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On Thursday evening the MACC's Schaefer International Gallery will feature a unique free "activations" event with photography, poetry, a tea ritual, music, and a talk by special guest, Japanese artist Miki Nitadori on her Odyssey: reflect installation, which highlights Japanese immigration to Hawaii.
Based in Paris, Nitadori was born in Tokyo and lived for a time on Maui.
"I shall invite visitors to have a conversation with me within the installation," Nitadori explains. "We will sit around the table. I will serve tea and pupus from Paris that relate to the installation. The visitors and myself will be part of and influenced by the installation. They can share stories with me or just listen and enjoy being there."
Inspiration for her work arrived in the shape of a suitcase of vintage Maui photographs that she was given in Paris.
A suitcase of vintage photographs from Lahaina inspired Nitadori to create Odyssey:reflect. "Thomas Hardy, a Frenchman, walked into my Paris workshop in the early 2000s," she recalls. "He saw a photograph of the Lahaina sugar mill on the wall and told me he lived near the sugar mill and had saved photographs that were abandoned, which belonged to his neighbor. Much later, I met him again by chance at a travel agency when he was planning to move to L.A. He told me he wanted to give me the photographs. I archived the photographs in the suitcase and looked at them for many years, but I didn't work on them much.
"I felt that the people in the photographs wanted to return to Maui, and in 2011, the previous director of Schaefer International Gallery, Neida Bangerter, invited me to show the work I had done based on these photographs. From the late 19th century to the 1950s, every Japanese-American family owns some, and the first exhibition based on these photographs took place at the MACC in 2013."
In time, her photo series work was shown in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, La Rochelle, Philadelphia, Milan, Rome, New York, Cologne, Tbilisi, and other cities. "The work kept traveling," she says. "I am simply accompanying them. These photographs are important to me. I want to put them in a light such that people will see them shining. It makes me very happy that these beautiful people can be seen, and that stories of Japanese immigration can be told through these works."
Nitadori first arrived on Maui as an 11-year-old in 1982. "My father began working for Hawaii Omori, which had an office next to the sugarcane train station in Lahaina," she says. "When I came to Lahaina, I was culture shocked. I didn't speak any English. I spent most of my time playing basketball on the street and other times, I spent time with older people, first and second generation Japanese Americans. They were kind, gentle, and made me laugh. Maui was my longest home for quite a while."
On the theme of Japanese immigration to Hawaii, she notes that it "is something that is integrated and yet forgotten. I feel it needs to be remembered. The photographs include third-generation children as well. They are beautiful people. They faced significant challenges when they left Japan, working in difficult conditions and experiencing the war. Some were interned, others went to war, and those who lost their parents returned to Hiroshima or Okinawa."
"ACTIVATIONS: After Hours at the Gallery" will also feature poetry by Pam Nomura and Sage Simpson, an experimental sound composition by Yuji Hamada, contemporary movement pieces inspired by Noh theater, a tea ceremony with Munay, and DJ O'Soulmain in the Yokouchi Pavilion & Courtyard.
Returning to Maui on Thursday, Nitadori says, "I feel as for this exhibition, the people in the photographs wanted to come back to Maui, to be present with their descendants and the people of Lahaina. Please join us. They will be waiting to meet you."
The event runs from 5 to 9 p.m. Admission is free. Ticketed reservations are required via mauiarts.org.