Brandon Shimoda and Aisuke Kondo: March 7, 2019

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The Poetry Center presents Brandon Shimoda and Aisuke Kondo, featuring a reading, an art presentation, and conversation. Shimoda reads a new work, written for the occasion, reflecting on the experience and legacy of Japanese American internment during World War II, followed by one long poem from his book The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018). Kondo, Japanese artist and visiting scholar at SF State in Asian American Studies, speaks (with live Japanese-to-English interpretation by Wesley Uenten) on the influence of his great grandfather's migration to the US and his internment during World War II in the Topaz Camp, in Utah, on his own art and creative process, interspersed with a video presentation and slideshow from recent exhibitions. Prior to the event, the audience was invited to join an informal gathering at the Ruth Asawa Garden of Remembrance, a public space designed to commemorate the 19 Japanese American San Francisco State University students incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. The reading and presentation are followed by a conversation between the artists and with the audience (with Japanese-English interpretation by Takeshi Moro). This event, funded in part by a Ford Foundation grant to the Academy of American Poets in support of the Poetry Coalition, is part of a series of nationwide programming during the month of March 2019 in conjunction with the Poetry Coalition, under the theme: "What is it then between us?" Poetry and Democracy, and was co-sponsored by the Department of Asian American Studies at SF State.

Originally Recorded By
DocFilm Institute
Location
The Poetry Center, SFSU
Date
03/07/2019
Total Run Time
01:44:59
Contributor
Steve Dickison, Wesley Uenten, Takeshi Moro, Susan Gevirtz, Steve Fujiwara, Jacob Kahn, Valerie Soe, Elaine Katzenberger
Rights
©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu
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3211
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66

Brandon Shimoda (00:27:56)

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After Steve Dickison introduces Brandon Shimoda, Aisuke Kondo, and the program (one in a nationwide group of programs titled, after a line of Walt Whitman, "What is it then between us?" Poetry and Democracy), Brandon Shimoda speaks on his hatred of Whitman as well as his previous experience visiting the Ruth Asawa Garden of Remembrance at SF State. He then reads a newly finished work, which he describes as "some notes on Ruth Asawa in the Garden of Remembrance." After recalling his visit, with other descendants of Japanese-American concentration camp survivors, to the Gila River Internment Camp outside Phoenix, Arizona, he finishes by reading "Gila River," from The Desert.

Aisuke Kondo (00:34:44)

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Aisuke Kondo (with live Japanese-to-English interpretation by Wesley Uenten, Professor of Asian American Studies at SF State) presents a talk, with video and slides, focused on the formation of his artistic practice and his current preoccupations. The presentation is interspersed with several showings of Kondo's work stemming from this change in artistic trajectory: a viewing of "About M.K." (2017), a video installation from Tokyo Art Museum (TAM) in Tokyo, Japan (2016); photos from the exhibition "The Past in the Present," from Gallery TURNAROUND in Sendai, Japan (2018); a viewing of "here where you stood," the eponymous video installation from the exhibition at MINTMOUE in Los Angeles, California (2017); photos and drawings from his solo exhibition "diaspora Memoria" at Kommunale Galerie in Berlin, Germany (2018); a viewing of the video work "The Past in the Present in SF" (2017); photos from the exhibition "here where you stood" at MINTMOUE in Los Angeles, California; and photos from the exhibition "On my great-grandfather who was living in San Francisco as an immigrant," at Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto, Japan (2016).

Conversation (00:34:45)

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Shimoda and Kondo take questions from the audience, with live Japanese-to-English interpretation by Takeshi Moro, Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University. In response to a question from Jacob Kahn, Shimoda and Kondo discuss the experience of working with ancestral memory and trauma in their creative work. Shimoda remarks how inheritors of such history are eternally made to revisit it. Susan Gevirtz asks about the relationship between research, time, and speculation in relation to creative work regarding family history, to which Kondo remarks that he cannot "get away" from the subject, even if his family does not understand his work. Shimoda agrees, adding that "Time doesn't care about what we do." They discuss the use of anger as both fuel for creative work and affective site of surveillance for marginalized identities by larger state forces. "If you're non-white in America," says Shimoda, "anger is not permissable. It's seen as evidence of your inability to fit in." Steve Fujiwara asks how travel and crossing borders affects awareness in both artists' work. Shimoda complicates the question by remarking on his own racial identity as a half-white, half-Japanese American citizen. Kondo, having lived for a long time outside Japan, for 15 years in Berlin and now living in San Francisco, sympathizes with the position of the "outsider."

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