JCCC Gallery

Nuit Blanche 2025

Yuko Matsuki — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 14:44:40 +0000

Nuit Blanche 2025 Yuko Matsuki Aug 27, 2025

October 4, 2025 7:00pm - October 5, 2025 7:00am

Event Category

Community Event

JCCC Gallery

Nuit Blanche at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre

From sunset October 4 to sunrise October 5, 2025

The Shape of Loss, Louise Noguchi

When Canada declared war on Japan in December 1941, Japanese Canadian fishermen were among the first to feel the consequences. The federal government, citing national security, ordered the confiscation of over 1,100 fishing boats owned by Japanese Canadians along the Pacific coast. Representing families’ livelihoods built over decades, the vessels were seized by the Royal Canadian Navy and the RCMP, often with little notice, and turned over to the Custodian of Enemy Property. While authorities claimed the boats were being held for safekeeping, most were sold off at a fraction of their value to non-Japanese buyers, effectively stripping Japanese Canadian families of their economic base. This marked the beginning of a wider program of dispossession and internment that targeted the entire Japanese Canadian community during the war.

Nuit Blanche at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre will see our space turned over to making visible these losses.

Over twelve hours, the hull of each fishing boat confiscated during WWII will be reproduced on our gallery walls by artist Louise Noguchi with the support of a community of announcers, narrators, collaborators, and co-conspirators.

Louise Noguchi is a Japanese Canadian artist whose work interrogates cultural identity, representation, and memory through photography, video, and installation. Over her career, she has moved from examining the myths and spectacles of the West, such as cowboys and magicians, to probing the erasures and legacies of Japanese Canadian history, including internment and dispossession. Her recent practice engages directly with archival materials and historical narratives, making her a vital figure in conversations about art, memory, and Japanese Canadian experience.

The space will be turned over to lingering attention. Tea will be served, and you are invited to remain and bear witness. Texts and other materials on Japanese Canadian history will be made available in addition to other slow and reflective activities.

Free parking is available.

The drawn hulls and a time-lapse video of the performance will remain in the gallery until the show closes on January 23, 2026.

Citations:

University of British Columbia Library. Rare Books and Special Collections. Japanese Canadian Research Collection. JCPC-12b-010
Confiscated boats held at the Annieville Dyke on the Fraser River in British Columbia. Courtesy Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre (NNM 2010.4.2.11.A)

Phase in My Journey Exhibition

Samphors Say — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 23:26:48 +0000

Phase in My Journey Exhibition Samphors Say Mar 3, 2025

April 5, 2025 10:00am - June 30, 2025 7:00pm

Event Category

The JCCC Arts Committee is pleased to announce that we will be participating in the CONTACT Photography Festival once again! Phase in my Journey, featuring artist Walter Borchenko and curated by Shin Sugino, will be on view from April 5 to June 30, 2025.

More about the show

The work of Canadian-born photographer Walter Borchenko represents a profound and singular exploration of the Modernist photographic aesthetic. This 20-year retrospective traces a remarkable journey, beginning with the evocative self-portrait, Self Portrait, Hollywood Florida (2006), and culminating in the integration of infra-red techniques in Grassy Brook - Talbot River Road (2024). Borchenko's work transcends homage, evolving the Modernist tradition into something new: a "Modernist evolved" aesthetic rather than a postmodern reinterpretation.

Over the last two decades, Borchenko has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the principles of Modernist photography. His dedication to achieving the essence of the image through meticulous camera work, optics, and lighting- eschewing heavy digital manipulation—is a rare practice in contemporary photography. The singularity of his approach is further heightened by his use of consistent digital capture technology throughout this period, providing continuity and integrity to his artistic evolution.

Borchenko's images are further elevated through the use of hand-made Japanese Awagami paper, which imbues his prints with a tactile depth and subtlety that harmonizes with the Modernist ethos. The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre is honored to present this unique and memorable exhibition, celebrating Borchenko's evolution of Modernist photography and his contribution to its legacy.

An Artist Talk will take place on May 24 at 2:00pm as part of Doors Open. See details here.

Spirit Place: The Magnificent Woodcut Art of Naoko Matsubara

Samphors Say — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 16:40:04 +0000

Spirit Place: The Magnificent Woodcut Art of Naoko Matsubara Samphors Say Aug 27, 2024

September 25, 2024 7:00pm-January 3, 2025 12:00pm

Event Category

Please note that the exhibit is now closing on January 3rd, 2025 at 12PM due to unforeseen circumstances. This is a few hours earlier than announced prior. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Nature is a sweeping backdrop of inspiration for renowned Japanese Canadian woodcut artist Naoko Matsubara. A distinguished print artist known for creating cheerful and joyful works, Matsubara’s images range from black and white to vibrant colour, intimate to monumental, playful to contemplative.

Spirit Place will explore the work and remarkable career of Naoko Matsubara. Since 1960, Matsubara has had over 80 exhibitions around the world, but none have focused on her creative process and the influence of nature and the architecture of her studio. Spirit Place acts not only as a retrospective of Matsubara’s work, but also a reflection on her creative process and the influence of nature, spirituality, and the studio where she works – her spirit place.

Forty dynamic woodcut prints will hang in the JCCC Art Gallery, along with her rollers, paints, brushes and handmade paper. Photographs depicting Matsubara in process in her studio will be hung, and a short documentary featuring the artist, her work, and her studio, will premiere.

Please join us for our opening reception on September 25th from 7-9:30 PM.

Opening Reception

More programming to be announced shortly!

Mottainai(勿体無い): The Beauty of Reclaimed Materials Opening Reception

Samphors Say — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 03:47:04 +0000

Mottainai(勿体無い): The Beauty of Reclaimed Materials Opening Reception Samphors Say Dec 7, 2023

January 13, 2024 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Event Category

Community Event

Exhibition

JCCC Gallery

Please join us in celebrating the opening of our upcoming community show, Mottainai(勿体無い): The Beauty of Reclaimed Materials Reception. The show features work from artists in the JCCC community around the theme of Mottainai, a well-known Japanese word that carries a profound message of respect and appreciation for resources and the environment.

Light refreshments served—more details to come.

Please note that artists in the JCCC community are still welcome to apply to exhibit their work in Mottainai until December 31st. Please see here for more details.

Opening Reception - 60 Years of Friendship Through Culture and Déjà Vu

SuYen — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 15:43:44 +0000

Opening Reception - 60 Years of Friendship Through Culture and Déjà Vu SuYen Apr 13, 2023

April 30, 2023 1:30pm - 3:30pm

Event Category

Reception: April 30 at 1:30pm

Exhibits: Déjà Vu: Split Perception as One | 60 Year of Friendship Through Culture

To celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC), the Centre invites you and your family to the opening reception for two exhibitions: Déjà Vu: Split Perception as One by Shin Sugino and 60 Years of Friendship Through Culture featuring an art installation by Elysha Rei.

To RSVP, click here to register.

https://bit.ly/JCCCReception

Artists Walk and Talk - Artsu Matsuri 2023

SuYen — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 15:22:26 +0000

Artists Walk and Talk - Artsu Matsuri 2023 SuYen Feb 27, 2023

March 26, 2023 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Event Category

An artist walk-and-talk will take place on March 26, 2023, where each artist will talk about their creations, what inspired them, and the process of how they brought their ideas to life. During the last Artsu Matsuri in 2020 the walk-and-talk was canceled due to Covid-19, however this year’s walk-and-talk offers insight into the new ideas and perspectives artists have gained during their time in isolation. This event will provide an opportunity for guests to meet some of the artists and their families as they informally dialogue with art enthusiasts in a casual setting.

Artsu Matsuri is a community based exhibition celebrating art in the JCCC community. This exhibition features the works of 25 artists: Katherine Adachi, David Bernhard, Kumiko Claros, Ruben Claros, Lois Fuse, Barbara Miiko Gravlin, Gerry Yumiko Hewson, Roslyn Levin, Gloria Kagawa, Tsutao Machida, Kai Morrison, Kaz Ogino, Harvey Okawara, Maryam Poozaki, Nancy Peng (Yamada), Michelle Ramos, Irene Sakata, Keiko Shintani, Ken Sugamori, Naomi Tsuji-Tamaki, Jerrold Tanaka, Kayoko Tanaka, Mui-Ling Teh, Rita Wong, and Hiroshi Yamamoto.

Artists Walk & Talk is happening on March 26 at 2pm.

This exhibition is available for viewing until April 21, 2023.

Opening Reception - Artsu Matsuri

SuYen — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 18:43:16 +0000

Opening Reception - Artsu Matsuri SuYen Jan 4, 2023

January 15, 2023 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Event Category

JCCC Gallery

Community Event

Reception: January 15 at 2pm at the JCCC Gallery

The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre invites you and your family to the opening reception for Artsu Matsuri, a community based exhibition celebrating art in the JCCC community. This exhibition features the works of 25 artists: Katherine Adachi, David Bernhard, Kumiko Claros, Ruben Claros, Lois Fuse, Barbara Miiko Gravlin, Roslyn Levin, Gloria Kagawa, Tsutao Machida, Kai Morrison, Kaz Ogino, Harvey Okawara, Maryam Poozaki, Nancy Peng (Yamada), Michelle Ramos, Irene Sakata, Keiko Shintani, Ken Sugamori, Naomi Tsuji-Tamaki, Jerrold Tanaka, Kayoko Tanaka, Mui-Ling Teh, Rita Wong, and Hiroshi Yamamoto.

Artsu Matsuri will be available for viewing until April 21, 2023.

Nuit Blanche Toronto

SuYen — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 14:38:55 +0000

Nuit Blanche Toronto SuYen Aug 26, 2022

October 1, 2022 7:00pm - October 2, 2022 7:00am

Event Category

Community Event

Heritage

JCCC Gallery

The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre will be presenting three programming during the Nuit Blanche festival featuring three Japanese Canadian artist and one Japanese Brazilian artist: Maari Sugawara, Annie Sumi, Brian Kobayakawa, and Erica Kaminishi. These artworks/exhibits are curated to revolve around concept of the exploration of Nikkei (Japanese Diaspora)’s identities by transnational artists who experience multiple levels of shifting communal memories and identities as well as contingent national identifications.

Schedule

Maru: Immigration Stories Exhibit Tours

Oct 1: 7:30 PM, 9:30 PM, 11:30 PM

For more information, click here. Self-guided audio tour also available.

Artist Talk: Maari Sugawara

Oct 1: 8:30 PM, 10:30 PM

Other exhibits available for viewing - 7pm - 7 am

Place of Pride
Women of Change

Algorithms of Innocence by Maari Sugawara - 7pm - 7am

JCCC Gallery's featured artist for Nuit Blanche this Fall, Maari Sugawara will exhibit a series of immersive audio and video installations entitled, "Algorithms of Innocence". Employing a wide range of mediums such as VR, animation, videography, and stock materials, Maari problematizes aspects of Japanese national and cultural identity and encourages a departure from traditional categories of difference.

Kintsugi by Annie Sumi and Brian Kobayakawa - 7pm - 7am

An anti-racist, interactive, multi-disciplinary, art installation, ‘Kintsugi’ reflects on racial identity, healing ancestral trauma, and the fragmented history of the Japanese Canadian internment. Created with the help of shadow-puppeteer duo Mind of a Snail, the projections are an overlapping collage of landscape video footage, cut-up old letters written by the artists’ ancestors, and playful animations. All of the pieces of this installation are site-specific. Two of the featured videos are present-day footage of the places where internment camps were built during WWII - one where Kobayakawa’s father was born, and the other where Sumi’s grandfather spent his youth.

All in one, one in All no 1 by Erica Kaminishi - 7pm - 7am

Maru: Immigration Stories focused on stories of the Japanese diaspora in the Americas and also features an interactive art installation by Japanese Brazilian artist Erica Kaminishi. Kaminishi is a third-generation Japanese Brazilian artist born in Brazil and in the past two decades, she moved between three continents. In this climate of globalization, Kaminishi’s works have internalized and explored topics relating to transnational migrations focused on notions of identities, generational communal memories, cosmopolitanism, and belonging. All in one, one in All no 1 is an installation that expands beyond its limits and playfully mixes creeds and colors in a unique collective life-art project. However, despite the concept of unity in diversity, it also brings reflections concerning our relationship with each other and the space we inhabit. This installation is a project that brings the public to its visual landscape, inviting them to build a place of reflection, living memory, and fluid identities.

INDEPENDENT PROJECT

Ichigo-Ichie 一期一会: One Time - One Meeting by Helen Kong (Secret Teatime)

Helen Kong, the owner of Secret Teatime, is a ceramicist and tea practitioner. She gathers fellow artists (Justine Wong, Sabrina Tu, and Mika Sato), makers (Satoshi Yoshikawa), designers (Makeshift Collective), tea practitioners (Momo Yoshida and Susanna Sun), and local small business owners to come together with their passion and artistry to create a multi-sensory art installation and tea event for the Toronto public. Participants will be guided through one of three tea rooms: a Japanese, Taiwanese, or Chinese tea space for either a personalized experience or self-guided exploration of tea and spirituality. RSVP online prior to event for limited spots in the Japanese and Taiwanese tearoom (follow Ichigo-Ichie to know when RSVP will be available). Drop-in and rush line opportunities will also be available.

Opening Reception - Algorithms of Innocence

SuYen — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 19:28:01 +0000

Opening Reception - Algorithms of Innocence SuYen Aug 3, 2022

August 12, 2022 5:00pm - 9:00pm

Event Category

Community Event

JCCC Gallery

Reception: August 12 at 5pm at the JCCC Gallery

Solo Exhibition: Maari Sugawara

JCCC Gallery's featured artist for Nuit Blanche this Fall, Maari Sugawara will exhibit a series of immersive audio and video installations entitled, "Algorithms of Innocence". Maari Sugawara (born 1994 in Tokyo, Japan), a Japanese interdisciplinary artist, researcher, translator, writer, and soon-to-be Ph.D. student at the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong, splits her time between Toronto, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. She is the recipient of the Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS), established by the Research Grants Council (RGC). Employing a wide range of mediums such as VR, animation, videography, and stock materials, Maari problematizes aspects of Japanese national and cultural identity and encourages a departure from traditional categories of difference.

Exhibition Statement by Maari Sugawara

Invoking the shifting entanglements between home and displacement, Imperial past and futures, violence and sexuality, Algorithms of Innocence invites audiences to inhabit an imaginative future space that defies traditional categories of differences. As a queer, autistic Japanese woman who grew up in England and later immigrated to Canada and is now based in Japan and Hong Kong, issues of marginalized identities and displacement are central to my work. This displacement prompts me to review the nuances of selves and identities; in particular, Japanese “self-colonizing” cultural and national identity.

Needing to take advantage of Orientalist projections by dominant Western powers, postwar Japanese national and cultural identity resorted to self-Orientalism. The “Japan Brand” Strategy— the government-owned production site of “Cool Japan” imagery and cultural policy, not only created a liberated and humane image of postwar Japan globally but it was also devised as a mechanism to induce collective amnesia which allowed Japan to disregard its colonial past and engender soft nationalism. This discourse celebrates the rise of the Japanese economy, affirming the country’s superiority while distancing itself from the imaginary “impoverished” continent of Asia. Through time, Japan’s self-defined “pure originality”— which emerged as a counter-narrative to Japan’s being infamous for its ability to imitate the West—along with the new marketable versions of Japaneseness–became internalized by the Japanese. This mechanism is perpetuated by Japan’s “ally,” the US, who further reifies the erasure of collective trauma from the era of Japanese colonization. Japan’s self-Orientalism was an unexpected side-effect of playing the US’s “Japan” and its dependence on the dominant West.

Using conceptualizations of cyborgs, shanzhai (deconstruction in Chinese; meaning “fake” and the idea that nothing is original), queer methodology, hauntology, and a reflexive capacity for toxicity where subjects have the agency to adapt to the aftermaths of disasters, Algorithms of Innocence rethinks constructed Japanese identities as delinked from the idea of “pure originality” and devoid of internalized Orientalism. This series consists of installations employing VR, animation, videos generated using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), photography, videography, stock materials, and texts. Leaping between multiple protagonists—the author (Maari Sugawara) and her cybernetic avatars, Avatar-Ms, illustrates how the traditional categories that are used to constitute identities are categorically interpellated and performatively constituted through Eurocentric, male-dominant, and heteronormative discourses. The intention is to queer normative Japanese orientations of identities and explore the possibilities for desiring in ways that move beyond the politicized regulation and representation of bodies and desire. This encourages imaginations of women-defined futures, futures that are delinked from self-colonization, futures where women survive Japan’s Imperialist past and present as well as all the natural disasters rather than simply submitting to such violence.

Artists Walk and Talk - Sumi-e: The Way of the Brush

SuYen — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 15:33:09 +0000

Artists Walk and Talk - Sumi-e: The Way of the Brush SuYen Jul 12, 2022

July 21, 2022 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Event Category

JCCC Gallery

Community Event

In recognition of the exhibit Sumi-e: the Way of the Brush, the AGO Insider published an article that proclaims, “the show celebrates the powerful complexity of our environment.”

On the summer evening of July 21st, the Artists Walk & Talk event will be the finale for this beautiful exhibition.This event will provide an opportunity for guests to meet some of the artists and their families as they informally dialogue with art enthusiasts in a casual setting.

Sumi-e painting is the embodiment of Japanese aesthetics – brush, ink and white space that captures the timeless beauty and complexity of the natural world. We believe Sumi-e can help in achieving inner peace during this tumultuous time in the world. Sumi-e has held an honoured place in the JCCC. It was the first cultural class offered to the public by the JCCC in 1964.

Artists Walk & Talk is happening on July 21st at 7pm.

Sumi-e: the Way of the Brush is available for viewing until July 29, 2022.