Making History Visible

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Henry Tsang, “Hastings Park: Building A - Livestock Building North, View Looking West,” 2021

pigment ink on metallic paper, 36″ x 48″ (courtesy the artist)

A pair of exhibitions by Vancouver artists Cindy Mochizuki and Henry Tsang at the Surrey Art Gallery offer powerful meditations on Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War. Both artists have a personal interest in exploring Asian Canadian histories and both use cameras and projection technologies effectively in their work.

Mochizuki’s Autumn Strawberry is a visually rich and layered multimedia installation that conveys the sights and sounds of Japanese Canadians who worked on strawberry farms in the Fraser Valley prior to 1942. 

The centrepiece is a large-scale projection of exquisite hand-painted and digitally animated vignettes – children play in a barn, a woman seizes a bullfrog in the tub where her startled daughter is having a bubble bath and men pick berries on the Strawberry Hill fields of north Surrey. A soundtrack heightens the magic realism of the one-hour work. We hear flutes and chimes, as well as ominous drumbeats. Birds sing and watchful tree creatures make creaking sounds as they cross the screen. 

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Cindy Mochizuki, “Autumn Strawberry,” 2021

animation still (courtesy the artist)

But everything changes with a blaring radio broadcast announcing Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour on Dec. 7, 1941. Subsequent scenes show the enforced evacuation of farm families, whose property was confiscated. In all, some 22,000 coastal Japanese Canadians were sent by the federal government to internment and labour camps in the B.C. Interior, as well as to Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario. 

Mochizuki created the characters from her imagination, but her storylines are grounded in historical fact. Besides archival research, she interviewed Nisei and Sansei (second- and third-generation Japanese Canadians) whose parents and grandparents owned or worked on agricultural farms starting in the early 1900s in Surrey, Mission, Langley and Maple Ridge. Mochizuki’s paternal grandparents farmed in Langley, and their internment has given impetus to her work.

Tsang’s Hastings Park offers a more cerebral experience. Tsang, who emigrated with his family from Hong Kong as a child, has examined issues related to racialized identity in earlier work, including 360 Riot Walk, a video walking tour of Vancouver’s 1907 anti-Asian riots.

This show includes photographs and projections of four buildings at Hastings Park, home to the Pacific National Exhibition and other Vancouver attractions. Tsang challenges viewers to envision the popular amusement site when authorities temporarily used it, starting in 1942, to detain some 8,000 Japanese Canadians. In the Livestock Building, for instance, women and children lived within makeshift partitions made with blankets strung from animal stalls.

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Henry Tsang, “Hastings Park: Building A - Livestock Building North, East Entrance,” 2021

pigment ink on metallic paper, 36″ x 48″ (courtesy the artist)

Informed by archival photographs by Leonard Frank, who was hired by authorities to document the internment process, Tsang employed a thermal imaging camera to photograph the same spaces in a different way. His images have a surreal quality. Dramatic reds frame exterior doors and windows, and the sky is a strange purple that morphs into black. Thermal imaging, used by the construction industry to locate leaks and cracks in buildings, is well-suited for these haunted spaces.  

Both exhibitions have an understated power that imparts new ways of seeing and knowing familiar histories using subtle yet expressive techniques. The theme of racial injustice is underscored and, for Mochizuki, so is the vital role of creative expression as a means to heal intergenerational trauma. ■  

Autumn Strawberry and Hastings Park, curated by Jordan Strom, are on view at the Surrey Art Gallery from June 26 to Aug. 28, 2021.

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