A.S.M. Kobayashi: Electric Neon Clock

Canada forcibly incarcerated and dispossessed thousands of Canadian citizens of Japanese heritage, relocating them to internment camps, or in the case of the artist A.S.M. Kobayashi’s family, a sugar beet work farm in the Canadian Prairies. After accessing the 119 page custodial file of my great-grandfather, Kobayashi discovered the case files of her relatives, their friends and a wider community of displaced people of Japanese descent. These historical documents detail inventories of their homes and fishing business, contain government correspondence, internal memos and court transcripts. All adults named in the original documents have died, leaving their now elderly children, as the only first-person accounts of this period. Their old age has blurred childhood memories, leaving the custodial file as the most enduring testimony of my family from this period. 

Electric Neon Clock, asks, how can the artist liberate forensic practices and state records, to undermine their original intention and use them to reconstruct the community and families they were designed to dismantle? Relying on her family’s custodial file as a guide, Kobayashi adapts this textual record into a multimedia installation and series of performances detailing her family’s experience. Using video, sound, intimate family interviews, a substantial photo archive, and the innovative format of a live auction, she welcomes audiences to delve into her family’s file, encouraging participation in accessing the inventory’s value to join her in interpreting and humanizing its contents.

Curated by AGM Senior Curator Shannon Anderson

A.S.M. Kobayashi is an interdisciplinary artist who grew up in Mississauga and is currently based in New York City and Toronto. Her hybrid, interactive work mixes documentary and fiction through video, performance, installation, and illustration. Her video work and performances have been exhibited internationally at museums and film festivals including The Lincoln Center, GTA24, The Power Plant, Gallery TPW, Nuit Blanche, BFI London Film Festival, Jakarta International Film Festival and Damascus Video Art Festival. Her critically acclaimed performance, Say Something Bunny!, based on found audio recordings, was heralded as “The best new theater experience in town” by Vogue. It was a NYTimes critics’ pick, and was listed in Time Out’s 2017 top ten productions and BOMB’s Best of Performance in 2018. Kobayashi is a 2024 Creative Capital Awardee, a 2006 recipient of the Trinity Square Video Artistic Vision Award and a 2007 Marty Award winner. She has received grants from the Canada Council, Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and New York State Council on the Arts. She was a multi-time fellow at both Yaddo and MacDowell, was the founding art director of the documentary journal World Records from 2018-2021, and produces Special Projects at UnionDocs, Center for Documentary Art.