Cindy Mochizuki

Mochizuki’s art practice is often focused on community, inter-generational knowledge and historic memory, and afterlife of objects. Mochizuki’s grandparents, who were uprooted from Vancouver during WWII, become a background theme of her works frequently.

Autumn Strawberry (Summer 2019) was a research project conducted during Mochizuki’s artist residency at Surrey Art Gallery. Including Mochizuki’s paternal grandparents, many Japanese Canadians worked in strawberry farms in Fraser Valley, which lands were confiscated by Canadian Government during wartime. The project resulted in a creation of two-channels animated film, which to be shown in 2021.

Mochizuki’s illustrations appear in West Coast Line, Front magazine, Alternatives Journal, and other illustrated books, such as Perpetual by Rita Wong and Things on the Shoreline.

Shako Club (2015), or a "social club," was a community-based project conducted in Mochizuki’s two-months artist residency at Grunt gallery, Vancouver. In collaboration with a Japanese Community Volunteer Association, Tonari Gumi, the project focused on community bonding through cooking and sharing knowledge and story; seniors made unique lunch boxes (bento) that incorporate their personal stories and wellness philosophies. Other members could order those lunch boxes in exchange of gifts to seniors who made those "culinary sculpture.”

Open Doors Project (2011) was a public art project taken place at the Powell Street Festival in 2011. Using Japanese card game, hanafuda as a visual inspiration, Mochizuki created sixteen panels as historic reference points of Japanese and Japanese Canadian people and their personal narratives. Each panel was placed each in front of a building, which used to host shops and institutions run by Japanese communities before WWII.

Cindy Mochizuki (born 1976) is a multimedia Japanese Canadian artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Through her drawings, installations, performance, and video works created through community-engaged and location-specific research projects, Mochizuki explores how historical and family memories are passed down in the form of narratives, folktales, rituals and archives. Mochizuki’s works have been exhibited in multiple countries including Japan, the USA, and Canada. Mochizuki received MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in 2006. She received Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award in New Media and Film in 2015.

This book was created after her research in Yonago, Tottori prefecture in Japan, where approximately 1,500 people migrated to British Columbia, Canada between 1895 and the onset of the Pacific War. The book contains an essay by a curator, Makiko Hara.