What My Grandparents Left Behind

“What My Grandparents Left Behind” provides an artistic exploration of my Japanese heritage. Using images of fading kimonos and family albums, the series of photographic montages represent memories and emotions, which can be inherited but lost over time.

“What My Grandparents Left Behind” provides an artistic exploration of my Japanese heritage. Using images of fading kimonos and family albums, the series of photographic montages represent memories and emotions, which can be inherited but lost over time.    

My grandmother was a lover of luxury despite the family’s stretched financial situation in postwar Japan. Even through the hardest of times, she continued to order kimonos, many of which were custom made using high-quality silk and intricate embroidery. My father recalls how this was a way she expressed herself and defined her place in her social circles. Forty years after her passing, what is left of her inheritance has traveled with me to America. 

My grandfather, who died years before I was born, was a producer at a Japanese network during the early years of television. Always with a camera around his neck and a sketchbook in his pocket, he was meticulous about documenting his life. Boxes of his browning prints and scrapbooks are still sitting in my parents’ home in Tokyo. His pictures show glimpses of a different era in Japanese society. 

My montage making process involves photographing sections of the garments during a traditional custom called mushiboshi where the kimonos are aired during the dry autumn months. Those pictures are merged with scanned images of archival photographs through different digital techniques. The approach works as a metaphor of my desire to preserve our tangible history, and to reimagine its place in today’s technology-driven culture.