Tsuneko Kokubo’s enigmatic artistic and creative practice spans over 70 years of painting, dance performance, costume design, and theatre. Born in 1937 in Steveston, B.C. and raised in Japan, Kokubo brings a dynamism of life’s complex beauty by being in-between states of time, memory, and place. She is revered as an artist with deep symbolic interconnectedness to her lived surroundings which often includes the trees, rivers, oceans to the plants in her garden. Her visionary art-making brings to the surface the life forms and energies caught in the folds of insightful observation and play.

In conversation with interdisciplinary artist, Cindy Mochizuki, Kokubo will discuss what has influenced and carried her as one of the early and pioneer Japanese Canadian artists of her time to ‘here’. Speaking through select artworks and processes, stories, and events, Kokubo’s talk will weave together estuaries and rivers of concepts, abstractions, symbols that have marked her multifaceted career. The event is hosted by the Langham Cultural Society and co-organized with the Asian Canadian Studies Society with funding from the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society.