A group of sculptures representing the losses skilled by Japanese Canadians throughout the Second World Conflict by multidisciplinary artist Kellen Hatanaka (beforehand featured right here). At present based mostly in Ontario, Hatanaka is finest recognized for creating vibrant, figurative work and drawings that remember sport, design, historical past, and tradition. His work typically incorporates problems with race, custom, and heritage particular to the nuances of the Japanese Canadian expertise. In “Stolen Heirlooms,” Hatanaka attracts on the historical past of Japanese internment in Canada. Beginning in 1942, 22,000 folks of Japanese descent dwelling alongside the coast of British Columbia had been forcibly faraway from their properties. They got very brief discover and solely allowed to take one or two suitcases. As such, a lot of their belongings had been left behind. With these works Hatanaka is making an attempt to grapple with the loss his personal grandparents and others endured:
“This physique of labor is impressed by my nice grandmother’s story of getting to go away behind her shamisen, a conventional Japanese string instrument, when she was pressured to go away her dwelling with my Grandmother and Nice Grandfather. It made me marvel what others had misplaced and if these gadgets nonetheless exist someplace, orphaned. The idea of the collective loss is summary and complex. How do you try to quantify and assign a worth to a loss that goes past merely financial?”
Hatanaka depicts imagined gadgets that maintain cultural or sentimental worth. The idea of an heirloom is utilized to attract a parallel between the passing of bodily objects and the passing of inherited trauma by way of generations of Japanese Canadians.
