TSUNEKO KOKUBO

A lifetime spent evoking feeling

by Jocelyn Doll

As a child, Tsuneko Kokubo would gather friends in the small village in Japan where she grew up and put on plays.

“The adults came to watch us, and it was a nice feeling to bring joy,” she says. “I think I am just a child who never grew up. I like to physically create something on the spot that evokes feelings in others.”

Now, 80 or so years later, Koko, as she is affectionately known, is still performing. Her partner Paul (Garbanzo) Gibbons often creates the music or soundscapes, and helps brainstorm storylines and images for the piece. However, Kokubo doesn’t like to over-rehearse, wanting the performance to be fresh, with room for “happy accidents.”

Her performance pieces are but one part of a travelling retrospective of her work, curated by Maggie Tchir. “Of Light Itself” features oil and acrylic paintings as well as videos of Kokubo’s performances.

One painting, Steveston Fog, was done 66 years ago, while Kokubo was waiting for a tram to Vancouver from Steveston.

“I clearly remember the day—cold, very cold, foggy,” she writes in her artist statement. “It was always cold and foggy in Steveston. I took out ink and brush from my bag and started drawing, to see if I could see anything in that thick fog.”

She added that she was grateful that someone thought to keep it.

Udo. Oil on canvas, 40x60 inches, 2017.

Image courtesy Tsuneko Kokubo

In her curatorial essay, Tchir describes Kokubo’s work as captivating to the eye and heart.

“There is an overpowering sense you have arrived in a mythic landscape, experienced perhaps from a dream fragment, or from a poem you heard long ago, or from a deep embedded memory of place.”

Kokubo was born in Steveston in 1937, however, she was raised in Japan. She had gone with family to visit but was stranded by the Second World War.

“I was raised by my grandmother who basically just let me run wild,” she says. “This turned out to be very useful in my art!”

Japanese script makes appearances in her paintings, as well as the landscapes, flora and fauna and faces of her childhood memories.

Kokubo only returned to Canada as a teenager.

“I have been lucky and have only experienced overt personal racism very occasionally over the years,” she says. “However, in a way my whole early life was shaped by the racist policies of B.C. and Canada and the incarceration of thousands of Japanese Canadians.”

Kokubo’s mother and sister were placed in an internment camp in Lemon Creek, B.C. and her father in a concentration camp in Angler, Ontario.

“Some of the themes and images from this time have emerged in my paintings in recent years, and will continue to do so,” she says.

In 1956, Kokubo enrolled at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr College of Art). She studied painting, composition, anatomy, sculpture, pottery, drawing and art history.

“I was inspired by my teachers—Peter Aspel, Don Jarvis, Jack Shadbolt, Bruce Boyd and others. I was also inspired learning about European Impressionist painters,” she says. “More recent inspiration comes from Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Gordon Smith, Takao Tanabe and my old friend Norman Takeuchi—to name just a few.”

But above all else, Kokubo is inspired by her memories and the natural world around us.

Tchir, curator of the retrospective, said many of Kokubo’s paintings are very large in presence, some of deep grace and others of deep horror.

“Of Light Itself” installation, Langham Cultural Centre, Kaslo, July 2022.

Photo: Maggie Tchir

One series depicts her memories and feelings of the bombing of Hiroshima during the Second World War. A piece features a young girl eating watermelon, surrounded by dark, mourning figures.

“After a cool swim in the tiny creek in my village in Japan, we were eating watermelons when there was an announcement on the radio about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima,” she recalls. “The watermelon is important to me because even now, after all these years, it tastes the same, and reminds me of that tragic day.”

After art school Kokubo helped launch Snake in the Grass Moving Theatre as both a performer and costume designer. The troupe went on to become the resident at the UBC Museum of Anthropology for 13 years and toured nationally and internationally.

She became a full-time painter in the early ’90s with the help of a Canada Council grant.

“Both performance and painting require discipline, which I find satisfying, but painting is like emotion frozen in time and has a more permanent aspect to it,” she says.

Watermelon Summer #2. Acrylic on canvas, 40x60 inches, 2014.

Image courtesy Tsuneko Kokubo

While perhaps a little-known name in Canadian households, Tchir says Kokubo is really up there with artists in the Canadian lexicon who have made a mark.

To this day Kokubo walks by a lake and creek at her home in the Slocan Valley, returning to her studio to sketch the images and feelings before the essence dissipates.

“If necessary, I can always go back and start over.”

“Of Light Itself” is showing at the Langham Galleries in Kaslo until October 16. The show will travel to Grand Forks Gallery 2 from May to July 2023, and to Penticton after that.

Banner photo: Portrait of the artist. Photo: Louis Bockner