Emmie Tsumura is a Toronto-based visual artist whose creations are rooted in Japanese folk tales and connecting with her ancestors. Her recent creations are her urban “Pigeons for the People” installations found across the city of Toronto, a collection of giant laminated pigeons attached to chain-link fences accompanied by notes of gratitude for essential and frontline workers.
The text bubbles serve as artistic calls to mass action, with calls to “please protect [delivery drivers] and pay them well,” along with other groups at the forefront of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic such as grocery store and sanitation workers, farm workers, and healthcare workers. Emmie believes that artists are equipped with the tools to illuminate underrepresented issues, make information more accessible, and bring difficult narratives into public consciousness. She is interested in how design thinking and strategies can be used to support grassroots organizing on issues such as climate change, migrant labour, and Black and Indigenous solidarity movements.
A pivotal moment in Emmie’s artistic growth was her land-based residency in Mayne Island, British Columbia, called Slow Wave. The residency was rooted in a feminist, land-based perspective and concentrated around how artists relate to and produce work on the land as settlers: “During the workshops, we discussed ways of connecting with our ancestors and healing our spirits; knowing who we are and where we come from is important to the process of decolonization. We were taught how to connect our work to the land through our ancestral spirits.” During Emmie’s residency, she also discovered poignant links to her own family history as Japanese Canadians. One of Emmie’s goals as part of the residency was to visit the Japanese garden on Mayne Island and see if she could find her ancestors there: “Everything we do now reaches back, and our ancestors feel this. It was a big deal for me to be welcomed to the same territory where my grandparents arrived. I felt their closeness and joy when I was on Coast Salish land.”
The time Emmie spent at Slow Wave drives her current projects on Japanese folktales and yōkai (spirits). She emphasizes that her ancestors are the driving force of her work, a conviction that was borne out of wanting to honour her grandparents and their histories. The themes of Emmie’s playful work revolve around time, ghosts, spirits, and ancestors that invoke both traditional and modern facets of Japanese culture: “If spirits are haunting a place, what they want is attention – they want to be seen and acknowledged for their existence. If something is haunting you, you could have a communication with that thing by drawing it.”
“If spirits are haunting a place, what they want is attention – they want to be seen and acknowledged for their existence. If something is haunting you, you could have a communication with that thing by drawing it.”
Emmie Tsumura
Emmie’s work allows not only yōkai but young Japanese Canadians to be seen and illuminates the relationalities between history and present solidarity movements across racialized and Indigenous communities. Emmie remarked on the need for desire-centric artistic production instead of solely focusing on trauma: “There’s a difficulty that arises with what Eve Tuck calls ‘damage-centred research’ – research that focuses on spotlighting painful experiences in order to call out oppression. I like [ancestral and familial] research because we’re not [just] focusing on intergenerational trauma, but things like recovering lost knowledge and healing. It feels really generative and for the community.”
https://emmie-tsumura.format.com/pigeons-for-the-people
Emmie also notes the complex relationship she has to her identity as a Japanese Canadian as to why she chose to draw both the pigeons and the neglected yōkai: “I felt like an invisibility in my own identity, so I think these things have always been interesting to me – how things can be invisible and not seen but still exist …” The “Pigeons for the People” project has accelerated as the COVID-19 pandemic progressed: “[The installations] started from me trying to get to know some of the non-human beings and spirits that I see around my house and my work …
I noticed the pigeons more and [began] obsessively drawing them as I started to get to know them and realize that they all had different faces, different feathers and colours, and all the different ways that they could move their bodies.” The impact of the public art installation is wide-reaching: the project was spotlighted on the CBC to raise funds for the grassroots organization Justice for Migrant Workers; she also expanded the project to include a children’s colouring book called The Pigeon Pages as an activity for families with young children in isolation during COVID-19. Emmie’s organic artist-activist creations showcase the nuanced possibilities inherent in public art during times of crisis and the importance of grounding one’s work in our historical and family relations. She is currently working on a film installation for the Reel Asian Film Festival called Pigeon Keyboard, which explores communication between humans and pigeons.
Key Themes: Ancestors, Indigenous solidarities, spirits/yōkai, public art installations
Interview conducted by Ai Yamamoto on July 29th, 2020.