The Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre is being transformed into a Japanese rock garden – made entirely of sugar.
BETA VULGARIS: The Sugar Beet Projects is an installation by Kelty Miyoshi McKinnon that will debut in February for a four-month run at the museum. It opens with a reception on Saturday, Feb. 10 from 2 to 4 p.m.
“The exhibit explores the relationship between the seemingly innocuous material of sugar and Japanese Canadian history in Western Canada,” McKinnon said in a press release.
The installation will include large sculptural boulders made of molten, burnt and sculpted sugar, with a wooden boardwalk traversing the landscape to emulate the sugar beet fields in Southern Alberta.
Japanese Canadians were forced into labour on sugar beet fields during the Second World War as part of the internment of the population. The B.C. Securities Commission Council organized “the Sugar Beet Projects,” which gave Japanese Canadian families a chance to stay together if they moved to the Prairies or Ontario to work the fields.
The result? Japanese Canadians supplied labour for 65 per cent of Alberta’s sugar beet acreage during the war.
McKinnon, a fourth-generation Japanese Canadian, shares a common narrative of Japanese Canadian history: “displacement, disenfranchisement and disorientation.”
The exhibition highlights the contrast between that history and the conditions of labour with what’s described as the “purity, genericity and neutrality of sugar.”
The exhibition will also include video imagery projected onto the sugared surfaces, along with a contemporary interpretive koto soundscape by Keri Latimer.
BETA VULGARIS: The Sugar Beet Projects opens Feb. 10 and runs to May 27 at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre, 6688 Southoaks Cres.
See centre.nikkeiplace.org for details.
