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.
Ancestral Harvest includes installations of overlapping, large-scale hanging drawings of the vegetables and produce cultivated by generations of my family. The images are drawn on a sheer fabric, normally used in agriculture to cover vegetable rows. The free-flowing textile panels create ghostly and dreamlike plant imagery, honoring my ancestors and our interdependence with the natural world. 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.
The installation Summer Family Time (Okra, Squash, Strawberry) depicts vegetables my grandmother, along with my school-aged father and his sisters, harvested as farm laborers during the children's annual summer breaks. Victory Garden (Napa Cabbage, Shiso, Squash) is a drawing installation of the produce grown in the incarceration camp they were forced to live in during World War II. The US government planned that the internees would need to produce their own food, intending that those incarcerated American citizens held in detention centers would be largely self-sufficient for their sustenance.
The Beyond the Barbed Wire (Sugar Beet) Installation tells the story of my teenage dad's desire to labor on the Idaho sugar beet farms as a way to leave the confines of the Minidoka Internment Camp. Sugar beets were a wartime necessity because of the scarcity of sugar and the use of this crop for munitions production. The small drawings, An opportunity to produce more food for freedom, and helping America win the war and the peace to follow, contain lines from an advertisement searching for Japanese American detainees to work as sugar beet farm laborers.