(dramatic music) - When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, our West Coast became a potential combat zone.

Living in that zone were more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestors.

No one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores.

- [Lois] This is 1942.

So, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and this was a direct governmental response to that.

- Military authorities therefore determined that all of them, citizens and aliens alike, would have to move.

- Executive Order 9066 announced the start of Japanese-American incarceration.

- [Milton] Notices were posted, all persons of Japanese descent were required to register.

- So, the idea was that everyone would be moved from the coast where they could possibly be sending information to Japan and moved to one of these sites.

- [Milton] They gathered in their own churches and schools and the Japanese themselves cheerfully handled the enormous paperwork involved in the migration.

- [Lois] My paternal grandmother's family was forcibly removed from their home outside of San Diego to an incarceration site in Poston, Arizona.

- [Milton] Naturally, the newcomers looked about with some curiosity.

They were in a new area on land that was raw, untamed, but full of opportunity.

(dramatic music) - All persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from the above area by 12 o'clock noon Pacific Western Time, Wednesday, June 3rd, 1942.

This is a piece of printed propaganda from 1942 announcing the start of Japanese-American incarceration.

No Japanese person will be permitted to move into or out of the above area after 5:00 AM.

I was really lucky to receive this physical copy about two years ago from my uncle who was also incarcerated with my grandmother.

(gentle music) So, a lot of the work that I make is about my family's history of Japanese-American incarceration.

And for me, it was a way to explore an area of my family's history that wasn't that well-known to myself.

(gentle music) So, this is a body of work from 2022 called Wish You Were Here.

And it's a combination of large silkscreen posters, as well as a custom penny press.

(coin clinks) (machine cranks) (coin clanks) With a lot of the Japanese-American incarceration sites, or for instance a battle site or a large graveyard, there's often an element of dark tourism that brings people to those sites.

And I thought, what better way to think about that idea than something you'd normally see at a tourist destination or a zoo, or an amusement park.

(coin clinks) (gentle music) So, the penny press represents four Japanese-American incarceration sites and the posters represent the remaining six.

I've always been really interested in government propaganda and printed materials, and these posters were inspired by Works Progress or WPA style posters.

They're big, bright travel posters, that say see the West, maybe advertise a national park.

But instead of using those bright destinations, I wanted to use the sites of Japanese-American incarceration to sort of, again, invite people in with these bright posters, but with a slightly darker subject matter.

(dramatic music) As an artist, I'm always interested in thinking about propaganda and using that as the genesis for work.

- [Milton] They opened advanced Americanization classes for college students who in turn would instruct other groups.

- In the incarceration sites, everyone would've had a role or a job.

There was really no infrastructure.

So, some people worked in the kitchen, some people worked in the medical facility, and my grandmother's role was as a teacher.

And she would've graduated from high school while at the site.

So, I can only imagine how strange it then must have been fulfilling that teaching role.

I think it's very common in folks my generation to have a grandparent who's a survivor of the camps, to say, "Oh, I don't want to talk about it.

We've moved on.

We've Americanized."

And my dad even learned about the history of Japanese-American incarceration in middle school.

(dramatic music) When my dad had gone home to tell my grandmother, "You are never gonna believe what they did to Japanese people," she said, "Yes, it was terrible."

And that was really the first time that my dad had realized that that was part of her history because it was something that she never really talked about.

(dramatic music) I can't remember the first time that I learned, I know that we studied it in history, but the version that you learn in school, if you learn it all, is usually a very rosy portrait.

So, using the language of camp.

There's usually folks who were allowed to garden, people played baseball, people had jobs.

- [Milton] Their parents, most of whom are American citizens, and their grandparents who are aliens, immediately wanted to go to work.

- And I'm somebody who values storytelling.

And a lot of the work that I do is thinking about what's presented in an archive, and thinking, who made this?

Whose perspective is this for?

And adapting it to match my story.

(object thuds) (soft upbeat music) (shoe scrapes) (soft upbeat music) (lid clinks) (soft upbeat music) (tool scrapes) (cloth rubbing) (soft upbeat music) This is a brand new body of work called 221 Stones.

And they're all intaglio monoprints.

So, it's a version of printmaking that uses etching or intaglio techniques.

But a monoprint means that each print is individual.

So, in this case, I'm using a series of 221-shaped copper etching plates that are getting inked up and printed in different orientations and different compositions for each print.

(machine cranking) (upbeat music) The number 221 is based on the government statistic of reported deaths at Poston, Arizona where my grandmother's family was.

So, each of those rocks is meant to represent one of those figures.

(soft upbeat music) (subdued music) The history of Japanese-American incarceration is just as relevant today as we think about detention centers, ICE centers.

The feeling of anti-immigrant sentiment is even higher than I feel like when I first started to make Wish You Were Here in 2020.

(dramatic music) There's not necessarily a stop gap to it happening again.

So, trying to raise awareness through my work that things really don't change unless we don't make the same mistakes again.

(dramatic music) And so, I wanted to say, this is something that I'm looking at and I invite you all to look at it with me.

(film rolling) (static crackling) (high-spirited music)