Cindy Mochizuki Clip 1
Details
Cindy Mochizuki Clip 1
Metadata (MODS) |
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|---|---|
| Titles | Cindy Mochizuki Clip 1: |
| Name | Cindy Mochizuki |
| Name | Dr Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | Cindy Mochizuki Clip 1 |
| Abstract | In this clip, visual artist Cindy Mochizuki comments on her work called Paper. Mochizuki outlines the inspiration and history of this project and this discussion leads to topics of space, globalization, ecology, memory, and the trans-Pacific. |
| Extent | 6:53 Minutes |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | CM: Hi my name is Cindy Mochizuki, and I'm a visual artist, um, and I make multimedia installations, drawing, and performance.CM: Um, so, Paper was based on um, or it came out of a research residency, um, that I went to in 2014 in Yonago, Totorri ken in Japan. Um, and at that time, the curator that I was working with, Makiko Hara, was doing um a lot of research on artists working back and forth between Canada and Japan. Looking at the trans-Pacific, and she'd invited me to think of a work to be made for Yonago. And, uh, one of her curatorial premises was that she thought that Vancouver or the islands of Vancouver, the Gulf Islands, resembled the islands of Yonago, in the sense that even just aesthethetically, this really red sunset, the vast oceans, and then so she thought that there was a connection there and so she invited me to think or imagine a work for um Yonago. And when we went there, we were invited to do different site visits and like almost take like a tourist through this city that I had actually been to before. So, I was fascinated with some of the artists who had come out of Yonago, so I'd been there sometime prior. So, I was familiar with it in terms or some of its tourists’ sites, some of it's like what they’re known for. Each region of Japan is known for specific things. And so, we were taken to this elder in the city of Yonago he had this he offers a boat tour for about ten dollars Canadian, and you kind of traverse through the travel through the canal ways. Yonago used to be a castle town so you can still see the canals that merchants would come to sell goods. And he takes you on this little boat tour. And I think his perspective is very much sort of about the gentrification of this area, or this island and so he's pointing to things that are disappearing. Very much from the ground-level of a citizen that cares about what's happening to the waters there and what's happening to the island and it's actually called the Nakaumi, the brackish lake, so it has it has um it's a lake but it's also, or, it's lake waters connected specifically to the ocean as well. To the Japan sea, so very different species and vegetation and life would grow in that kind of water, and I guess back in the day many families would spend time there, and now if you go there it's like polluted and people have forgotten about it. So, he kind of stresses the importance of that on this tour. In Japanese. And he pointed to this island just off the shoreline that we were on called Kayashima, and he just kind of briefly said: "when I was a little boy, my grandfather told me that this woman made these great noodles and there used to be a restaurant there and people would have to go there by boat,” and then he sort of carried on and I was very fascinated by this nugget or this little story that came out of this. And so I said to Machiko, "well, I think I'd like to make a story or make a piece that's about this island. Whether it's fictional or non-fictional, or hearsay or whatever, I think that's gonna be the root or starting point." So, I went home, and did some research about Yonago to see if it had any connections to B.C. And so, I found that in the 1900s there was a boom of migration from that region. Not necessarily Yonago, but another region nearby called Sakaiminato to Vancouver and a lot of Japanese migrants worked in like um the lumber mills or worked on hot house tomatoes on main island and Gulf Islands and were part of the industry building of that time before the internment. And so, in Paper, it's about a 20 minute audio work that I had imagined you would listen to on headsets and you would um it's for that boat tour, so we asked the boat elder who was giving that tour, "if I make this piece, is it okay if we play this while you tour or you drive the boat?" He said "sure." It's a 20 minute audio work where there's a woman named K, just the letter 'K', and she's working out of this restaurant, it's a family business, she's trying to master this very specific Kakiage tempura, just like burdock roots and carrots --it's this sort of mash of tempura and carrots and very bored and kind of like running this family restaurant and she encounters this ghost, or what I know is the writer's ghost of a Japanese-Canadian lumberjack that kind of passes through and drops behind this letter. And the other thing that I had discovered when I was in the archives doing research about Yonago and Vancouver is that the boom of migrants that came over, came because they were called over by somebody that got here first, and they wrote what's called the Yobiyose letter or a calling letter to kind of woo families over. A little bit kind of in a sort of very nostalgic sort of flowery kind of way by saying “we've got this great ocean there's salmon and abundance of work,” but then they come and it's like complete like difficult times as a racialized migrant to come over and you know you're not getting paid well and you’re like, it's you know the complete opposite. The letter that I found in the archive was someone from Yomi, Yonago kind of extending out to be like "come on family, I bought this forest, there's lots of work to be done," and so the piece in the very end shifts this connection to the menu which is actually a papery menu and when the ghosts leaves the menu, sort of a hole rips open and she's able to see this Douglas Fir and this forest. And then when she goes back to the wall where the menu had fallen, and so where the menu hit the wall, also there's a rupture in the wall so she's able to see through to the 1900s B.C. and she starts to see um the sort of like this lush forest and it kind of ends there. And I had imagined that the chapter, that I would come back and finish Rock and Scissors. Rock, Paper, Scissors in Japan is actually Janken-pon, or it's like um, it is you know the game the kids play, of course, and it's sort of a game you play for who goes first or who gets the treat, you know it's like a common game in Asian families. I didn't think, well at some point I thought I would write Rock and Scissors, and Paper was that story that's sandwiched in the middle. But what happened was that when we finished the work everybody from the community or different people kind came forward and I know something about the island or I could tell you something, and um, I was invited back in 2016 for a different residency to kind of gather all this stuff and then Rock and Scissors was born. So that's how Paper got started. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr Joanne Leow |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | North America--Canada--British Columbia----Vancouver |
| Subject Local Name | ----Site-specific--Memory--Migration--Space--Water--Ecology--Family--Boat--Globalization--Displacement---- |