Start Here
A modest tribute to four Japanese Canadian artists.
Roy Kiyooka, “Untitled – Geometric Abstract,” 1963-1964
acrylic (gift of Jack Diamond, AGGV 1992.031.00, photo courtesy Art Gallery of Greater Victoria)
Work by four Nisei artists – the term refers to children born to parents who emigrated from Japan – on view at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, offers a chance to reflect on distinct and entwining histories within the Canadian mosaic. The artists, born within a few years of each other in the late 1920s, lived in various parts of the country and had unique practices. Certainly, all were affected by the prevailing prejudices of the time, and three of them were among the 21,000 West Coast Japanese Canadians wrested from their homes and interned in isolated camps during the Second World War.
Common artistic threads emerge in the show, Start Here, on view until Jan. 22. One revolves around abstraction, particularly among the three male artists – Roy Kiyooka, Takao Tanabe and Kazuo Nakamura. Also apparent is an interest in the natural world, particularly in the show’s representational work. The fourth artist, Shizuye Takashima, is somewhat an outlier with her gentle expressionism, at times childlike or drifting into magic realism.
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Shizuye Takashima, “The Judges,” no date
oil on canvas (collection of Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre, Burnaby, B.C.; photo courtesy Art Gallery of Greater Victoria)
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Shizuye Takashima, “Macrocosm & Microcosm,” 1970
oil on canvas (collection of Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre, Bunaby, B.C.; photo courtesy Art Gallery of Greater Victoria)
Takashima, who had many health problems growing up, is remembered for her 1971 book, A Child in Prison Camp, the first significant publication by a Japanese Canadian to discuss that experience. After the war, she attended the Ontario College of Art. She was an instructor there from 1976 to 1994 and died in 2005.
Her work in the show is muted, and at times is executed in pastel colours. The Awakening / The New Age, a 1978 oil painting, shows a roughly sketched human figure leading a horse through a nebulous haze as the sun rises over a beach, bathing the rocky foreshore in a peachy light. Nearby, an intriguing, though darker, work, The Judges, shows two masked figures – doctors, perhaps? – with only their eyes visible. The ambiguously masked figure has taken on new weight over the last few years.
Takashima’s painting, Macrocosm & Microcosm, from 1970, bridges into a spiritually infused abstraction with two orbs, one pale pink and the other white, that meet in the centre of the canvas, beneath a four-pointed star. She had the least-established exhibition record of the four artists, perhaps not surprising for an artist of that era whose intersectionality included not only her cultural background, but also gender and disability. Curiously, her work was not included on the graphic banner promoting the show on the gallery’s website.
“Start Here,” 2022, installation view showing work by Roy Kiyooka at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (photo courtesy AGGV)
Vancouver artist Roy Kiyooka, meanwhile, is represented with vibrant geometric abstractions. Bast, a large acrylic painting from 1963, reads almost like a landscape with a horizontal band of blue at the base of the planar field of orange that dominates the canvas. His Untitled – Geometric Abstract, from the same era, explores the relationship between two blue orbs and an orange cross. It’s a starkly rigid and muscular work compared to Takashima’s more delicate but somewhat similarly structured piece.
Kiyooka, born in Moose Jaw, Sask., and raised in Calgary, was also a poet. His art practice included photography, a selection of which is shown here. For two decades, he taught art at universities across the country, eventually settling in Vancouver. He died in 1994. Kiyooka’s brother, Harry, was also an artist, and taught at the University of Calgary. He died last April, aged 94. I’m curious why he was not included in this show.
Kazuo Nakamura, “Number Structure No. 9,” 1984
oil on canvas (collection of Brian and Susan Lahey, photo courtesy Art Gallery of Greater Victoria)
Nakamura, meanwhile, is remembered as a co-founder of the influential Canadian artist group, Painters Eleven, which banded together in the 1950s to exhibit abstract art in Toronto. Born in Vancouver, his family was interned east of Hope, B.C., and later settled in Toronto. He became occupied by his research into patterns, both in nature and science. A brief reflection on the gallery wall by Toronto gallerist Christopher Cutts recalls Nakamura as “a man of intellectual fervour, obsessively curious.”
Nakamura’s Number Structure No. 9, a 1984 oil painting, shows columns of numbers painted in blue on a pale background. The stepped construction of the columnar numbers and the repetitive, yet slightly varied, template does, indeed, suggest an underlying pattern. Yet, somehow, I feel no need to decode it, and instead luxuriate in the work’s visual qualities. It feels comfortable, almost familiar.
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Kazuo Nakamura, "Untitled, (green landscape)," undated
oil on board, 18.5” x 22.5” framed (collection of Minoru and Kiyoko Shimoda)
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“Start Here,” 2022, installation view showing work by Kazuo Nakamura at Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (photo courtesy AGGV)
Similarly, Nakamura’s small densely patterned Untitled, (green landscape) suggests a forest. In the foreground, a flat area with a different surface treatment evokes a stagnant pond. Neither seems to demand a full visual resolution. Thus, the work becomes a serene place to rest the eyes, much like the experience of being in an actual forest, an interesting accomplishment for such a small piece. Nakamura died in 2002.
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Takao Tanabe, “Forest Impressions #8,” 1953
watercolour, (gift of the artist, AGGV 2002.031.001, photo courtesy Art Gallery of Greater Victoria)
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Takao Tanabe, “Gulf Islands, Fog,” 1982
acrylic (gift of the artist, AGGV 2019.025.002, photo courtesy Art Gallery of Greater Victoria)
Finally, comes Tanabe, who also explored abstraction but eventually moved to representational landscapes. The early works here are loosely painted and atmospheric with mark-making that feels almost calligraphic. For instance, in Forest Impressions #8, a watercolour from 1953, quick dark linear marks representing trees are deposited on multicoloured washes under a seemingly dank sky. His landscape, Gulf Islands, Fog, is composed of thin muted grey washes, so evocative of a coastal winter. His later landscapes are almost photorealistic.
Tanabe, 98, who lives on Vancouver Island, is the only artist in the show who is still alive. Born on the West Coast, he was interned as a Japanese alien during the Second World War. His education included time studying calligraphy and Sumi-e, Japanese ink painting, at Tokyo University on a Canada Council scholarship from 1959 to 1960, building on his time at the Winnipeg School of Art, the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.
He has taken on the mantle of elder statesman by establishing six years ago the Tanabe Prize for B.C. Painters. Works by this year’s winner, Robert Burke, a residential school survivor of Métis and Black heritage originally from the Northwest Territories, are displayed in a nearby corridor. Tanabe’s honours include a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the 2013 Audain Prize, given for lifetime achievement in the visual arts.
The show, organized by guest curator Bryce Kanbara, a Hamilton artist of Japanese heritage, was mounted in conjunction with an arts symposium organized by the National Association of Japanese Canadians in September. While modest, the show feels like a tribute. As Kanbara observes of the artists: “They set the bar high for succeeding generations of Japanese Canadians in the arts, and accounts of their lives provide all of us with inspirational examples of what it takes to make a difference.”
I would have appreciated a fuller discussion of what Kanbara notes as the “negative consequences” of having Asian heritage prior to the Second World War as well as the “beneficial effects” of the rich cultural traditions of Japan. Kanbara seems to brush off the latter in a single statement in the didactic material. “They seemed,” he writes, “to approach their common Japanese Canadian heritage, at turns, with both obliviousness and acknowledgment.” ■
Start Here: Kiyooka, Nakamura, Takashima, Tanabe at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from Sept. 17, 2022, to Jan. 22, 2023. Curated by Bryce Kanbara.
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