The Welcoming Wonderland of Setsuko Piroche

Japanese-Canadian's exhibition on now at Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre

by

The exhibition WOVEN: Setsuko Piroche’s Wonderland does indeed, as the title suggests, invoke the mystical world of Japanese-Canadian artist Setsuko Piroche. 

The show is on now through Sept. 28 at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby, British Columbia.

In celebrating her 70-year legacy, a selection of some 40 objects, including traditional Japanese Nihonga paintings, soft sculpture, printmaking, children’s books and personal memorabilia offers a rare and long overdue opportunity to experience artwork representative of key moments in Piroche’s oeuvre. The fact that Piroche, who is close to 92 years old, was available to show her obvious approval of the exhibition at the opening reception, lent a strongly auspicious note to the project.

Co-curators Makiko Hara and Sheri Shinobu Kajiwara, who is also curator/director of the hosting institution, were undoubtedly well qualified to navigate the special circumstances involved in creating this exhibition. Drawing on their cultural backgrounds (both were born in Japan) as well as personal experience with family elders in decline, they were able to obtain valuable insights from Piroche on her work and its origins, although she currently suffers from dementia. The artist’s late husband, horticulturalist Pierre Piroche who passed only a few months before the exhibition opened, was fortunately present throughout its two-year organizational phase and was able to provide or locate the artwork and share details of the travels that inspired specific works in the collection. These adventures, and later, stories related to the couple’s lively artistic network in Vancouver, are often intertwined with pieces in the exhibition and thus further reinforce its main title, WOVEN.

The inclusion of several early Nihonga (pigment-based) paintings in the exhibition is revelatory in demonstrating Piroche’s remarkably precocious artistic development, as well as her lifelong tendency to be selective in adopting established artistic styles and techniques. Her private tuition in Nihonga painting at age 14 was led by the renowned Japanese painter and internationally acclaimed set designer, Setsu Asakura. While honouring the traditional tenets of the Nihonga methodology, Asakura’s strongly narrative style ran counter to Nihonga’s conventional use of nature as its central theme, thus foreshadowing her future career in theatre and film. And, although Piroche, as her student, eventually gained a mastery of the art form, she also rejected traditional Nihonga subject matter in favour of the elements of drama, storytelling and “other worldliness” that became the acknowledged hallmarks of her mature style. 

Despite having developed a considerable reputation as an exhibiting painter in Japan, the strikingly independent Piroche set out at age 26 on a lengthy and free-spirited period of travel in India and later Australia, where she met her life partner and soul mate, horticulturalist Pierre Piroche. This romantic partnership flourished amidst the couple’s mutual curiosity about the natural world and the diversity of cultures they encountered along the way. When they ultimately settled in British Columbia in 1967, she had a stable base from which to re-ignite her art practice while Pierre established a thriving horticultural business.

It is not surprising that she soon discovered North Vancouver’s acclaimed Handcraft House, at one time the province’s most dynamic centre for craft supplies and tuition as well as exhibitions in fibre art and ceramics. Somewhere during her travels abroad, Piroche had already learned the intricate and demanding techniques associated with Ikat weaving and was accomplished enough to offer classes at Handcraft House. The centre, with its collective expertise in weaving and other fibre art techniques, enabled her to experiment with tapestry weaving, which she soon adapted to create three-dimensional woven figures by connecting woven cloth pieces with off-loom weaving techniques. 

Typically shown without any special staging, the sheer presence of these soft sculpture characters often suggests a visual narrative that is part of a larger story located outside the visual frame. In one such example, two young girls in handwoven hopsacking are turning a skipping rope for an invisible participant. Wearing masks reminiscent of the ancient Noh theatre and accessories in obverse versions of black and white, the mysterious countenance of these twinned figures disrupts the notion of a playful activity with an unsettling ambiance. In another soft sculpture pairing, a couple whose woven forms suggests a non-specific South American tribal group, the creatures seem both friendly and somewhat fierce in nature, all the more so as each character has an alternate version of themselves facing the opposite direction. 

The artist’s intentions regarding the woven sculptures, Haida Chief & Kwakwaka’wakw Woman, a gift from the artist to Bill and Martine Reid, PhD, are considerably less obscure. In this instance, Piroche created the figures as an homage to Bill Reid’s heritage and to thank the couple for their generosity in hosting Bikky Sunazawa, a distinguished Japanese artist of Ainu origin, at their home/studio on Haida Gwaii. The duo piece is currently part of the personal collection of Martine Reid, who, in a most welcome gesture, made it available for display for the first time in a public setting. 

Although she continued making artwork, largely in printmaking media, for many years afterwards, the dolls and other soft sculpture pieces created in the 1970s and 1980s represent Setsuko Piroche at the uppermost point in the arc of her career. Her work was recognized in galleries throughout Canada and in international galleries in Tokyo, Paris, London and Brussels. These were the heady times of second-wave feminist art, which reflected and advanced the contemporaneous activism driving the Women’s Liberation movement. 

Piroche, like many of her artistic colleagues conveniently labeled as feminists, denied identification with the movement in its formal sense. As the curators point out, however, when interviewed in preparation for this article Setsuko Piroche definitely embraced her own personal form of feminism that was well tested both in Japan, where the professional aspirations of Japanese women were extremely limited, and abroad, as she established a strong presence in international contexts not particularly welcome to women of Japanese origin.  

The examples of two more eminent female artists who emigrated from Japan to North America in the late 1950s/early 1960s yields some interesting comparisons. Yayoi Kusama (born 1929), Yoko Ono (born 1933) and Setsuko Piroche (born 1932), all of whom were are from privileged families, all experienced the catastrophic bombing of Japan in World War II. And, while Kusama states that much of her enveloping artwork represents an escape from family trauma, she also expresses the anti-war and peace sentiments that populate much of Ono’s and Piroche’s art, particularly during the period of the Vietnam War. It would not be a stretch to suggest that the alternate realities all of these artists are known for were at some level a response to the horrors of war and the hardships of Japan’s initial recovery during their childhoods.

Ono and Kusama, however, are essentially conceptual artists who built their expanding influence with media and widely accessible installations for larger audiences to enjoy in both physical and virtual contexts.

Piroche, for all her sophistication, is essentially a materialist, and at her best when she is creating art with her own hands on an intimate scale. This fact, and her disinclination to engage professional representation may have limited the further development of her career.

Apart from an exhibition at Maple Ridge’s ACT Art Gallery in 2016, and the inclusion of one of the woven aerial pieces, Dizzy Dome, in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2020 exhibition Modern in the Making, Setsuko Piroche’s work has not been shown publicly for some 20 years. Following some restoration work, however, the artwork in WOVEN: Setsuko Piroche’s Wonderland is as fresh and lively as ever, and well worth a visit. ■

WOVEN: Setsuko Piroche’s Wonderland is on now through Sept. 28 at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Curator’s tours of WOVEN: Setsuko Piroche’s Wonderland will take place at 1 pm on Sunday, Aug. 25 and Sunday, Sept. 22. Arrive early and enjoy the Nikkei Garden Farmers Market from 10 am to 2 pm.

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Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre

6688 Southoaks Crescent, Burnaby, British Columbia V5E 4M7

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