“The Picnic” is ten historic photographs printed on canvas, painted, and altered. The images dating from the 1930’s, are from a personal collection of a Japanese Canadian woman who, because she was not in Canada during World War 2, unknowingly saved them from being confiscated or burned. I embarked on the curation of about one hundred photographs from her collection. Within the collection, I chose five images. They stood out as unusual, vibrant, with a “selfie” like quality. They showed Japanese Canadians at leisure, being unselfconscious and not being ethnicized, exoticized or othered. This racialized leisure creates new possibilities for Japanese Canadians to see themselves in Art. While the photos have a joyous quality - a community taking pictures of itself - for itself, they also have a foreboding quality, lying in wait for circumstances that will break their peaceful existence. The communal life they depict will soon be destroyed through the uprooting, internment, and dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Many Japanese Canadians lived in Richmond, especially in the fishing community of Steveston. 

The paintings all have a gold, or kinstugi line running through them. Kinstugi is the practise of mending broken pottery with lacquer and gold, and philosophically, not discarding, but mending what is broken. By piecing them together again, something more beautiful is created. These paintings enable Japanese Canadians to heal, culturally and emotionally. 

It is important for me to show Japanese Canadians at leisure in the distant past and bring them into contemporary life. It raises questions of who is entitled to leisure? What if we had been able to psychologically continue from this place in history, until now? The opportunity to see the characters from about one hundred years ago, in a Gallery setting, will be thought provoking. 

“The Picnic” speaks about a pioneer group of Steveston and Richmond, when brought into the modern milieu, creates questions, pride, and awareness of a sense of place. The past has residual reverberations that can be discovered when viewed within a contemporary context.