Lydia Nakashima Degarrod

Shadows from the Past: Sansei Artists and the American Concentration Camps

Website:

https://www.nakashimadegarrod.com

Biography:

Lydia Nakashima Degarrod has been showing her work in museums and galleries in the US and South America for over 20 years. Recently, her work was selected for the de Young Open at the de Young museum, San Francisco. Other venues include the Universidad Alberto Hurtado. Santiago, Chile; Eranos Foundation, Ascona, Switzerland; Valene L Smith Museum of Anthropology, CA University, Chico; Oliver Art Center, CA College of the Arts, UC, Berkeley; CA Institute of Integral Studies, SF; and the David Rockefeller Center Gallery, Harvard University. She has received many grants and awards including the Winning Artist Award, Wing Luke Memorial Museum; Juror’s Award, International Contemporary Craft & Exhibition, Materials Hard +Soft; CA; Story Fund Grant, CA Council for the Humanities; International Award for Excellence in Art, International Journal of the Arts in Society; Chilean Government Sponsorship Grant, Ministry of Culture, Chile; Visiting Artist and Scholar, Center for Latin American Studies, UC, Berkeley; Purchase Award, Saint John’s University; and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (UC, Berkeley). Artist Residencies include Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Woodside, CA; Asian American Women Artists Asso.,e Young Museum of Art, SF; Center for Art and Public Life, CA College of the Arts; Kala Art Institute; and the Virginia Tech University.  She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology, from UCLA, an MA in Folklore & Mythology, UCLA, her BFA from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Born in Chile, Nakashima Degarrod has lived in the US since 1977. She is currently teaching at the CA College of the Arts and maintains her residence and studio in Oakland, CA. 

Artist Statement:

Studying art and anthropology has helped me to understand in part, what my family has experienced through displacement and fragmentation by never fully feeling a part of the society in which they were forced to live. I am a Japanese Chilean Sansei. I am a descendant of parents who lost their families in the bombing of Hiroshima, and of a Japanese Peruvian father who was forced to leave the country, or face deportation to the US and incarceration in a US concentration camp due to his Japanese heritage. He moved to Chile where I was born and raised. I left Chile in 1974 to study at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where, for the first time in my life, I was part of a large Asian population. The handmade 100 cotton bolls I have created for this exhibit express the feelings of being scattered and displaced as they were conveyed to me by my family. They are also derived from stories I have gathered from descendants of Japanese Peruvians who were taken to camps in the United States then compelled to stay in the US or return--not to their South American countries of birth--but to Japan. Each petal of the boll tells fragments of stories to serve as a catalyst for the release of more memories and reflections. The process of making the papers used for the cotton bolls became a ritual for healing and releasing my family wounds by merging the fibers from the herb yerba known for its healing qualities in Latin America, and the mulberry fibers used traditionally in Japan for paper-making.  

 

 


Mending the Past, 2019 
photo prints on handmade paper, 72" x 48” x 3”  

 


Mending the Past (detail) 

 


​Mending the Past (detail) 

 


​Mending the Past (detail) 

 

Mending the Past is composed of 12 handmade papers combining mulberry bark, a traditional element of Japanese papers, and Yerba Buena, a Latin American herb known for its healing and soothing quality. Each piece is stitched using the Japanese technique of Boro used for mending torn fabrics. The images printed in the papers portrait broadly the history of Japanese Americans from their arrival to Latin America working in the agricultural fields, their detainment during World War II and their continued presence in the cultural fabric of Latin America. “I am a Chilean/Japanese artist whose grandparents migrated to South America at the dawn of World War II where they encountered both hospitality and hostility, the effects of World War II and the clash of disparate cultures in the pursuit of their dreams and escaping danger. Mending the Past honors the resilient presence of Japanese people in Latin America by combining some of the traditional crafts of these cultures, paper-making, the use of healing plants, and mending stitching, with the purpose of healing some of their wounds.” 
 

 


Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls
The Legacy of WW2 on my Japanese Peruvian Family, 2020 
cotton boll, prints on handmade paper, size variable 

 

Lydia uses the cotton boll as a symbol for the Japanese presence in Peru and for the first wave of Japanese immigrants who came to work in the cotton plantations. She has created an installation of 20 enlarged bolls hanging from the ceiling made of mulberry fiber and photo etchings of her father and other Japanese Peruvians who were affected by the actions of the governments of Peru and United States during World War II. They were labelled as enemies because of their Japanese ancestry and either deposed to house arrest or expelled from Peru and sent to incarceration centers in the United States. Her installation seeks to evoke the feelings of being scattered and rootless experienced by some descendants of Japanese Peruvians who, because of their parents’ fate, grew up in countries different from their parents. She reflects, “After World War II, my father was forced to escape to Chile. In Peru he had been treated like the enemy, and he had lost all of his family in the bombing of Hiroshima. I was born and raised in Chile where I grew up without an understanding of my father’s sense of alienation and fragmentation. As a Sansei living in California, I aim at understanding the suffering that my father experienced and my own sense of fragmentation and feeling of not belonging.” 

 


Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls (detail) 



Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls (detail) 

 


Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls (detail) 

 


Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls (detail)

 


Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls (detail) 

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