Glenn Kaino
Still from The Store
2023
VR equipment, mixed-media installation
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

Written by Luxi H.

Akira Shiraishi used to run a humble neighborhood market in East Los Angeles. At the corner of Blanchard Street and Geraghty Avenue, the store served its local Japanese and Hispanic community from 1957 to 1970. Simply and amiably named, the corner store bore a plain name – Aki’s market, which, in later years, would sound as a boomerang call from family memories spanning over a century, aggregating trauma of cultural incarceration during World War II, histories of America’s concentration camp, as well as intimate memories distilled in the mundane groceries and stocked goods.

Snapshot of Aki’s Market, Los Angeles, ca. 1957.
Courtesy of Glenn Akira Kaino.

To revive the collective and personal memory embodied in the small store, Akira Shiraishi’s grandson, Glenn Akira Kaino, a multimedia artist and filmmaker, has created the immersive exhibition Aki’s Market. Built upon archival photographs, VR recreation of the historical store, and installation of a contemporary store of the same name, the exhibition explores the different layers and mixed temporalities of the collective memory of Japanese Americans through the private cultural symbol of Aki’s market.

Though not the first of its kind, Aki’s Market, a pioneer mixed-media immersive exhibition rooted in photographs presents to viewers the question about photography’s relationship to memory. As he places photography – the primary medium from the good old days, in a confrontation and provocative cooperation with VR—the new medium presumably with more immediate potency, Glenn Kaino, not without nostalgia, asks through the exhibition: why do we still need photography for memories, if VR, otherwise, can conveniently reconstruct what is being memorized into the present?

Glenn Kaino, Aki’s Market, 2023, artist’s rendering of virtual reality recreation.
Courtesy of Glenn Akira Kaino.

VR came into the conceptualization of the exhibition in an early stage. When Kaino was trying to find a historical image of Aki’s market, he realized, apart from some snapshots, there were very few photographs at his disposal. His inquiry with the family members was also met with slight reluctance and an inability to remember as time poses its powerful silence. In order to unlock past memories and to create a space that releases further details, Kaino went on to conduct several rounds of interviews; and based on the information acquired, he mapped out the historical store in virtual reality space.

Should it be a more photographically-dominated exhibition, viewers would expect photographs to bear the actual, abundant texture of memories, and the method of engaging with photographs would be closer to reading as images are meant to be the embodiment of memorized past. But right now, as VR overshines photography in immediate effect and expression, photography, on the other hand, also enjoys the opportunity to be salvaged from the long-held myth of its direct presentation. It is the VR-reconstruction of Aki’s market that allows viewers to experience the historical store in its present life, but it is dependent on the photographs, on acknowledging the temporal gap between the viewers and the images, that viewers can experience Aki’s market as a memory in its complete “memoriness”.

If the VR is a badge commemorating Glenn Akira’s success in unlocking the memories, then the silent photographs are placed on the site as a reminder of the lock. Imposed by time’s inconvertible monodirectional procession, the lock is also what makes memory memorable. Photographs speak to viewers with more reserve, suggestiveness, and neutrality. To travel through photographs till we arrive at memories demands some hard labor of actual remembering, memorizing, of committing oneself into the sinister temporal gap, of relinquishing all the known in the present tense. And it’s not till then that we will meet the Aki’s market at where it stands on the historical spectrum.

Jul 20 Aki's Market | Glenn Kaino

Jul 21 Intimate Strangers | Yancey Richardson

Jul 20 Early Color | Magnum Paris Gallery

Related Posts