Arts & Consciousness Gallery, John F. Kennedy University
August 17-September 18. Reception: August 21, 6-9pm
Last fall, after meeting other Japanese American Sansei artists through the Asian American Women's Artists’ Association, I suggested that we join forces for a group show. Reiko Fujii, Lucien Kubo, Judy Shintani and I share the same heritage from different vantage points. We work in a variety of media and techniques to express the rich complexities of past and present, legacy and duty, history and secrets. Here's what I wrote for our catalog:
The on-going legacy of the Japanese American experience has rarely been examined through a Sansei lens. Art by first-generation Issei and second-generation Nisei who were incarcerated in American concentration camps during World War II has been well-documented, as has the heavily assimilated and media-centric landscape of younger API artists. But the Sansei have remained a shadow or sandwich generation subsumed between survivor guilt and filial piety on the one hand and kodomo no tame ni (sacrifice for our children) on the other.
The Issei identity was defined by immigration, the Nisei by the mass incarceration. The Sansei children of the incarcerated have a foot in two, maybe three worlds, struggling to find balance along the continuum of Japanese>American. The four of us, now in our 50s and 60s, were born too late to be incarcerated ourselves, but we are old enough to have been influenced by our grandparents’ Issei lifestyles and values, by our Nisei parents’ responses to incarceration and by our own pressures to function in the mainstream rather than in the sheltered backwaters of ethnic enclaves.
We are distinct from the Yonsei, Gosei and Hapa (fourth and fifth generation and mixed heritage) who often express a sense of anger, confusion or loss. The younger generations seek reflections of themselves in the media because they did not grow up seeing themselves reflected in the eyes of a close-knit community. Their childhoods were sanitized of the mud and weeds and sidewalk interactions of traditional lifestyles and cultures. But many Sansei still remember our grandparents' egg farms, strawberry ranches, and single-room occupancy hotels. Our responses to our heritage are diverse, yet remarkably similar, expressing themselves in family ties, community service, political awareness, and a hyper-sensitivity to equal justice for other marginalized peoples. We are Americanized and yet oblique, liberated yet bound by deeply felt obligation.
Why is our perspective important? Our nation is groping for ways to back out of the evolutionary dead-end of of a fossil-fuel economy. At a time when traditional cultures around the globe are dying faster than endangered species, we can no longer look back "home" to replenish traditional values; Japan's salarymen and AsiaPop dollies are almost as far removed from the ancient peasant ways as Japanese Americans are. Perhaps because of the inherited weight of the incarceration, Sansei still embody traces of 19th-century Meiji-era values preserved in amber, as we sift through the gifts and pitfalls of our traditional culture and of our families’ multigenerational American journeys. What do we treasure and what can we lay to rest? How can we add to the multi-faceted and resilience wisdom America needs to meet the challenges of the 21st century?
