All Amazed for Roy Kiyooka (review)

Roy Kiyooka, one of Canada's pre-eminent abstract expressionist painters, who paradoxically gave up painting in 1969-70 because he had lost faith in the precepts of modernism and had come to distrust the commercial art market, has never been as well recognized as a poet, photographer, filmmaker, sculptor, musician, and performance artist, the vocations to which he devoted the last twenty-five years of his life. The conference on Kiyooka's work held in Vancouver in October 1999 admirably attempted to reflect and explore the multidisciplinary nature of this extraordinary artist, in particular 'to bring the worlds [of art and poetry] together as they were together in his work.' All Amazed for Roy Kiyooka is based on that important conference; the first part of the book reproduces the transcript of the opening night, a celebration of Kiyooka that was 'curated' by Daphne Marlatt and Michael Ondaatje, while the second part presents reworked versions of four of the conference papers.

Like the conference, the book attempts to capture the spirit of collaboration, multidisciplinarity, and diversity that is the essence of Kiyooka's art, and it succeeds within the limitations of a printed medium. Unfortunately, it cannot reproduce the video, film, music, and performance art that were a major part of the tribute to Kiyooka and that possess the immediacy of the moment that Kiyooka felt was central to his art. We do get a good sample of Kiyooka's photographs, but it is the written word that is inevitably privileged, with Kiyooka's poetry taking centre stage - and compelling poetry it is, a treat for those unfamiliar with this aspect of his work.

Roy Miki, the editor and long-time champion of Kiyooka's poetry, insightfully explores Kiyooka's subject position as a Japanese Canadian who felt contained, 'athwarted' by the 'Canadian' national cultural scene of the postwar period. Miki's essay teases out the political impetus behind Kiyooka's writing, focusing on his racialized, minoritized position 'as the "asian," "oriental," "jap," [in which] he wrestled with ... the ghosts of a splayed family history, the disappearance of "mother tongue," and the incommensurabilities that visited his consciousness through the back (though more properly, the lack) door of alterities in an unspoken "alien nation" that was both his own and not his own.' As well as uncovering in Kiyooka's work the trauma of being a Japanese-Canadian artist after the internment, amid 'a national whiteness,' Miki also champions Kiyooka's resiliency, charting his refusal to succumb to victimhood and the strength he gained from his Japanese-Canadian heritage. Miki's essay places Kiyooka's work within the contexts of postcolonial, globalization, and Asian-Canadian studies; I sincerely hope it will help to secure his position within these fields for Kiyooka is richly deserving of greater scholarly attention.

Henry Tsang's personal memoir of Kiyooka as a teacher presents a revealing portrait of a man who was independent, humble, funny, warm, generous, and engaged, a man who served as mentor and collaborator to a number of Asian-Canadian artists. Sheryl Conkelton's much more analytical essay is, as she says, 'the token stranger in this volume' in that she does not approach Kiyooka's art through personal knowledge of the man. Rather, she attempts to illustrate the thesis that, even after he abandoned abstract expressionist painting, Kiyooka continued to be strongly influenced by a modernist/formalist aesthetic in his photography, particularly in the ways he chose to order the grids and sequences of photographs that became his chosen mode of expression. She asserts that, rather than being involved in broad critique of cultural systems, Kiyooka continued to celebrate the individual's response to the immediate present of the world and to stress his awareness of the artist watching that world.

In a wonderfully playful, brilliantly evocative final essay that builds on Miki's and rebuts Conkelton's, Scott Toguri McFarlane argues that 'Roy Kiyooka's [photo-essay] StoneDGloves insists that...