Installation, 2012 

As early as the 1880’s, small Japanese businesses existed in Vancouver that catered primarily to the floating labourers along the Powell Street area.  The Japanese moved into this area and were gainfully employed working in sawmills, gardening, domestic and hotel service and nearly half were involved in commercial enterprise. Before World War II, this area known as Japantown or Nihonmachi was a concentrated area of Japanese activities including grocery stores, restaurants, cafes, lodging houses, dry goods shops, bathhouses, fish markets and specialty stores like the confectionary shops that sold specialty Japanese sweets. In 1942, over 20,000 Japanese Canadians were forcibly dispersed and uprooted from their homes and lost possession of their businesses and properties to be sold without consent by the Canadian government.

confections is a new and ongoing project that reworks the memory and history of the abundant confectionary shops and kashitens available in the bustling Powell Street area blocks away from the B.C. Sugar Refinery. As of 1941 there were at least 19 Japanese confectionaries, bakeries, and senbei ya that were found along Powell, Hastings, Gore, Dunlevy, Alexander and Main Street.  The installation attempts to re-create that and bring forth a site of memory; an interior of a space and time of nostalgic handmade confectionery that has now disappeared.  The installation includes audio interviews with those that grew up in and around the Powell Street area and the creation of specialty Japanese sweets with members of various Japanese Canadian community groups that presently still continue the culinary tradition. confections continues the research and memory work that was explored through the Open Doors Project, a series of historic panels presented as a graphic memoir found at the storefront of businesses presently occupying the Powell and Jackson Street area. The panels reflect the history of the Japantown area through the documentation of the businesses and shops that existed before and after the war.

Originally part of group exhibition with Raymond Boisjoly, Stan Douglas, Ali Kazimi, Vanessa Kwan, Evan Lee called To | From BC Electric Railway 100 Years at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, curated by Makiko Hara and Annabel Vaughan

Photo Credit to Trevor Brady.