Audio Tour

GK: My name is Glenn. Glenn Akira Kaino and I’m an artist. I was born in Los Angeles. I grew up in a suburb called Cerritos. And one of the, I’d say, more connected qualities of my youth was that my friends and I would build our own—my own toys. And we would get sort of action figures or whatever, but not be able to have or afford the vehicles or any of the settings. And so we would make all of the landscapes and, you know, my first in early introduction into making and kit bashing and the idea of using other parts for different projects was making our own toys.

My mom was a school teacher. My dad was [an] engineer, you know. My dad was entrepreneurial so he and one of his buddies out of college who was a little older than him, started an engineering firm that did, you know, pretty well. I guess, my mom, you know, sort of had a consistent job as an educator.

I’d say [we had a] conventional life, you know, as we unpack it, growing older, you know, understanding what it must have been like to not only be two generations removed from the incarceration of Japanese Americans and kind of understanding how their parents sort of lives were shaped by that [and] has taught me more about how they have shaped their lives, you know, and whatnot.
 

GK: The stories of my grandfather, you know, a fellow named Akira, from [whom] I was named after, who I had grown up

learning and hearing about being a legendary football player for Poly High in Los Angeles. It was very hard because he passed away two years before I was born. I never got to meet him. I saw a very limited photographic documentation of him in his life. I saw, I think, two photos growing up. And so growing up as a scrawny, skinny Asian American, you know, Japanese American kid but hearing that your grandfather was a legendary football player, you know, it’s sort of a hard square to circle. It was really, really hard to connect. And I think one of the things that I’m trying to think about in this project for this show is how some of those struggles and constructs are transferred—transgenerational and whatnot—and thinking about media archetypes and role models and what that means and exploring that through this work.

HY:And what roles did your grandparents play as you were growing up? You talked a little bit about your grandfather.

GK: Yeah. My grandfather passed away when I was very young.

HY: Right. Mm-hm.

GK: And my grandfather on my father’s side also passed away, you know, very young. So my grandmothers were the ones that really were present in my life.

HY: Can you talk a little bit about how they met?

GK: Yeah, my grandparents—well Akira met Sachiye in Heart Mountain, at the camps. They were also together in Santa Anita but I believe that they actually met at Heart Mountain.

HY: Do you know how they met?

GK: I think she [Glenn’s grandmother] said something just about going to a dance or something (laughs) because I know dances were a big deal for them. 

HY: They were, yeah.

GK: But, it strikes—he was a football stud and there were a few, you know, there were a handful of really great football players over at Heart Mountain.

GK: It is a self-awareness of how our memory and imagination—the slippage between the imagination and memory, you know, and what the notion of space-making can provide, and understanding how sites of trauma and sites of healing can be catalysts for generational change.

One of the takeaways also is that in addition to the negative psychological artifacts that we carry—you know, my anger and violence, for example, as a frustrated teenager—are there also wonderful things like community and generosity that are also passed down transgenerationally, you know, so that we can figure out how to connect the two in a way and to offer hopeful solutions for healing as opposed to just scars.

And so what I think and hope is that people have experienced—even it’s a glimpse of a space and leave here having visited and we’ve implanted and created a memory, a spatial memory, a memory of presence, and really a time machine and we’ve transported them through time—[is] that they then understand that behind every photograph that they have, behind every moment, you know, has value. Because ostensibly, what happens is by placing this here, the institution has found it to have value. And this is merely a story of a small town store in an ignored neighborhood in LA, but if this store and this story can have value, then everyone’s story can have value, and so that’s part of what I hope everyone leaves with.

HY: Could you talk a little bit about the different artworks that will be around?

GK: Yeah, there’s a series of, I call them sketches on butcher paper, it’s vegetable oil paints on butcher paper. I call it the three Akiras. It’s my grandfather Akira, it’s Akira Kurosawa, the filmmaker, and Akira Yoshizawa, the godfather of origami, in different ages of their lives. All of the works are slippages of memory and imagination. So it’s like, Oh, my grandfather is named Akira, maybe all these are my grandfathers. And thinking about role models and whatnot.

GK: I had this vision or dream for, I don’t know, fifteen years about me at some point doing a project to realize his dream of playing football or thinking about that. And so one of the sculptures—actually one of those sculptures over there—I think the body of the work will be called “Take Inventory,” and it’s shelves of stolen goods. So what does a shelf of stolen goods look like? It looks empty. But inside, there’s a diorama that’s an infinity mirror box of a football field, and the football field goes on forever. There’s always a game being played forever, which is in honor of that story.

GK: The movie Akira came out in ’88 when I was at the height of my sort of troubled moments. And it’s very interesting because that was the first—I was writing about that too [for the accompanying zine]—and that film was the first movie that spoke to me in a way. Asian-American representation was either martial arts films, mostly Chinese martial arts films. It was a ninja show called Kage no Gundan: Shadow Warriors, and that’s it. 

It’s Japanese, a Japanese protagonist, but it ends up being in the US and really defines a future of culture in a way and so that movie spoke to me in a super powerful way, on top of the fact that it’s called Akira, which is my name! And I was like, what a gift that film was. And so this show slips in and out of the imagination of my grandfather being Akira from the movie. And so we’ve recreated Kaneda’s bike from artifacts that would be in the store. Wood crates, shipping crates, and then the rims from my grandfather’s station wagon emblazoned like the Kaneda’s bike with the logos of his past and my past.

So there’s fixtures in East LA—his old haunts, but also mine—and it’s this blurriness and slippage of, again, memory, imagination of cultural artifacts, and really bringing into form this notion of how sometimes your memories attach themselves to an object.
 

GK: And one of the other more powerful pieces also is two bunka-shishū embroidery works, one of them created by my grandmother, of a kabuki dancer. And it was very interesting because I grew up seeing—she embroidered these. There’s these art kits called bunka shishū and she would punch embroidery them and, well, all of our family members have them because she’s made a lot of work. And I always thought they were great, but it was always like, oh, they’re great art kits. And then I recently met a woman who was the, Darlene, who’s the caretaker of the craft. She runs the website where everyone gets supplies and she’s one of the western liaisons to the bunka craft. And she gave me one of the last remaining patterns of the same kabuki dancer that my grandmother made.

In fact I handed her the needle and she started going at it (laughs) and she ended up embroidering a beautiful small... I was hoping for one stitch. We ended up

getting a bunch of stitches in a little area. And so what I did was I took the rest of the thread and I figured out a way to punch it to only have one stitch for each thread and the rest of it hangs down with the idea being that these are stitches that will be—are just left to be punched in a way. And it creates this beautiful look, but also the threads are weeping in a way, the threads are crying.
 

GK: When visitors come into the space, they’ll see, effectively, an empty room. There are artworks in positions around the room, but the primary floor area is covered with a recycled rubber floor mat in the outline of Aki’s market, which is the neighborhood store that my grandfather and grandmother ran out of their house. They will see the only clear photo taken from within the store of Aki standing in front of some of the products on the shelf. And next to it is a VR headset. And then they’ll be able to put on the VR headset, enter the silhouette of the space on the floor, and then through virtual reality and through seeing in the goggles, they will be transported through time and space into the store and be able to walk around and visit our recreation inspired by the photo and numerous layers of stories of the market.

We’ve also collapsed the fifteen years of the store’s existence into one moment, so there are products from different cycles of the store. But we’ve also introduced products from now and introduced new iterations of it where my family and some of the storytellers had gaps in their memories, we’ve filled them in, really connecting the present day to that moment as well. And what I’ve been saying is that inventory comes and goes, but the spirit of the store is what stays.