Painting

Tomoko Kodama

Tomoko Kodama was a sumi-e painter born in Tokyo. She first discovered her love of art in high school, and went on to study nihonga painting in university. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1957. Kodama immigrated to Canada with her husband, Hideomi Kodama, in 1962. They were planning on staying only […]

Hiroshi Yamamoto

Hiroshi Yamamoto is a nihonga and sumi-e painter. His artist name is ‘Hakuho.’ Yamamoto was born in Shiga prefecture in Japan. He graduated from the Kyoto Industrial Design Institute and the Kyoto Japanese Art School, where he studied Japanese Traditional Art – Nihonga, Sumi-e and Art History. He was awarded the Ruth Yamada Award in […]

Yumie Kono

Yumie Kono is a visual artist who draws and paints. She was born in Hiroshima and grew up in Matsue, Japan. She graduated with a BFA from the Women’s College of Fine Arts in Tokyo in 1967. After traveling for a year from 1971-1972 to North America and Middle East, she immigrated to Canada and […]

Michael Tora Speier

Michael Tora Speier is a west coast North American visual artist, born in Berkeley CA, raised in Vancouver BC, of Jewish and Japanese ancestry. He received a visual art scholarship from the Helen Pitt Foundation and graduated with BFA honours in Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia. Growing to define himself as a […]

Kevin DeForest

Kevin Ei-ichi DeForest is a visual and multimedia artist. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba to Japanese and Swiss parents. He studied architecture (Bachelor of Environmental Studies, 1983) and fine art (BFA, 1986) at the University of Manitoba before getting an MFA from Concordia University in 1994. He was also a Mombusho (Japan Ministry of […]

Sachi Yamabe

Sachi Yamabe is a visual artist. She was born in Burnaby, BC and grew up on Saltspring Island and Vancouver Island. She is Sansei. Yamabe received a BFA from the University of Victoria in 1987 and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (NSCAD) in 1989. Yamabe’s work has been exhibited […]

Walter Sunahara

Walter Sunahara was a painter. He was born in Vancouver and during WWII was interned as a child at Bay Farm, Slocan. Moving east after the war he earned a degree from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto in 1959. Walter then pursued graduate studies at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts specializing in Nihonga, […]

Shizuye Takashima

Shizuye Takashima was one of Canada’s foremost Nisei painters. Beginning in the late 1950s, she became noticed on the Canadian art scene for her skilful and sensitive figurative paintings, but her style and subject matter underwent many transformations throughout her career. She is most well-known for her book, A Child in Prison Camp, which tells […]

Leslie Sasaki

Leslie Sasaki is a sansei art educator and artist living in Hamilton, Ontario. He was born in Winnipeg in 1953 to George Sasaki (b. Annacis Island, BC) and Rosa Adeline Sasaki (nee Takatsu, b. Hainey, BC) His formative artistic influences include his father, who was a sign painter and his mother, who encouraged her children […]

Kazuo Nakamura

Kazuo Nakamura was an internationally recognized abstract painter, widely noted for his application of rigorous mathematical structure to his depictions of both landscapes and more abstract visuals. Born in Vancouver in 1926, he was teaching himself how to paint landscapes when he was forcibly relocated as a teenager to the Tashme internment camp, where he […]

Tsuneko Kokubo

Tsuneko Kokubo was born in Steveston BC in 1937, and raised in Japan. Returning to Canada in her late teens, she studied Fine Arts for four years at Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University), focussing on drawing and painting. She has worked extensively in theatre as a performer (physical theatre and dance) and […]

Mitsugi Kikuchi

Mitsugi Shinran Kikuchi is a painter who works in traditional Japanese styles of sumi-e (ink brush painting) and tarashikomi (‘drop-in’ method of watercolour painting), and a retired ikebana sensei in the Ohara school. He learned sumi-e and tarashikomi after graduating high school in Japan, and also became an ikebana teacher before immigrating to Canada in […]

Mitsuru Cope

Mitsuru Cope is a Japanese-born ceramicist and painter who trained at Champlain College and Concordia University in Montreal. She has taken part in exhibitions in Quebec, Alberta, and the Czech Republic. Cope was one of six JC participants (with Baco Ohama, Stan Taniwa, Takako Suzuki, Sadashi Inuzuka and Bryce Kanbara) in the momentous ‘Community’ project […]

Ruth Yamada

Ruth Yamada was a sumi-e artist and watercolour painter, and founder of the Toronto-based group Sumi-e Artists of Canada. Professionally, Yamada worked as the lead fashion artist for Fairweather Clothing. Her sumi-e and watercolours were exhibited at a number of solo exhibitions in Ontario, and part of group exhibitions internationally, including in Japan. Yamada was […]

Aiko Suzuki

Aiko Suzuki was a prolific and versatile artist whose work took the forms of textiles, acrylic and oil painting, or just painting, printmaking, installations, and even multimedia works and set design. She was also an art educator, curator, and a leader and mentor in the arts community: not the least of her achievements was the […]