The New Witnesses: The Artists Documenting Right Now

In San Francisco in 1939, a young Japanese American woman named Clara was working as a live-in nanny when the father of the family did something unusual for the time: he taught her photography and let her borrow his camera.

She photographed everything — her life in the city, her family's farm near Sacramento, a whole Japanese American world in its last few years before the war. Then in 1942 she was pulled out of business college and sent to the Tule Lake camp. Through all of it, she kept the albums.

Clara lived to be 103. In her last decades, she spent hours going through those albums with her grand-niece, an artist named Lauren Iida, telling her the stories behind the photographs. Today, images from those albums live on in Iida's hand-cut paper artworks — in galleries, and in permanent public art installed along transit lines in Washington State. A family archive that could have easily ended up in a dumpster is now something thousands of strangers see on their way to catch a train.

This summer, Lauren Iida sat down with us for an interview. We ended Part 2 asking who witnesses now, after the original witnesses are gone. I thought I knew roughly what her answer would be. I was only half right.

Inheriting the job

Iida never experienced the incarceration. She was born in 1984. But her work is built almost entirely from primary sources: her grand-aunt Clara's firsthand accounts, the oral histories and photographs on Densho, and the memories of her mentor, the poet Lawrence Matsuda, who was actually born inside the Minidoka camp during the war.

"I feel like it's my privilege, but also my responsibility, to share the stories that I know from her directly," she told us.

What struck me was how deliberate her method is. The beauty comes first, on purpose. One of her public pieces in Redmond, Washington takes a historical photo of incarcerated Japanese American kids playing rock-paper-scissors at Tule Lake and turns it into glass mosaic panels along a bike path, broken into film-strip-style frames so the game seems to move as you ride by. People stop because it's beautiful. Then they read the caption.

"I create beautiful artworks and the beautiful artworks bring people in," she said. "And then once they read the caption... they learn about our history."

She also told us most of this history wasn't talked about in her own family growing up — which we've heard from almost everyone we've interviewed. Her grandmother passed away before Iida could really ask her about the camps. Clara was the one who talked. It made me think about how thin the thread actually is. Sometimes the difference between a story surviving and disappearing is one relative who's willing to talk, and one kid who thinks to ask.

"More urgent at this moment"

Here's the part I didn't expect. I assumed our conversation would mostly be about the past. Iida kept pulling it back to right now.

Her work "feels much more urgent at this moment," she told us — because she sees today's mass detentions and deportations echoing what happened to her own family, down to some former incarceration facilities being repurposed as ICE detention centers, and signage being removed from incarceration memorial sites. "The push for erasure right now is incredibly dangerous," she said. "If we don't keep fighting back in every way possible, we're going to have major losses."

And this urgency has literally changed the materials she works in. Paper cutting is where her heart is — she's been doing it for twenty years. But paper is fragile, and lately she's been moving her imagery into steel, aluminum, and glass, doing a residency at the Tacoma Museum of Glass so the work can outlast anyone who might prefer this history to disappear. Talking about the glass pieces, she said our history "will be preserved forever if they're taken care of. But if we're careless with them, they'll break and be gone forever."

In Part 1, we met artists making fragile, secret records under a government that banned cameras. Eighty years later, here's an artist casting the same memories into glass and steel because she doesn't fully trust that the record will be left alone. I don't really know what to do with that except to say the witness impulse clearly hasn't faded. If anything it's gotten harder, in both senses of the word.

New crises, new witnesses

And it's not only inherited history that needs witnesses, because history keeps producing new material.

When COVID-19 hit and Asian Americans got scapegoated for it — the slurs, the harassment, the violence — artists responded from inside the moment, the same way Okubo and Miyatake and the Vincent Chin filmmakers had. One example we came across: Sammy Lee, a Korean American artist in Denver who works with hanji, Korean mulberry paper, transforming it into sculptural pieces about migration and identity. During the pandemic she helped organize community art projects responding to anti-Asian hate and co-curated an exhibition called inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE, about a community that gets ignored until a crisis suddenly makes it a target. Even just the title does a lot of work.

Different decade, different crisis, same sentence underneath it all: we were here, this happened, here's proof.

"Flooding the space with our stories"

Near the end of our interview, Iida said something that honestly reframed this whole series for me.

She's been thinking about AI — about how the systems everyone increasingly gets their information from learn from whatever's already in the record. "Whoever's telling their stories the loudest and the most frequently," she said, "that information is going to provide the basis for what the population ingests as the truth in the future." Her conclusion: "We need to be flooding the space with our stories."

That's the Angel Island principle, eighty years later. The detainees carved their testimony into the only surface they had, on the chance someone would eventually read it. The surface has changed — it's now archives, databases, the internet, apparently even training data — but the task is exactly the same. Get your testimony into the record, in every medium available, now.

The last thing she told us

Her advice for young Asian American artists: "Don't let people put you in a box as an Asian American artist. You are a storyteller, first and foremost." And then — tell your stories outside your own community too. "We need to be collectively braver to connect our experiences with the experiences of other people."

I started this series writing about people who made records because nobody else was going to make honest ones. I'm ending it with a working artist telling two high school students, directly, that the record of this moment will be made by whoever shows up to make it.

That's more or less why AAA exists. Our first event is this November at OCSA, and it's built around exactly this idea — art as testimony. There will be student work, an excerpt from our documentary, and a place to add your own voice to the record. The first witnesses had a carving blade and a smuggled lens. We have a lot more than that. No excuses.