Video by Mark Laurila https://www.judychanart.com

Los Angeles-born artist Judy (Odagawa) Chan is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists’ Fellowship. In this video profile, she reflects on her time as a small child spent at the Poston, Arizona Japanese American Incarceration Camp (aka internment camp, aka concentration camp) during World War II. In 1994, she created a series of mixed-media artworks about the camps, called “Do I Have to Be the Enemy?” During her childhood, she suffered from abuse at the hands of family members. Decades later, her creation of a series of intaglio monotypes about the abuse finally allowed her to feel free. She has gone on to create a wide range of artworks, alternating between a powerful, dark beauty and witty, formal experimentation, often combining two-dimensional printing with three-dimensional hanging objects.
She received an MFA from California State University, Long Beach, and she has work held in the collections of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Judy Chan lives and works in Long Beach, California.
Interviews recorded on December 5th and 8th, 2023.

Photographs of the camp at Poston are in the Public Domain and were originally disseminated by the War Relocation Authority in 1942. They appear courtesy of the National Archives. Many are available without restrictions through Densho.org.

All music licensed through Epidemic Sound:
https://www.epidemicsound.com/