation still from Cindy Mochizuki’s Autumn Strawberry.
Henry Tsang’s Hastings Park: Building A - Livestock Building North, East Entrance.
Surrey Art Gallery presents Cindy Mochizuki: Autumn Strawberry and Henry Tsang: Hastings Park until August 28; prebook visits here. The artists take part in a virtual conversation about their work on July 17 at 7 pm via Facebook Live and YouTube.
TO MOST LOCALS, Surrey’s suburban Strawberry Hill neighbourhood and East Van’s historic Pacific National Exhibition buildings would seem to have little to do with one another. But the sites are inextricably linked, with a Japanese Canadian history that has all but been erased.
In Surrey, strip malls and housing developments obscure the former berry fields and thriving family farms that sat there a century ago. At Hastings Park, pig races, petting zoos, and show-marts belie a dark chapter of families incarcerated there during the Second World War.
Now, in two new multimedia solo exhibitions at the Surrey Art Gallery, a pair of local artists are excavating the sometimes vibrant, sometimes painful past and making it visible again.
In Autumn Strawberry, Cindy Mochizuki is bringing the former Japanese-Canadian berry-farming traditions of the Surrey area, as well as Mission, Haney, Langley, and Maple Ridge, back to life through vivid animation. The farms were later abandoned, seized, and sold off during the internment of Japanese Canadians. During that period, in 1942, about 8,000 Japanese Canadians were forcibly detained at Hastings Park before being sent to forced-labour and prison camps in the BC interior and further east. And that’s where artist Henry Tsang comes in with his Hastings Park exhibit, using thermal-imaging photographs and projections to portray the four buildings where they were held in a new light.
Both projects are about much more than loss, though. “There’s a type of resilience or spirit that, as someone who is Japanese-Canadian, fuels my practice,” Mochizuki tells Stir over the phone on a break from installing the work at the gallery. “And the ties with people in the community: they are so generous with their stories. They trust the presence of art. I’m an artist, not a historian, and I’m a complete stranger they trust.
“Revisiting history and recovering lost materials is still active and alive in 2021. And I feel really honoured that people still reach out to me.”
An animation still from CindyMochizuki’s Autumn Strawberry.
Berries, bull frogs, and burning cameras
Mochizuki’s Autumn Strawberry grew out of a residency she had at the gallery in 2019, but her interest in the berry farming culture has a personal lineage, as well.
Her grandparents on her father’s side were berry farmers in the Walnut Grove area of Langley before the internment. But she only heard intermittent stories about that life, mostly from her aunts and grandmother; her father was only three when they were forced off the land during the war. (One of her aunt’s tales makes it into her hand-painted animation: a recollection of a bull frog in the farm’s bath water.)
During her residency at SAG, Mochizuki set about doing much more deep research into the history of Japanese-Canadian berry farming in the region, hunting down rare records (such as farmers’ guides to growing fruit in the area) and speaking with dozens of Nisei and Sansei (second- and third-generation) Japanese Canadians whose parents and grandparents had owned or worked the land across the Fraser Valley.
“I was interested in this lost knowledge—all the things they had learned and how they were able to succeed,” Mochizuki explains. “A lot of the animation shows the farmers studying and taking notes, trying very hard to understand the ground and the plants.”
Amid her discoveries: white settlers often leased land to Japanese farmers that was covered in trees. To remove them, farmers had to take on the risk of blasting out the tree stumps with dynamite. The animation and the exhibit—which also features sculptural tree stumps—wrestle with hard truths about the role the farmers had in deforestation.
“I wanted to acknowledge that Japanese Canadians were also settlers,” the artist adds. “Perception of the land also shifted for me, and that is integrated into the animation. It’s this really complex system where we’re all implicated inside the making of history.”
Animation became the perfect medium for the multimedia artist, who has worked across forms from sculptural bento boxes to illustrations. Handpainted and then transferred and layered digitally to resemble intricate dioramas, her animations allow her to weave together historical research with her subjects’ anecdotes, giving them equal weight. Many scenes capture intimate everyday moments from farm life—children as young as four polishing chicken eggs for sale; women making preserves, miso, and sake to get their families through the winter—then give way to more fantastical worlds of trees and insects.
But as so often is the case with the artist’s animation, watching it will be more than just a passive sit-in-front-of-a-screen process. Alongside large-scale projections, visitors can peek inside sculptural stumps and barn flats to watch animations on smaller projections.
Cindy Mochizuki. Photo by Adam Blasberg
“It’s a really visceral theatrical experience,” Mochizuki says, adding celebrated dance lighting designer James Proudfoot has lit the installations, and Nancy Tam has created an immersive sound world featuring Vancouver musicians like taiko drummer E. Kage and shakuhachi maestro Takeo Yamashiro. (Watch for a filmed dance performance by Company 605 artist Lisa Mariko Gelley to come out of the setting later this summer, Mochizuki says.)
The animations form a series of vignettes. “As somebody who is Japanese Canadian, this is how the history or how the memories of these moments come to me—through these fragments,” she explains.
More significantly for Mochizuki, animation allows her to recount history through a tool other than a camera.
“When the Japanese were interned, they weren’t allowed to bring any media or radios or cameras into the camps,” she explains. “So any photos we have are government-sanctioned ones. In order for someone like me, who’s a grandchild or daughter of somebody who went through internment to re-picture it again...it [the camera] is not the right lens.
“So, to me, animation allows that ability to kind of reimagine and re-see something,” she continues. “And I think that's where my interest in animation comes from: these are histories where the lenses that were often placed on them were not shot by themselves.”
In fact, one of the scenes viewers can watch at Autumn Strawberry re-enacts a moving moment about cameras that her aunt and father remembered happening just before they were taken away for internment.
“They took their Kodak Brownie, their camera, and the farmers got together and burned it outside the farmhouse,” Mochizuki says. “Everyone kind of dumped their cameras into this fire outside.”
Henry Tsang’s Hastings Park: Building A - Livestock Building North, View Looking West.
Asking buildings if they remember
Henry Tsang, on the other hand, has used a camera and projections to revisit the Japanese internment—but in unexpected ways.
Working from Leonard Frank’s government-sanctioned documentary shots of the internment at the Hastings Park buildings, he takes similar angles today, using thermal imaging technology to try to detect signs of the past still inscribed within the walls.
It’s a process Tsang first explored with Building A-Livestock Building, an infrared photo of that Hastings Park structure that became a huge public artwork on the CBC Building.
As part of that project, he says that, working with archivists at CBC, he came across documentary-style footage of families’ confinement there, as well as interviews with Japanese Canadians about the internment.
“So I started to look more deeply into the use of the Hastings Park site,” Tsang tells Stir. “And I wanted to ask those buildings, Do they remember anything of this?”
He learned about the thermal imaging cameras when he had an energy assessment done of his house. The devices are used mostly in the construction industry to detect differences in temperature by capturing light rays—and therefore leaks and cracks—that are invisible to the human eye.
“I wondered, ‘What if there was a high-end camera of this sort? What can it see that we can’t?,’ because it sees beyond the visible spectrum,” he says.
Henry Tsang. Photo by Naiya Tsang
The results are images that glow in unearthly red and yellow, shot through with green, ghostly shadows. Even more otherworldly feeling is the exhibition’s monochromatic video projection of Hastings Park, a technical feat that Tsang ended up pulling off with an old Kodak projector.
“Are they eerie? Yeah, sure,” he says of his imagery, likening it to the same, strange quality you get with a mega-magnified photo of an insect. “This is a camera that can do things that a naked eyeball can’t do. It can take us into a different realm of perception. These images shift our perception of time and place.”
That resonates with Tsang, who grew up going to the PNE, and associated it with summer entertainment, not aware of the darker part of its history. Perversely, the place associated with the most fun—the Livestock Building with its farm animals and petting zoos—was once the site of Japanese Canadian women and children incarcerated in stables and cattle stalls. (A plaque commemorating the people interned there was installed on the building in 2012.)
“I don’t actually know about what part of its history it’s showing us,” he says of his thermal-imaging photography, in which the buildings seem to breathe with inner life.
The idea of cutting-edge technology uncovering buried history makes Tsang reflect on the recent use of ground-penetrating radar to confirm the existence of mass graves of Indigenous children by residential schools in B.C. and Saskatchewan. Does society choose what it wants to remember and what it wants to forget?
“There's always this erasing of history, and I think it’s really great that technology can confirm what people know—what has been covered up by other people in positions of power who don’t want that knowledge out,” Tsang asserts. “So I can’t help but think of that topical issue right now.”
For her part, Mochizuki, who has also leveraged technology to bring history to life, says she hopes viewers can find some strength or inspiration in the exhibition—even if it does represent a lost time and knowledge system.
“Making this work in the pandemic year, there was obviously feelings of mourning,” she says. “But at the same time...these are stories around survival and how these families, despite these hardships and against all odds, were able to hold things together.”
A still from Henry Tsang’s projected thermal imaging video Hastings Park Buildings A, F, K, L
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