Paradise

The JCCC Gallery's fall exhibition is Paradise: a multimedia installation by Japanese Canadian artists and longtime family friends Mitchell Akiyama and Emma Nishimura that explores intergenerational inheritance. Combining print, video, and sculpture, the work reflects on their relationship to the legacy of Japanese Canadian internment experienced by their paternal grandparents.

The exhibition draws on a shared childhood memory of a summer day in Northern Ontario, where the artists and their siblings built a temporary "Frog Paradise." This moment of play, shaped by a sense of safety and belonging, becomes a lens for considering how one group’s utopia can exist alongside another’s harm. The installation includes video that intercuts footage of this experience with recent visits to former internment sites in British Columbia.

Bridging personal narrative and historical context, Paradise examines the forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese Canadians, tracing how this legacy continues to shape memory, displacement, and belonging across generations.