Ancestral Harvest
The Ancestral Harvest series blends the story of Japanese American agrarian history, food sovereignty, and my personal life as an artist and farmer. In order for immigrants like my grandparents to prepare the comfort foods reminiscent of the lives they left behind, they grew their own traditional vegetables and passed on that practice.
The small drawings contain lines from an advertisement searching for Japanese American detainees to work as sugar beet farm laborers. This series utilizes my process of holding drawing utensils like hashi (chopsticks), as a conceptual means to express the duality of embracing our cultural differences and similarities. With two pencils in hand, they are manipulated to work in opposition to each other while working together to create the drawing.