Sasaki and Mochizuki, Building Boats and Japanese Folktales: Where do we begin? -- A Review

by Shelby Lu

Jon Sasaki We First Need a Boat for the Rising Tide to Lift Us and Cindy Mochizuki Cave to Dream

Richmond Art Gallery

September 29 - November 17, 2019

A wooden boat displayed perfectly still on a rectangular plinth is the first piece you encounter when entering the Richmond Art Gallery. This is Jon Sasaki’s We First Need a Boat for the Rising Tide to Lift Us. Inching deeper into the gallery, you see Cindy Mochizuki’s Cave to Dream; a small theatrical staging of a cave with projected visuals. Immediately your imagination is captured, and although very different, the two exhibitions bring to life the different facets of telling a story–whether it be from personal history or from a belief in folktales and myths. Both shows are tied to each other in their desire to produce different flavors of storytelling through an artistic touch.

Jon Sasaki, Image still of Jon Sasaki building the boat from We Must First Build a Boat Performance. Images Courtesy of Randy Gledhill.

Sasaki’s piece titled We First Need a Boat for the Rising Tide to Lift Us is told both with the structure of the wooden boat laid out in gallery and an accompanying performance that was filmed in July at Garry Point Park in Steveston. In this performance, Sasaki was submerged waist-deep in water carrying only basic materials and tools. Sasaki then attempts to build a functioning boat that will allow him to enter and paddle himself to shore. However, as he has never built a boat before, the result does not hold his weight. This is the boat that is on display. Displayed across the wooden boat in a display case are the tools and materials that Sasaki used to build the boat. One tool, a Japanese saw cutter, has rusted almost entirely. Others have
been maintained in perfect condition. As these tools are neatly placed behind glass, it gives a sense of physical documentation of the materials Sasaki’s used to achieve his final product. Perhaps he is not archiving the non-functionality of the boat, but the generational and transcultural loss of knowledge.

Sasaki performed this piece in Steveston, the home of his Japanese-Canadian family pre-interment. His grandfather owned a fishing business, but was never able to pass those skills on. I couldn’t help but sympathize with this loss experienced by Japanese-Canadians brought forward in this work. This treatment of minority groups is a reminder that everyone should be aware of how we treat people, regardless of their ethnicity, race, gender, sex, etc. The loss is the subject tying together the two works by Sasaki that are displayed in We First Need a Boat for the Rising Tide to Lift Us— a video piece titled Adaptability (2019) and a document by the Kishizo Kimara
in 1942 titled Kishizo Kimura fonds, number 2010.4.4.1.22. The video depicts the use and reuse of a piece of origami paper folded it into different forms: a boat, a house, a flower and etc. The different shapes the origami paper took reflects on the adaptability to quick changes that is very well known to post-internment Japanese Canadians. The shift from one drastic event to another forced the Japanese-Canadians to figure out effective plan to accommodate to their new life, however, documentation of their change was little to non-existent in archives. One document
Sasaki was able to obtain was the, Kishizo Kimura fonds, number 2010.4.4.1.22. The Kishizo Kimura fonds is a part of the Japanese Fishing Boat Disposition Committee which recorded the sale of boats owned by Japanese Canadians. Wanting to find more, Sasaki’s search was cut short when he was only able to obtain one record of a Japanese boat being purchased due to the lack of documentation for Japanese-Canadian fishermen as they were deemed “unimportant”.

Cindy Mochizuki, Film still of Snow in Cave to Dream, 2019.

Meanwhile, in a separate section of the gallery, we are drawn into this theatrical setting of four fictional stories: Onyx, Salt, Shadow, Snow (2019). Mochizuki’s work has a strong relationship to site-specificity, invisible histories, archives and memory work. In this current exhibition, she dove into Japanese folktales and myths and explores this ritual, yet magical approach to storytelling. Mochizuki’s Cave to Dream incorporates small-scale theatrical sets to project her ink and wash drawings, which become animated later in the film. Each film tells a story that is inspired by Japanese myths and legends. Displayed at the centre of the set, there are different shaped porcelain game pieces made by Mochizuki herself. The objective of the game is

to simply help enhance the performance of the overall aesthetic in the three-dimensional space. It was also used in a performance on November 16th where performers were playing with the games pieces similarly to how people play chess or checkers. Surrounded by blue and purple toned lighting, the atmosphere takes you into the spiral effect of entering a very formidable cave, carved with different stories to tell.

The more intimate and encircled exhibition of Mochizuki, with the different screened caves relates to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which explores isolated and shackled people that are bound and unable to head towards daylight. They are forced to create their own stories and allow their imagination to take them elsewhere. This concept of the cave surrounded with different vessels of imagination sparks this conversation of what is fictional.

Storytelling is always evolving. Whether one is trapped in an enclosed space and is only exposed to a certain idea or is trying to unravel new knowledge of past histories, you are left with only a surface level of understanding the meaning of storytelling.

Sasaki brings the audience into a world of challenging oneself of skills that, at one point, were within the family but were eliminated due to unfortunate circumstances, taking on the subject of endurance and quick adaptation to new conditions. Mochizuki takes us into a world of Japanese storytelling, bringing the audience into this mysterious, yet intricate environment of four individual video installations. Mochizuki’s ability to tie the subject back together through the notion of the relationship between the human and non-human characters guides the motion of moving through the various environments and dreamscapes within the context of a confined cave.

Through my experience with We First Need a Boat for the Rising Tide to Lift Us and
Cave to Dream, I was able to gain insight of not only Japanese histories and their culture, but the stories of how both Sasaki and Mochizuki’s families experienced a generational impact of internment camps. The different approaches both artists used in terms of Japanese culture brought new depth to the subject.