25 Jan 2023
Posted by Kelly Fleck 
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Artists Annie Sumi and Brian Kobayakawa are the creators of Kintsugi, an anti-racist, interactive art installation at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre until March 17.
TORONTO — In the heart of the Moriyama Nikkei Heritage Centre at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre sits a prewar treadle-powered Singer sewing machine. A large white sheet is threaded through the machine as if the person working on it has just stepped away.
Quiet and unassuming, when a visitor sits and presses down on the treadle with their foot, the machine comes to life, but not with the expected whirling sound of a sewing machine. Instead, the museum space fills with hauntingly beautiful music, and a video projects onto the draped fabric; the sewing machine begins to tell its story.
Kintsugi is an anti-racist, interactive art installation created by Japanese Canadian musicians Annie Sumi and Brian Kobayakawa. Named after the Japanese ceramics practice of using molten gold to repair broken pieces of pottery, embellishing its brokenness, the installation takes the artists’ fragmented pieces of self, story, and culture, reassembling them into something new through song.
The two artists created four original songs, exploring racial identity, healing, ancestral trauma, and the fragmented history of Japanese Canadian internment. Working together, Sumi and Kobayakawa connected over similarities in their experiences, families, and cultural identity.
Annie Sumi sits at the sewing machine and Brian Kobayakawa stands to the right during the opening night reception of Kintsugi at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre on Oct. 14. Photo credit: Kelly Fleck.
“We realized that we had so many parallels in our family stories that sparked from our first meeting,” Kobayakawa tells Nikkei Voice in an interview. “It was so great to have someone who is not family who shares so much of this overlap, both in our mixed-race heritage and how our families talk about this stuff and the internment trauma elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss.”
Kobayakawa, also known as Brava Kilo, has made music for 20 years and is one of Toronto’s most in-demand session bassists, composers, and experimental artists. A member of the Canadian Folk Award-winning Creaking Tree String Quartet, he has worked with some of Canada’s top artists, including touring the world with Serena Ryder.
Sumi is a mixed-race Japanese Canadian folk artist, originally from Whitby, Ont., whose ethereal voice resembles birdsong and evokes memories of nature. She has released two critically-acclaimed albums and received several Juno nominations. Her most recent album, Solastalgia, was released in October 2021.
A still image from the multidisciplinary project, Kintsugi. The video projections were created with shadow puppetry duo Mind of a Snail. Photo courtesy: Annie Sumi and Brian Kobayakawa.
Accompanying the songs are projections with playful animations and shadow puppetry that play over collaged images and video footage, created with the help of shadow-puppeteer duo Mind of a Snail. The images include letters, photos, and documents collected from their families’ files in the Landscapes of Injustice database and present-day video footage from internment camps sites where Kobayakawa’s father was born and where Sumi’s grandfather was interned as a child.
Kobayakawa and Sumi used the Landscapes of Injustice files to explore their family histories, finding official documents, records, transcripts, and letters written by their families, contextualizing the fragmented stories they heard from their families throughout their lives.
Musician Annie Sumi. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Documents particularly striking to Kobayakawa and Sumi were lists of chattels, the property and possessions confiscated from their families. The lists became the lyrics for the song Chattels, emphasizing what was lost during the dispossession and internment.
“[It was like] placing yourself in these homes that our ancestors lived in and imagining all of these things, this random assortment of things, what use they had in their lives and importance that they had to them. Kind of like a time capsule,” says Sumi.
In these lists of chattels, Kobayakawa noticed a treadle-powered Singer sewing machine, noting it had shipped to his grandmother on Feb. 16, 1943. The machine was included among a list of other family possessions with notes on when the items sold at auction, returned to the family, or if they were unaccounted for or lost. Kobayakawa realized he was very familiar with the sewing machine.
“It was in reading those same documents that I realized how this project was going to go. [The sewing machine] has been in my parent’s basement for most of my life. I think, when I was really young, my Bachan still sewed on it,” says Kobayakawa. “It’s been there longer than I can remember, and they’ve moved with it a couple of times. We’d shoot tennis balls at it while playing ball hockey in the basement. It was a net to me.”
Musician Brian Kobayakawa (Brava Kilo). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Kobayakawa altered the machine, installing sensors so the music and projections would play when pressing on the treadle. Kobayakawa discovered it wasn’t the first time the machine was altered—his grandmother had a motor installed at one point to make it easier to use.
“It was really cool that they had already modified it with more modern technology, and then we did the same,” says Kobayakawa.
Kobayakawa found a lot of answers while exploring his family files, but it’s still a mystery why the sewing machine returned to the family while other items did not.
Each of Kobayakawa and Sumi’s songs are layered with meaning, from the lyrics to the instruments—recordings of Kobayakawa pounding on the confiscated boats made by his grandfather are the percussion in one song—to the voices in the songs. For one, Kobayakawa and Sumi invited their families into the studio to include their voices in the project.
“I was really touched when our families came because my family had never really seen me at work outside of performing… it was special to have their voices and their willingness to be there and be part of it all. I loved that day for all those reasons,” says Sumi.
Incredibly special to Sumi was the inclusion of her great-grandfather Choichi Sumi’s voice in the song Bronzo. The song begins with an audio recording of Choichi reading a haiku in Japanese. The story behind the recording was family folklore; her great-grandfather and other Japanese Canadian poets read their haikus from the poetry anthology Paper Doors on CBC Radio in the late 70s. She realized this recording must exist somewhere and reached out to an archivist from CBC, who tracked down the recording.
Annie Sumi sits at the sewing machine during the opening night reception of Kintsugi at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre on Oct. 14. Photo credit: Kelly Fleck.
“I got to hear his voice for the first time and share it with my family. My papa [grandfather] teared up when he first heard it because he hadn’t heard his dad’s voice in many, many years, so it was just an amazing gift to have,” says Sumi.
For Kobayakawa and Sumi, music is how they express themselves, so it felt natural to use music to explore their family history. Unlike an album you can listen to on your phone or buy in a store, Kobayakawa and Sumi ask audiences to come out and engage with Kintsugi.
“You have to read some instructions, travel to the space and sit down and put real physical labour into making the sound come out,” says Kobayakawa. “[We’re] asking people to put some effort in for us, to hear what we’re trying to say, and I think we’ll give something back that will feel worthwhile.”
While this art installation explores Sumi and Kobayakawa’s family stories, themes of displacement and intergenerational trauma exist in many other communities.
“Even though this particular piece is Brian and my expression of finding ourselves within the stories of our own ancestors and in the stories of our lives, I do feel like it’s accessible for many people,” says Sumi. “I hope that, for anyone who is hopefully on that journey already of putting the effort in to heal some of those wounds or putting in the effort to show up for other communities, that this is helpful or inspiring in some way.”
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Kobayakawa and Sumi plan to release the music from Kintsugi in the new year. For more information on the exhibit, visit www.kintsugi-installation.com.
Watch and listen to Chattels by Brava Kilo and Annie Sumi, one of the four songs and videos created for Kintsugi below:
