Cindy Mochizuki and Henry Tsang set to make invisible Japanese Canadian histories visible again at Surrey Art Gallery this summer
Autumn Strawberry brings century-old farms to animated life, while Hastings Park documents internment site via thermal imaging
A still from Cindy Mochizuki’s Autumn Strawberry.
Surrey Art Gallery has announced two new summer solo exhibitions that revisit local Japanese Canadian history.
Cindy Mochizuki: Autumn Strawberry and Henry Tsang: Hastings Park are set to run from June 26 to August 28. In both cases, the multimedia artists make invisible Japanese Canadian histories visible again, with a conversation between the two scheduled for July 17 from 7 to 8 pm on Facebook and Youtube.
Animator and designer Mochizuki’s multimedia installation takes visitors back in time to the Japanese Canadian farms of the early 20th century, prior to the Second World War.
Autumn Strawberry emerges from her artist residency at Surrey Art Gallery in 2019, when Mochizuki met with dozens of Nisei and Sansei (second- and third-generation) Japanese Canadians whose parents and grandparents had owned or worked on farms across the Fraser Valley. Combining archival research with these collected stories of farm life, Autumn Strawberry weaves together a series of short vignettes via hand-painted and digital animation projected onto the gallery walls and screens.
Henry Tsang’s Hastings Park Building A—Livestock Building.
In addition to the large-scale projections, sculptural tree stumps and pieces of barn flats are scattered throughout the gallery floor. Visitors are invited to peek inside and watch animations on smaller projections. These farms would later lie abandoned and then were sold to support the construction of the Japanese Canadian internment camps during the Second World War.
Henry Tsang: Hastings Park presents photographs and projections of four buildings at Hastings Park in Vancouver, where, in 1942, about 8,000 Japanese Canadians were detained prior to being sent to internment and labour camps farther east. Among the four buildings is the Livestock Building—a place associated nowadays with the Pacific National Exhibition’s popular pig races and petting zoo.
Tsang used a thermal imaging camera to create his images based in part on the compositions and staging of Leonard Frank’s documentary photographs of the Japanese Canadian internment at the site.
The Powell Street Festival in Vancouver and Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre in Burnaby have stepped in as partners for the exhibition.
Post sponsored by Surrey Art Gallery.