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The Hollow Man by Yonsei artist Jon Sasaki will stand outside the Livestock Building at Hastings Park in Vancouver, B.C. The “anti-monument” spotlights racist actions of Ian Alistair Mackenzie. Photo courtesy: Jon Sasaki.

VANCOUVER — I am Jon Sasaki, a Toronto-based Yonsei artist currently working on a temporary public art project commissioned by the City of Vancouver.

The work is scheduled to be installed in October 2024 at Hastings Park in Vancouver, home of the Pacific National Exhibition, which was the site of the incarceration of 8,000 Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

The piece is titled The Hollow Man, and it will be an “anti-monument” to call attention to the racist actions of Ian Alistair Mackenzie (1890-1949), the wartime federal MP who stripped thousands of Japanese Canadians of their belongings, human rights, and community.

Largely because of Mackenzie, many members of my family were uprooted from the West Coast and forced to start their lives again in Ontario.

The sculpture will be a hollowed-out, life-sized shell of Mackenzie’s figure made from unpolished cast aluminum. The hollowed-out back will signify Mackenzie’s lack of a moral core and feature a vertical prop-stand typical of disposable cardboard cutouts.

It will stand backward outside the Livestock Building at Hastings Park in Vancouver, B.C., for seven years, one month, and eight days, the same duration his order-in-council was in place. At the end of that period, the sculpture will be destroyed, a moment that is intended to be a healing one.

The sculpture will include a plaque describing Mackenzie’s damaging racist deeds and the ripple effects that continue to reverberate through the generations. Anyone interested in helping to craft the language for this plaque is warmly invited to submit recommendations. Please contact me at publicart@vancouver.ca (ideally by the end of July), and I will be in touch with the next steps.

Mackenzie is largely unknown outside the Japanese Canadian community, and this project is intended to hold him to historic account.

Sincerely,
Jon Sasaki

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