Eryn Kimura

Eryn Kimura

A true San Francisco flower child, Eryn Kimura is creating art from the pains of the past.

BY MICHAEL DAKS

Eryn Kimura is a fifth-generation Japanese and Chinese American artist born and raised in San Francisco. She has also lived in Kyoto, Japan, and Paris, France. In the course of my interview, I asked her many questions, but it was the eloquence of her responses that really set the tone. I will leave you to decide the questions.

I come from the depths of Glen Park canyon where coyotes and pot-smoking pre-teens cohabitate and roam. My great-great-grandma’s laundromat on the horse-carriage-filled Valencia street of the late 1800s. The 1970 Lowell High School “Welcome Back” dance when a young Nikkei buck from the Richmond caught eyes with young queen from the

Sunset amidst a sea of pioneering acid trippers; within the concrete caverns of the Bayshore freeway underpass where a good friend told me he resided. This is my Mama, the topography of my ancestors, my home: Frisco.

These lived experiences are not just my own, but ours, a part of the collective narrative and culture of San Francisco. As a fifth generation settler on Ramaytush Ohlone land (San Franciscan) and fifth generation Chinese and Japanese-American, I was fortunate to be raised by a collaborative, polycultural community that nourished my radical imagination.

I grew up valuing the various narratives of struggle that built this golden city. But today, more than ever, this culture of collective struggle and love is becoming less visible and respected in the face of the almighty dollar.

This is the San Francisco we are currently witnessing— again.

Seven dollar cups of coffee; the highest displacement rate of Black Americans second to post-Katrina New Orleans; chrome Aston Martins going 60 miles per hour in the now “up and coming” neighborhoods; flocks of metal cranes piercing the landscape; casual yet covert transphobic racism; and the uncompassionate cackles of the young, profit-driven, and privileged toward the older man on the corner admirably collecting aluminum cans to recycle. This is the San Francisco we are currently witnessing—again.

As a culture bearer of our past and the author of the future, my thriving existence as an artist is in and of itself resistance—resistance to racial capitalism, imperialism, cis-hetero white supremacy. From the racist 1870 street ordinance that banned my great-greatgrand-aunties from carrying their belongings on bamboo poles to the Anti-Asian Exclusion act to the more recent corporate takeover of America’s first Japantown.

The Ramaytush Ohlone and Black ancestors. I owe them my voice, my struggle, my resistance, to upend the oppressive forces that be. They fought so that we all could be free. Not just me.

Read more at https://issuu.com/rareluxuryliving/docs/troora_san_francisco_2021_pages/228