Reflecting on Hawaiian Textile History

I am starting to distill ideas for a grant application letter of intent. The collaboration I hope to fund would examine Hawaiian Aloha textiles and garments designed by a Alfred Shaheen. It would explore the divergence and threads of commonality between the exported image of Hawaii and the actual Hawaii lived by Japanese Hawaiians.

Here is a digital sketch of one component of the project. This hanging curtain of pattern pieces would be composed of sample work in progress pattern shapes. The pattern pieces will be digitally printed with images of my textile designs. The installation would also include pattern pieces in the shape of objects from Hawaii plantation era and perhaps silhouettes echoing the diverse cultures of Silicon Valley today. Already some of the pattern shapes remind me of Hawaiian objects...such as poi pounders.

The above is just a rough concept. I really need to iron out the whole project and make it tightly fit. I visualize working with Colleen Quen, an amazing San Francisco fashion designer. The partnering nonprofit would be The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

I am really excited about the possibility of creating my own textile prints that reflect a fading visual vocabulary of the Japanese Hawaiian experiences. This grant would enable me to explore that direction and to bridge my digital skills with my fine art mixed media skills.

Here is a company that will print digital textiles. I have read great things about it and look forward to testing them out: Spoonflower.

This production service in Scotland looks amazing. Centre For Advanced Textiles at The Glasglow School of Art.

Artifacts from Heinlenville for student animation

It is very exciting to now have a few artifacts on hand to start building the history based animation project. Last weekend my daughter and I attended the Spirit of Japantown Festival in San Jose and met with Connie Young Yu. We were able to look at archeological artifacts from the Heinlenville dig. Connie had the great suggestion that I provide the workshop students with magnifying glasses to get a closer look at the objects. It was a great honor for me to meet Connie Young Yu and I had just completed reading her book Chinatown San Jose, USA. I also read an essay of hers in the book Life along the Guadalupe River- an Archeological and Historical Journey. Her writings bring to life the experiences of early Chinese immigrants in San Jose.


















Above: Small poreclain bowls. Collection of Connie Young Yu



















Above: Chinese and United States coins. These coins were found in the money box from Connie Young Yu's grandparent's store, Quong Wo Chan. Collection of Connie Young Yu

















Above and below: Bricks from the Heinlenville archeological excavation. These bricks are from 1887! They were probably created by Chinese labor. The above brick is from the steps of the Ng Shing Gung Temple. There is a recreation of this temple (using many original elemnents) at the San Jose History Park.



















The above brick is from 34 Cleveland Avenue, the site of the Quong Wo Chan store.The name of this general store meant Peaceful, Splendid Place.

I look forward to sharing these artifacts with the children.
Below is a more detailed description of this project.

CONCEPT FOR ANIMATION WORKSHOP SERIES:
This workshops series explores the history of San Jose's Heinlenville and Japantown. Students at two Santa Clara County schools will work with clay and paper to recreate archeological dig artifact fragments which they will transform into whole objects. The objects will be animated and transformed to tell an intimate and personal story that brings the history of these communities to life.

HISTORY AND CULTURAL COMPONENT:
Heinlenville was a walled community created in response to arson and was the last of six San Jose Chinatowns. John Heinlen was a German immigrant who established himself in San Jose as a businessman and a farmer. He assiseted the Chinese by building a walled community for them after a sereis of arson attacks reduced thier community to ashes. San Jose's Japantown sprung up to surround Heinlenville. Japantown abruptly disappeared when Japanese Americans were interned during WWII. Japantown emerged again in the same location when some families returned to the area after Internment.
Archeologists form the Anthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State Univeristy and local San Jose historians worked with the Redevelopment Agency of the City of San Jose to unearth selected areas of Helinlenville and early Japantown.

GOAL:
The workshop series will culmulate in five minute films exploring the lives fo Chinese and Japanese people who worked in the agricultural industries of San Jose in the late 1800's to the mid 1900's. The exploration will be accomplished through the study of artifact fragements uncovered in recent excavations. The benefits of the workshop series are:
1. Exposure to the many stepped process of stop motion animation
2. Team Building and problem solving skills through an engaging and fun artistic endeavor
3.Enhancement of visual and verbal communication skills
4. Introduction to archeology through hands-on use of archeological dig artifacts and the reading of archeological research literature.
5. Knowledge of local California history

AUDIENCE REACHED:
This workshop series will be conducted at two schools at far ends of Santa Clara County after Star Testing in May.

At Horace Cureton Elementary School of Alum Rock, San Jose, 84% of the students are Hispanic and many have argricultural labor roots. The family histories of Chinese and Japanese laborers working in the strawberry fields and canneries of the late 1800's to mid 1900's may resonate with the children. This will heighten their cultural understanding and enrich them with the ability to see common threads of experience in different cultures.

At Stevens Creek Elementary School of Cupertino 63% of the students are Asian and many of these are first and second generation Asian American children of highly educated parents working in technology industries. Learing about past Asian immigrants who came to work in very different conditions will increase their appreciation for past immigrant experiences and the ground they paved for future generations.

I am now trying to find funding to bring these workshops to life in the spring. Last year we were able to obtain a grant from the Alum Rock Education Foundation for material costs for my animation workshops at Horace Cureton. I am hoping to identify and target a few more grant sources so that this is not an entirely volunteer endeavor.

San Jose History in Animation Workshop

Ever since I read about an archeological excavation of the walled Chinatown of Heinlenville in Japantown, San Jose, I have been brewing ideas on how to explore the amazing rich history of this area in art. At first I conceptualized a dance piece in which I would create the sets from fragments simulation excavation artifacts, but then over the past month or so I have been thinking more along the lines of animation. I teach simple stop motion animation in elementary schools and conducted a few workshops this summer. I now visualize creating a lesson plan that invites the student to look at archeological artifacts and bring them to life through the stories of people who lived in and have memories of Heinlenville and Nihonmachi.

I envision the children creating their animated stories with clay and drawings. Above: I created a rough animated sketch of a bowl fragment becoming a bowl from which strawberry emerge from the porcelain pattern and Chinese workers grow out of the double happiness symbol. Many of the Chinese who came to San Jose worked in the Strawberry fields.

















Above: sample shoe box with frame and pottery inside. I envision groups of children creating a shoebox diorama in which the archeological artifacts emerge from the fragments and transform to tell an intimate personal story of past lives in Heinlenville and early Japantown.

It would be fantastic to use actual fragments from the dig as reference images for such transformation sequences. And, of course, there would be music as well as narration which would give more information on the history. I can see a half dozen artifact come to life somehow and offer a small intimate detail of life in Heinlenville or Japantown, little stories that give a taste of life in these communities.

Above is a super rough storyboard I created inspired by a quote I read on a bench in Nihonmachi, San Jose. Narration is by my nine year old son. There are benches throughout San Jose's Japantown etched with quotes from individuals relating stories of the old communities. This quote caught my eye as it talked about children watching a man making noodles by jumping up and down on a pole. I just couldn't visualize this process so I researched it. How do you jump up and down on a bamboo pole? I found this amazing video on bamboo noodle making. It shows how it is done, it takes hours to do and it is both a beautiful and brutal process.

Below: bench in front of the Ken Ying Low building in San Jose's Japantown.

Japanese Purse Workshop

I am designing a Japanese purse making workshop for Serentripity Learning Vacations that will be conducted at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and at the residence of Yoshi of Yoshi's Restaurants/Jazz Clubs. I will be conducting these workshop once in September, November and December.

The hour long workshops focus on the reuse themes in Japanese textiles such as boro (work clothes made of stitched together scraps) and sashiko stitching. The base of the purse is a recycled plastic sushi tray. The embellishments reflect a blend of contemporary Japan with the creative thriftiness of Meji era Japan: plastic sushi grass stitched alongside mini shoyu bottles, pearls, and Japanese Delica beads. Regarding the base fabric, we will use recycled Filipino noodle bags (thank you Anne Marie!) overlayed with organza silks. This use of recycle fabrics and materials is a theme common in my work as I am greatly inspired by the Japanese Hawaiian Plantation culture of my father's family.


















I have also created several manga "kawaii" characters that participants can iron onto the fabric of their purses. Contemporary Japanese manga and the recent "Kawaii" graphic style movement have roots in Japan's reaction and exposure to U.S. culture during its occupation after WWII. A great reference book about this period of transformatio in Japan is Embracing Defeat. I found this book fascinating because for me it pinpointed some of the sources of divergence in culture and perspective between Japanese Hawaiians and Japanese in Japan.

Below are these iron-on characters. They are decorated with fragments of vintage Chinese and Japanese food wrappers. I created them in Photoshop and used bits of wrappers I scanned from my collection.















































Below: A butterfly iron-on image created from my Asian food wrapper collection:



















I have created a prototype purse. The cord slider is a mini shoyu bottle (in the shape of a pig). The thick red cording my father picked up for me a few years ago in China.























This purse below has the image of a kiri leaf which is of historical importance. It is a bombing leaflet that the U.S. forces dropped on the Aleutian Islands when the Japanese occupied them during WWII. It alludes to the early falling of Kiri leaves which is a bad omen in Japan. These leaf leaflets warn the Japanese soldiers that their efforts are futile. It also was ironic imagery as there are no trees of mention on these sparsely vegetated islands. I included this image on my purse as the end of The War led to the absorption things Western in occupied Japan. It lead to modern Japan's embrace and zeal for all that is new and marked it's separation from Japanese in diaspora who clung to the thrify Meji Era ways. This purse mixes these two directions.























Detail: Sushi grass and mini fish shoyu bottle embellishment. The shoyu bottle is stuffed with pink produce netting to give it color.

Haiku Project for Asian Art Museum

Last week I completed another art/education project for the San Francisco Asian Art Museum's Lords of the Samurai exhibit. This was probably the most fun of all the projects for me. I love attempting to write haiku and children enjoy playing around with this type of poetry, too.

There was a fantastic article in The L.A. Times a few weeks back about the role of poetry in the history of a particular samurai line. The article's dramatic opening describes the saving of the Hosokawa samurai clan from certain defeat in battle. The samurai leader Yusai Hosokawa was deemed such a valuable poet that the emperor stopped the battle and saved a highly artistic samurai clan in the process.
Here is the article:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-samurai19-2009jul19,0,3632270.story

Below is my craft project for the museum. It will be posted on the Asian Art Museum's website (scroll towards the bottom) in a few weeks.

















































This above haiku project is fun to do with children for Poetry Month in May.
Here is a great children haiku book for reference:
Haiku Picturebook for Children
I know there are other good children haiku books out there, but I really like this one because the illustrations are great and it has both the Japanese and the English translations.

Final Animation Camp Screening

This morning we had the screening of all four of the summer camp animations. I am having difficulty posting the final flash animations on the blog, perhaps the sizes are too big. At any rate, I have posted the final animations on my YouTube site.

Here is the Vanity Animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHYzw1LCSLk&feature=channel_page

Here is the Teamwork Animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQfNmTwGfjw&feature=channel_page

Here is the Funny Crazy Animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Uccwm36yU&feature=channel_page

Here is the Discoveries in the Garden Animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRG6LkL7fbs&feature=channel_page

We were very fortunate to have Raquel Coelho as a guest speaker. Ms. Coelho is an Animation professor at San Jose State University and has worked at many animation house in The San Francisco Bay Area. She shared her puppet making process with the children and parents. She was a wonderfully engaging speaker and she had a lot of materials to share.














































Below: Some of the puppet making materials Raquel brought in.



















Below: Puppet figure from one of her books.























Raquel also brought some of her beautifully illustrated children books from Brazil. The illustrations were photos of lovely shadow boxes depicting in puppets the history of theater from around the world. For the conclusion she shared with us a wonderful short animation she worked on called Moon Girl. Below: Raquel brought in one of her shadow box pieces. This one depicts the famous photographer Eadweard Muybridge.























Detail:

Animation Camp Session 2, rough drafts of animations

Here are the rough drafts of animations from the second session of animation camp. The children were really creative and I loved the different stories each came up with. The children imported each of their still images into Premiere Elements. The audio they recorded on the last day of the workshop. I cleaned up these sound files with the freeware Audacity. This animation, The Funny Crazy Animation, is almost completed. Audio is inserted. I will do a little Photoshop retouch to eliminate some of the string and wire supports. The end credit text will also be added.



The tales in the animation Discoveries in the Garden all have garden or park scenes. The figures in this group worked quite well with the magnet feet and cookie tray. I will be doing a little bit of Photoshop retouching of wires and such in this animation as well.


We will be having a screening of the children's work next Monday. We are also fortunate to have Raquel Coelho present a few of her animations, her puppets and children's books during this gathering. She is a professor in the Animaiton Department at San Jose State and has worked at DreamWorks and other Bay Area animation studios. I am really excited to see her work in person and know the children will be inspired by her work, too. She has been very gracious in agreeing to speak to us. We were also very lucky to have a tour at De Anza College's Animation Department with this group as well last Thursday.