WAAC Education Committee presents ARTIST VOICES Speaker Series with Lillian Yano Blakey

Lillian Yano Blakey

Thursday, February 20, 2025

via ZOOM

To the Japanese, imperfection is part of beauty, even in a broken ceramic vase. The vase is put back together with gold filling the cracks, making it even more beautiful because the vase carries proudly its scars.

The journey of the 22,000 out of their broken world is a golden kintsugi journey. My family was one of the families who had slaved in exile in Alberta. In 1945, I was born in Coaldale Alberta and my sister in 1946. A new beginning. Out of the broken world at last.

As an artist, for most of my life, I was in denial of what had happened and of my dual heritage of being both the persecuted and the persecutor. My art is my kintsugi journey.

Lillian Michiko Blakey is a third generation Japanese Canadian, based in Newmarket, whose family came to Ontario in 1952. The first in her family to graduate from university, she became a teacher, educational consultant, and professional artist. She is the past President of the Ontario Society of Artists, with paintings in the collections of the Government of Ontario and the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby, BC. Recent group exhibitions include the ROM and Canadian National War Museum,

Artist Bio
It has taken me seventy-four years after WWII, thirty-two years after the government’s Acknowledgement and Apology, to come to terms with who I am…  a Canadian of Japanese heritage. My work has been exhibited in many Canadian venues – The John B. Aird Gallery; the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre; the University of British Columbia, Absence in Remembrance: The Japanese Canadian Internment; the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, Toronto, On Being Michiko 2012;  the ROM, On Being Japanese Canadian: Reflections on a Broken World (2019);  the Canadian Museum of History, Lost Liberties: The War Measures Act (2022);  and currently, in the Canadian War Museum’s Outside the Lines: Women Artists and War (2024) which will tour to five institutional venues until the end of 2027.  I co-published, with Jeff Chiba Stearns, a graphic novel On Being Yukiko (2020). My art projections supported the premiere of the ballet, Kimiko’s Pearl (2024) The ROM’s iconic exhibition “Being Japanese Canadian: reflections on a broken world” in 2019, was a turning point in my life. By interspersing the artwork of eight Japanese Canadian artists in the Sigmund Samuel Gallery of Canadian history, I finally felt that our story is an important part of the history of Canada. My portrait of my mother in city clothes, behind a barbed wire fence in Alberta, was the signature image for the exhibition.

Website
www.blakeyart.ca