Patience & Persistence

19 September, 2025 – 16 January,2026

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka & Johnny Nghiem
Curated by Miao Xuan Liu

Prince Takamado Gallery
at the Canadian Embassy to Japan
Tokyo, Japan

Exhibition statement

In Patience and Persistence, an ephemeral force undergirds the work of Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka and Johnny Nghiem. Hanging from thread, wavering images on delicate sheets scatter like constellations among intricate Washi clothing, patchworked sculpture, and textile. Some dangle variably off kozo sticks like husks. All are aglow with a seemingly immanent translucency.

Washi is traditional Japanese paper made from the renewable plant fibers of kozo, mitsumata, and gampi. In Patience and Persistence, this laborious, ancient, and endangered material forms the subject and medium of formal experimentation and embodied labour. Emerging from Hatanaka’s intimate engagements with traditional paper makers in Japan and Vietnam and documented through video and image by Nghiem, the exhibition touches upon themes of lineage, ecological wellbeing, and interconnectedness.

In Nghiem’s photographs of rural and urban Japan and Vietnam, life is at a standstill. In effect, presences are sensed more than imaged, the interior life a stand-in for corporeality. Bodies are glimpsed from behind, and uninhabited landscapes are captured indiscreetly in a mirror’s burnished glow. In the weightlessness that results, a diasporic imprecision thwarts any attempts at chronology. Rather, we encounter a dreamlike quality beyond the concretized confines of colonial time and place.

Hatanaka likewise demonstrates an affinity for the rhythms of the natural world. In her hand, milk white surfaces are stained with pigment from the earth. The marks are sometimes precise, such as printed swathes of undulating snow of the Arctic, memorializing her long-term collaboration with communities in Kinngait, Nunavut, and other times the marks are intuitive free free-handed gestures. This contrast is no coincidence - Hatanaka is interested in the calcified and transformative side by side, prodding delicate equilibria found at the centre of both ecological and emotional health.

One only needs to read the artwork titles to realize that for the artist, these terrains of uncertainty are equal parts bodily as terrestrial: “Aftershocks”, “one last thing”, “freeze or fly, fly or flight”. Strata upon strata, patch by patch, through Hatanaka’s hand instability takes form where the personal, environmental, and historical collide. This reflects an engagement with ecological metaphors of mental wellness, including her own experience with depression and bipolar.
By forging strength from fragility and combining artistic production with social enterprise, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka and Johnny Nghiem underscore the interconnected nature that animates their practices. Patience and Persistence extends that spirit, presenting a significant survey of artworks embedded with craft philosophy. As the persistent stream that carves through calcified stone over time, this exhibition suggests that principles which sustain ecological systems might be the same ones that also support human and relational wellness, commemorating the slow, gestural, and measured force.

— Miao Xuan Liu

The works are almost entirely created with washi (Japanese paper) made by Kashiki Seishi, a seventh generation family mill in the famous region of Tosa Washi, producing within a tradition of over 1000 years, where Hatananaka was artist in residence. The exhibition encapsulates three years of the artists’ evolving work together, including two documentaries learning with great appreciation about regionally specific, environmentally sustainable papermaking traditions: one in Kochi, Japan, and the other in northern Vietnam – the places of the artists’ ancestry.

In Minor Keys
61st Biennale di Venezia
By Koyo Kouoh

Curatorial Team:
Marie Hélène Pereira
Siddhartha Mitter
Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo
Rory Tsapayi
Rasha Salti

05 May, 2025 – 22 November, 2026

Location:
Giardini
Central Pavilion

Photos: Marco Pavan

catalogue text by claire shea

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka documents humanity’s physical and emotional relationships with the natural world, considering how environmental changes can also be reflected in our “inner landscapes”. Materially, her work is dedicated to upholding embodied knowledge related to the environment that is increasingly endangered or ignored.

Recent research into the evolutionary origin of bipolar “disorder” suggests that it may have developed during the last Ice Age as an adaptive response to extreme climate variability. For Hatanaka, who lives with the condition, this research explains that it may have evolved as a sensitive attunement to nature by cultivating a spectrum of moods – from the extremely energetic and creative manic periods through to shutdown or hibernation in the more depressive periods to conserve energy. Considering this entanglement of affect with the environment, Hatanaka wonders what we might learn from bipolar condition that could be helpful as the climate continues to change.

This understanding resonates with Hatanaka’s wider concern with the corporeal knowledge that moves across generations and connects us beyond our individual existence. A key part of her practice is her research and work with papermaking techniques, particularly washi, continuing a tradition practiced across East and Southeast Asia for over two thousand years. She embraces printmaking as well, as an embodied language honed through sensory repetition, in which even the ideal ink viscosity can be heard before it is seen.

Hatanaka’s works often depict the High Arctic, where she has been involved in community-engaged projects in Kinngait, Nunavut, for over a decade. There, she witnessed the tangible effects of climate change and learned from Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit generational wisdom), which carries a remarkable attunement to nature as a means of survival. The works Moveable and Immovable feature linocut prints of the snowdrifts Inuit have used for centuries as natural navigational guides. They double as documentation of this fragile environment, which is under threat from rising temperatures.

Hatanaka also practises gyotaku – a traditional Japanese printmaking method that fishermen employed to record their catches before the invention of photography. Today, scientists examine these historical prints to assess the biodiversity of fish species in centuries past. Hatanaka, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were fishermen, creates gyotaku prints during her travels and residencies, maintaining a symbolic and material connection to the marine world while upholding this practice of documentation. She stitches together prints, created across geographies and time, to form larger works such as Namazu (2023), which retells the Japanese legend of a catfish that thrashed about, causing earthquakes. In the period following the 1855 Edo (now Tokyo) earthquake, images of Namazu-e, or “catfish prints”, began to circulate widely, as this “earthquake fish” was considered responsible for initiating the great disaster. But this legend is not pure fabrication, as seismologists have since confirmed that catfish exhibit increased agitation several hours before earthquakes, enabling them to “predict” these events with remarkable accuracy.

Echoing this seismic theme, Faultlines and Loneliness (2024) and Instability (2024) explore the changing language of emotion, mapping collective psychological shifts. In both works, Hatanaka embeds a graph that charts the steep rise in the usage of the words loneliness and instability, respectively, over time. In the Giardini, Susceptibility to Gravity (2026), a series of seven outdoor flags, draws inspiration from koinobori, or carp flags. Made by sailmakers, they soar in the winds that contribute to more frequent occurrences of acqua alta flooding in Venice. Recalling the Japanese legend of carp that swim upstream despite strong currents, they symbolise strength and courage.

—Claire Shea, 2026

Orbital

7 January, 2026 – 16 January,2026

Group Exhibition

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

Berlin, Germany

Exhibition statement

‘The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour.’ Taken from Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital, this line captures the strange duality at the heart of the exhibition: the exhilaration of seeing our world from a distance, and the quiet ache that such distance can produce. Orbital, at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, brings together painting, sculpture, collage and prints by artists who look to the cosmos not for escape, but as a way of reframing our relationship with the Earth and with one another. Across their works, celestial imagery becomes a lens for thinking about vulnerability, ecological change and how we understand our place in the world.

Artists:

Alina Birkner, Johan Deckmann, Kyriaki Goni, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Parsa Hosseinpour, Melanie King, Anna Kubelik & Tarik Goetzke, Maryam Lamei Harvani, Hannah Luxton, Roman Manikhin, Eeman Masood, Hormazd Narielwalla and Janet Vollebregt

Sanctuary

28 January, 2026 – 7 March,2026

Group Exhibition

Fridman Gallery

New York City, US

Sustenance by Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka
58 x 85”
collograph, gyotaku and linocut printmaking, natural dye, ink, konnyaku, sewn washi from Kashiki Seishi
2025

Exhibition statement

Fridman Gallery is honored to announce Sanctuary, a group exhibition examining root causes and psychological effects of displacement. The exhibition title refers to “sanctuary cities”, including New York, which are supposed to afford legal protection for immigrants, and, in a more general sense, to sanctuaries as physical and emotional safe spaces.

In recent years, the world has experienced unprecedented interconnectedness brought about by online communications, climate change, and the COVID pandemic. Seemingly, we are more networked and closer, more aware of technological and biological ties and risks that have universal effects. We have more access to information about global suffering than ever before, yet it has not translated into deeper empathy. Apparent proximity has not led to integration.

In fact, a backlash has occurred — nationalist politics have led to tighter restrictions on movement of people and goods, and to censorship of free expression. Human capacity for empathy actually may have diminished with the informational overload. Without empathy, unable to feel the conditions of others, we are unable to admit the shared responsibility for, and susceptibility to, those conditions. We are less inclined to learn, less likely to survive.

Immigrants and artists, channeling individual and collective experiences of trauma and healing, are messengers of powerful stories we can assimilate as our own. Sanctuary aims to create a space where a shared sense of displacement leads to shared empathy.

The exhibition includes an octophonic (eight-channel) sound installation by Samita Sinha and Daniel Neumann, titled Co-emergence. The work unfolds through two distinct voices, like two rivers, emerge simultaneously, born of each other and born together. One sings the micro-fluctuations and dimensions of a single vibration; the other sings the eight verses of Shikshashtakam, a 16th-century chant of liberation and devotion from the Vaishnava tradition. The listener is invited to participate in and expand the co-emergence by experiencing and actualizing the sonic architecture through their own listening and somatic presence.

The exhibition features 16 artists of diverse backgrounds facing complexities of our times, including:

— Deprivation of rights: Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s comic-book detailing the story of the Pentagon whistleblower Chelsea Manning; Jared Owens’ stamp-and-soil paintings of prison yards; Spandita Malik’s photos of survivors of sexual violence in rural India, embroidered by the victims;

— Living between worlds: Alibaba Awrang’s calligraphy made on the U.S. military base in Qatar where his family escaped just as the Taliban conquered Afghanistan; Lesia Khomenko’s painting of blurry footage from a Kamikaze drone approaching a soldier hiding in the trees; Jerome Lagarrigue’s scenes of Parisian street protests; Aura Satz’s lenticular closeups of a bullet entering and exiting a surface, forcing the viewer to walk “between the bullet and the hole”.

— Hope charged with precarity: Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s and Dindga McCannon’s hand-sewn tapestries enveloping protagonists in the comfort of ancestral materials; Lewinale Havette’s depictions of femininity, sensuality and spaces where women can safely convene; Helena Kozuchowicz’s silhouette longing for respite and connection; Fidelis Joseph’s and Will Maxen’s shifting color fields linking emotions and memories; Samita Sinha’s meditative vocals resonating through the gallery’s 8-channel sound system; and Cynthia Alberto’s handwoven “Sanctuary” on the gallery’s facade.

Photo credit: Jordan Benton

On the right: Spandita Malik, in the middle: Lewinale Havette

On the left: Fidelis Joseph

In case my mind [betrays] me, let me say one last thing.

Solo exhibition
7 November – 14 December 2024

Curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre
Trotter&Sholer, NYC, USA

“Instability” (interior of gallery view), Patchwork of printed, sumi ink painted and naturally dyed washi from Kashiki Seishi, gyotaku, artist’s handmade paper, 145x168,” 2024

Exhibition statement

We humans often desire stability. We seek it and thrive for it. Stability is what is known; it feels safe and manageable. It gives a sense of ownership over one’s circumstances.

Many life events may shake this grounded feeling of permanence. Illness, loss, separations: we will all experience the unexpected and will be confronted with the utter lack of control we truly have in the face of it all, whether it be due to specific personal events or through a broader opening to understanding the greater mechanisms we are bound to.

Life, in all its forms, is a fragile state in constant equilibrium. Adaptive and reactive, it inherently responds to the ecosystem it participates in and is deeply impacted by its evolution.

At the root of Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s practice is a physical, material experience. Settling for months on end in Nunavut, Vietnam, or Japan, she creates, often using local, ancestral papermaking or printmaking techniques as a means to engage with a geography she inhabits physically and emotionally. This process—and Alexa’s symbiotic nature—allows for a hyper-awareness of ecological shifts. Her works become stratas, organic forms, echoes of terrains she records as a means to preserve and embody.

Many of us have been experiencing climate anxiety. Storms, cataclysms, and displacements have been increasingly part of our human experience. The way we live, as functional participants in a capitalist society, actively participates in the increasingly changing nature of our environment.

Alexa is bipolar and was only recently diagnosed as such. This discovery impacted her understanding of herself and of the way she engages intimately with the world. A known hypothesis links the origin of bipolarity to the Pleistocene Epoch, where erratic shifts in weather required fast adaptation to climate change. What is now considered an illness or disability may have been a mere evolutive behavior to a changing ecosystem.

‘In case my mind [betrays] me, let me say one last thing.’—from author Naomi Jackson, describing her own relationship to being bipolar—summons the feverish urge to create which comes with a deep understanding of the fragility of any one moment. The precarity embedded in impermanence makes the creative act so much more essential and precious.

But this exhibition also challenges the sense of inadequacy that comes with being marginalized. As one approaches the gallery, they are confronted with a site-specific artwork partly obstructing their view. The piece, designed to offer only partial sights into the installation, defies our ability to read a context overall. Perspective is always partial, perception, personal, and conditional. Inside, works on paper resist our understanding of their material nature—often discarded for being delicate or fragile despite their inherent versatility and resilience.

Alexa makes herself part of the papers she uses. These handmade processes, learned amongst other locations while in residency with traditional makers in Japan whose papers she has been using for more than 15 years, have been preserved and utilized for over a thousand years.

Traditional paper-making processes require and participate in a clean environment. They build on a respect and reverence for one’s surroundings. Alexa’s practice is highly influenced by her understanding of the world and its natural rules. Versed in gyotaku—a historical technique in which the imprints of real fish are used as motifs but can still be further washed and consumed—she employs non-toxic inks for this process. Her practice seeks not the thrill of immediacy but instead aims at connecting secular artistic, practical, and environmental knowledge and instinctual gestures to the now.

In a society where our way of life actively participates in our destruction, perhaps other praxeological approaches and misunderstood cognitive behaviors considered less functional or adequate hold inherent wisdom we too often summarily reject as ill, foreign, and other. By embracing uncertainty as an inescapable and integral part of one’s life and accepting what we may learn from a leap into the unknown, we may perhaps find new ways to reconsider and question broader destructive systems we perceive as immutable.

— Anne-Laure Lemaitre

“Instability”, exterior gallery view. Once the sun has set, this floor-to-ceiling window piece takes on a whole new look. Reminiscent of stained glass, the artfully placed tapestry partially obscures the gallery’s interior while providing small windows to peek in to another world brought to life by Hatanaka. It is at once the heartbeat of and the entrance to the exhibition.

Shake the Ground

January 17 - March 15, 2026
Curated by Gentiane Bélanger

Foreman Gallery

Exhibition statement

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s print work unfolds like the territory, with a strong sense of infinitude. Dense lattices of grooves draw mysterious topographies, sometimes expansive, sometimes cut and multiplied as in quilts, echoing the artist’s delocalized, transnational identity. The handmade papers often from regions in Asia that receive the prints animates these configurations with a luminous transparency.

Through her lines carved into linoleum, Hatanaka explores different superimposed territories: those shaped by the turbulence of water, by ice, wind and snow; those shaped by sensations, perceptions, and affects. The worlds that leave their imprint on paper are both external and internal, empirical and psychic. The historical, regional papers used connect these abstract world maps to very specific lands, through its own materiality contingent on the plants, waterways and traditions that allow them to be produced.

This exhibition brings together several large-format prints on paper as well as printing blocks, where the material, pigments, patterns and the interlacing of veins echo each other. Eddies on the surface of torrents, wind wrinkles in the snow, cracks in the frozen ground of the north, but also lines of flight, lines of desire and trajectories of pathologized symptoms . Sometimes suspended in space, sometimes packed in on themselves as if they were boulders, these large sails of printed paper shake the ground of our convictions and our belongings, and probe our interiority, in the hollow of the furrows formed by our frailties.

The Foreman Art Gallery would like to thank Patel Brown Gallery for lending the works and contributing to this exhibition.

patience & persistence

Duo exhibition
with Johnny Nghiem
9 September, 2025 – 16 January,2026

Curated by Miao Xuan Liu

Prince Takamado Gallery
at the Canadian Embassy to Japan
Tokyo, Japan

Exhibition statement

In Patience and Persistence, an ephemeral force undergirds the work of Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka and Johnny Nghiem. Hanging from thread, wavering images on delicate sheets scatter like constellations among intricate Washi clothing, patchworked sculpture, and textile. Some dangle variably off kozo sticks like husks. All are aglow with a seemingly immanent translucency.

Washi is traditional Japanese paper made from the renewable plant fibers of kozo, mitsumata, and gampi. In Patience and Persistence, this laborious, ancient, and endangered material forms the subject and medium of formal experimentation and embodied labour. Emerging from Hatanaka’s intimate engagements with traditional paper makers in Japan and Vietnam and documented through video and image by Nghiem, the exhibition touches upon themes of lineage, ecological wellbeing, and interconnectedness.

In Nghiem’s photographs of rural and urban Japan and Vietnam, life is at a standstill. In effect, presences are sensed more than imaged, the interior life a stand-in for corporeality. Bodies are glimpsed from behind, and uninhabited landscapes are captured indiscreetly in a mirror’s burnished glow. In the weightlessness that results, a diasporic imprecision thwarts any attempts at chronology. Rather, we encounter a dreamlike quality beyond the concretized confines of colonial time and place.

Hatanaka likewise demonstrates an affinity for the rhythms of the natural world. In her hand, milk white surfaces are stained with pigment from the earth. The marks are sometimes precise, such as printed swathes of undulating snow of the Arctic, memorializing her long-term collaboration with communities in Kinngait, Nunavut, and other times the marks are intuitive free free-handed gestures. This contrast is no coincidence - Hatanaka is interested in the calcified and transformative side by side, prodding delicate equilibria found at the centre of both ecological and emotional health.

One only needs to read the artwork titles to realize that for the artist, these terrains of uncertainty are equal parts bodily as terrestrial: “Aftershocks”, “one last thing”, “freeze or fly, fly or flight”. Strata upon strata, patch by patch, through Hatanaka’s hand instability takes form where the personal, environmental, and historical collide. This reflects an engagement with ecological metaphors of mental wellness, including her own experience with depression and bipolar.
By forging strength from fragility and combining artistic production with social enterprise, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka and Johnny Nghiem underscore the interconnected nature that animates their practices. Patience and Persistence extends that spirit, presenting a significant survey of artworks embedded with craft philosophy. As the persistent stream that carves through calcified stone over time, this exhibition suggests that principles which sustain ecological systems might be the same ones that also support human and relational wellness, commemorating the slow, gestural, and measured force.

— Miao Xuan Liu

The works are almost entirely created with washi (Japanese paper) made by Kashiki Seishi, a seventh generation family mill in the famous region of Tosa Washi, producing within a tradition of over 1000 years, where Hatananaka was artist in residence. The exhibition encapsulates three years of the artists’ evolving work together, including two documentaries learning with great appreciation about regionally specific, environmentally sustainable papermaking traditions: one in Kochi, Japan, and the other in northern Vietnam – the places of the artists’ ancestry.

Susceptibility to gravity

Solo exhibition
18 January – 24 February 2024

Curated by Maude Johnson
Patel Brown Gallery, Montreal, Canada

Exhibition statement

Hatanaka’s polysemous works trace disruptions and tell stories of what persists, what feeds the heart and soul. Human bodies and waterways, stories and materiality, terrestrial movements, and migrations—the artist maps the interconnections that characterize selfhood: her own, in particular. Each of her works embodies, to a certain extent, a layer of herself, a stratum of her history.

— Excerpt from Maude Johnson’s text

Ohayo Radio: A Conversation Between Friends

Duo exhibition with Johnny Nghiem
13 April – 29 May 2024
Curated by Chiedza Pasipanodya

Ino-Cho Paper Museum, Kochi, Japan

Featuring photography by Johnny Nghiem and Maya Fuhr.

Hatanaka holding her washi artwork, 2023. Photo: Johnny Nghiem

Exhibition statement

“OHAYO RADIO: A Conversation Between Friends” begins in Kochi, Japan as two friends, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka and Johnny Nghiem, explore papermaking through collaborations in sculpture and photography. This exhibition symbolizes an exchange between the old and the new, the homeland and the diaspora, the traditional and the newer media and between people in different places coming together in one place — a third space. This third space, rich with cultural hybridity and play, speaks to cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldua’s ideas that identity is constructed across differences.

In this exhibition, Hatanaka’s wearable washi sculptures, washi patchworks and koi are presented as part of a network of conversations tying back to her father’s homeland (Japan). This work exists alongside images taken before and during the making of the sculptures. The images are photographed by Nghiem who is interested in capturing gestures, atmospheric qualities and cultural nuances within his lens-based practice. For “OHAYO RADIO” photographs printed on washi emerging from his time in Kochi with Hatanaka in 2023 are accompanied by video vignettes from his recent travels to Vietnam—the homeland of his parents.

As they return to their homes, Hatanaka in Toronto, Canada and Nghiem in Berlin, Germany, they maintain correspondence through calls which they lovingly name, “OHAYO RADIO”. “Ohayo” is a colloquial term meaning “good morning” in Japanese and radio being a mode of transmitting audio through sound waves is used as an entry in point into this adventurous and warm exhibition that reflects the material products of a 1000-year-old tradition of washi at the historic Ino-Cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan. In this third place, away from Toronto and Berlin, “OHAYO RADIO: A Conversation Between Friends” is a manifestation of aliveness and conviviality at the intersections of place, material and homeland.

All works originate from a residency with Washi＋ in 2023.

acknowledgements & CONTRIBUTORS

Featuring a photographic washi collaboration with Maya Fuhr. All washi in this exhibition was made by Kashiki Seishi.

Special thanks to Kayoko Ichinomiya, Sho Tanabe, Kashiki Seishi, Ayumi Hamada, Patel Brown Gallery, Victor Chin, Tatsuyuki Kitaoka, Emiri Fujimoto, Yan Li, Smokestack Studios.

This exhibition was made possible through generous funding from the Canada Council of the Arts.

Unchanging and changing and changing

Solo exhibition
23 September – 25 November 2023

Curated by Chiedza Pasipanodya
Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, Toronto, Canada

Featuring photography by Johnny Nghiem, Maya Fuhr, Ashok Mathur, Darren Rigo, and Holly Chang.

“Kōchi Koinobori” flying, Japan. Photo: Johnny Nghiem

CURATOR’S NOTE

As I write this the precious island of Maui is burning due to climate change. As I write this a major Canadian oil corporation has been ordered to shut down its pipeline and compensate the Chippewa Indians $5.1M. We are living in a time of expansion and retraction, of immense loss and unprecedented freedoms, of unchanging and changing and changing. It has been said by many that to do two things at once is to do neither, but what if that doing is in fact one thing after all—a gesturing towards interconnectedness? What then becomes possible of these two or more things…

In Unchanging and changing and changing, a multidisciplinary exhibition by Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC), it is this paradox that is in question. Featuring sculptural and wearable artworks and documentary footage, this exhibition is a personal reflection on traumatic events as seen through the body and the planet, and the resilience and release that has followed. It brings together two key concepts - protective armours and what we will call inverse armours, wearable artworks. These sculptures present dichotomies of softness and linearity, rigidity and levity, and protection alongside joy and contending with one another through fashion-forward wearable garments that either shield against the storms of life or reveal in times of unapologetic liberation.

To be exhibiting at the Japanese Canadian Culture Centre is a homecoming of sorts; it is here that as a child Hatanaka studied semi-classical Nihon Buyo dance. The JCCC serves to celebrate the unique culture, history, and legacy of Japanese Canadians for the benefit of all while creating a tribute to the history of the Nikkei (diasporic) community. It is a perfect home for a deeper exploration into the breath of Hatanaka’s practice centered around washi, a thousand-year-old Japanese paper made by hand with local fibers and water.

Though not seen explicitly, water is everywhere in this exhibition. It is integral to the making of washi paper and it was central to the choreography of the Unchanging and changing and changing Nihon Buyo dance performed by Danielle Yamashita and Katherine Yamashita, alongside Taiko drummers Jody Chan and Wy Joung Kou presented on the opening night of the exhibition. Water is the vehicle that moves the koi fish and is reflected in the numerous gyotaku fish prints (non-toxic direct prints from real fish) and linocut prints of waves and tsunami references in the panels of Hatanaka’s work. In works like Hazmat (Obachan and The Great Kantō), Hatanaka has reproduced an image of the catastrophic 1923 earthquake and tsunami that forced her grandmother to flee Japan for Canada. In other works such as For Nihon Buyo (Rain defence overcoat) and Aftershock, Tōhoku (Dancer's armour) tsunami images are reproduced again this time from the Tōhoku Disaster in 2011 which coincided with one of Hatanaka’s own personal aftershocks.

The accompanying documentary footage within the exhibition shares Hatanaka’s recent residency at Kashiki Seishi and the rapidly disappearing sustainable craft technologies that have been passed down for millennia, while a second video provides the audience with another look at the Nihon Buyo and Taiko drum performance. Scattered thoughtfully through the gallery are ephemera—several Koi fish, a symbol of courage and persistence from the Nihon-Buyō performance and delicately hung a prized fishing rod from her grandfather—both objects are also inextricably tied together through water.

As we collectively move through these times, like fish swimming upstream against a current much stronger than us, as we navigate the unchanging and changing and changing, Hatanaka’s delicate yet durable washi works and accompanying ephemera serve as an invitation. One that encourages audiences to embrace both protecting and defending that which we care most about - our bodies, our cultures and traditions and our environment, while equally doing the very important work of demonstrating resilience and healing through the liberatory acts of dance, storytelling, music, play and joy.

— Chiedza Pasipanodya

THE PERFORMANCE

The exhibition is accompanied by a performance of the same name, Unchanging and changing and changing, that brings together Taiko drumming, Nihon-Buyō (dance) and washi (Japanese paper) techniques used for costuming. These three Japanese expressions are combined in the spirit of celebrating the potential of hybrid, personal and contemporary interpretations of historical practices. Developed collaboratively with Hatanaka, the performance features drummers Jody Chan & Wy Joung Kou and a mother and daughter dance duo Katherine Yamashita & Danielle Yamashita, the latter whom Hatanaka danced with as a child.

The performance traces a story that reaches back generations and toward a hopeful future despite the certainty of grief and gravity. Percussion and movement meld quietly, and then persistently propel through a constellation of selfhood, tsunami, dis/order, change, koi and Obon Odori.

Video by Johnny Nghiem and Zachary Hertzman

The Documentary

The opening night of the exhibition also featured a screening of “The Making of Unchanging and changing and changing”, a documentary by friend and collaborator, Johnny Nghiem, that follows me during my residency at Kashiki Seishi from 2022 to 2023.

WASHI & ARTIST’S PROCESS

The durability of washi and the tenacity of its long-standing techniques behave as a symbol for resilience that resonates with Hatanaka’s diasporic identity. A dynamic bond between material and body is present, resulting in personal reflections on the various ways that connections to ancestral crafts nurture a meaningful integration of art-making, identity-making and community-building.

In her linocut print work, Hatanaka embeds impressions in the washi to convey topographical imageries that resemble chiseled snow, stone, water, earthquakes or the gesture of a map. These organic forms use pattern-making and repetition to reference mental and emotional geographies, as much as physical ones.

“The softness of the Japanese washi paper and its transparency represent the environment where the natural materials were picked, under a clear sky and near a magnificent river. The warmth and robustness of Japanese washi paper comes from the efforts of farmers and their love for this land where they have lived for several generations. It is thanks to this strong bond between people and nature that the Kashiki paper production company was able to produce Japanese washi paper.”

— Kashiki Seishi, fourth generation paper mill in Japan where Hatanaka was artist in residence.

Ayumi Hamada of Kashiki Seishi harvesting kozō (mulberry tree branches) for washi at her mill’s farm.

Hatanaka harvesting kozō (mulberry tree branches) for washi at Kashiki Seishi.

Kozō inner bark laid out for traditional method of cleaning at Osaki Seishijo in Tosa, a very significant town and region for washi.

Kozō pulp mixing in vat at Kashiki Seishi.

Hatanaka holding washi-making frame at Niyodo River, Kōchi, Japan.

Hatanaka drying small batch washi made in Niyodo River, Kōchi, Japan.

Hatanaka sewing washi wearable during her residency at Kashiki Seishi.

Washi wearables hanging in Hatanaka’s studio window at Kashiki Seishi, Japan.