Japanese Canadian Cultural Center

What’s new at the JCCC in 2022!

The permanent participatory artwork All in One, One in All No.01 was released last year at JCCC! The artwork is part of the permanent exhibition, Maru: Immigration Stories at The Moriyama Nikkei Heritage Centre (MNHC). In 2020, the JCCC commissioned Erica Kaminishi for a participatory art installation that explores the theme of immigration, culture, and identity with the title All in one, one in All No. 01. The curator Su Yen Chong explains about it in this video (from 12:44)

Read also a short interview about All in One, One in All No.01

“All in one, one in All brings references of Zen Buddhism, precisely from concepts of inter-being by the monk Thich Nhat Hanh. One of the inter-being principles is “We do not exist independently. We inter-are. Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest — whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.”

This project specially planned and elaborated for the JCCC is related to my participatory art projects that have already been exhibited in Japan and in Brazil.

For this project, I planned a large-scale white cloud whose contours allude to a topographic map with its contour lines. Those elements are also present in my other works. The public will be invited to participate in the creative process by drawing and writing with blue pen on white sticky notes in droplets shapes. Then, the filled in sticky notes will be fixed on the surface of the large map-cloud, which at the end will be full of blue droplets.

It is a way of reflecting on how everything is interrelated: the cloud is not formed with just a drop of water. Just as we need each other to build something relevant in this world, we must also think that everything coexists within a natural cycle and we need to take care of. From a simple rain, the earth has enough nutrients for a tree to grow and bear fruit and raw material for us to manufacture the paper, on which we draw…. “