"We Need to Be Flooding the Space with Our Stories": A Conversation with Lauren Iida

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: 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 incarceration 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 intricate 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, we interviewed Lauren Iida over Zoom. We expected to talk mostly about the past. She kept pulling the conversation into the present — and by the end, she'd changed how I think about why artists matter at all.

First, why this matters: the Okubo problem

Quick history, because it explains everything Iida does.

When Japanese Americans were forced into camps in 1942, cameras were banned. The government took the official photos and wrote the official reports, using words like "evacuation" and "relocation" that made prison sound like a moving company. The record was supposed to belong to the people who caused it.

The artist Miné Okubo — the subject of our documentary — broke that plan with a pen. Cameras were banned, but nobody thought to ban drawing, so she made around two thousand sketches of daily life at Tanforan and Topaz and published them in 1946 as Citizen 13660, the first personal account of the incarceration from someone who lived it. Decades later, when Congress finally investigated, she brought her drawings to the hearings as evidence. Those hearings led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, when the U.S. formally apologized and paid redress to survivors.

That's the shortest version I can give of why art isn't decoration. When the official record lies, the artist's record is sometimes the only honest one left — and honest records can eventually change laws.

But Okubo could witness because she was there. The survivors are almost all gone now. So who does this work today?

Inheriting the job

That's essentially Lauren Iida's whole career. She was born in 1984 and never experienced the incarceration, but her work is built from primary sources: Clara's firsthand accounts, the photo albums, the oral histories on Densho's digital archive, and the memories of her mentor, the poet Lawrence Matsuda, who was born inside the Minidoka camp.

"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 is 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 kids playing rock-paper-scissors at Tule Lake and turns it into glass mosaic panels along a bike path, broken into film-strip frames so the game seems to move as you ride past. 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 this history was barely discussed in her own family growing up — her grandmother passed away before Iida could really ask about the camps. Clara was the one who talked. Which made me realize how thin the thread actually is. Sometimes the difference between a story surviving and disappearing is one relative willing to talk, and one kid who thinks to ask.

"More urgent at this moment"

Here's where the interview surprised me.

Iida told us her work "feels much more urgent at this moment" than ever before — because she sees today's mass detentions and deportations echoing what happened to her own family, down to some former incarceration sites being repurposed as ICE detention facilities, and signage being removed from incarceration memorials. "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."

The urgency has literally changed her materials. Paper cutting is where her heart is — twenty years with an X-Acto knife. But paper is fragile, so she's been moving her imagery into steel, aluminum, and glass, including a residency at the Tacoma Museum of Glass, so the work can outlast anyone who might prefer this history to disappear. Our history, she said of the glass pieces, "will be preserved forever if they're taken care of. But if we're careless with them, they'll break and be gone forever."

Okubo made a fragile record under a government that banned cameras. Eighty years later, Iida is casting the same memories into glass and steel because she doesn't fully trust the record will be left alone. The witness impulse hasn't faded. It's gotten harder — in both senses of the word.

The line I can't stop thinking about

Near the end, Iida brought up AI, which I did not see coming.

She's been thinking about how the systems everyone increasingly gets 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."

I keep turning that over. The record now includes archives, databases, the internet — apparently even the training data of machines. And the task is the same one Okubo faced: get your testimony in, in every medium available, before someone else's version fills the space.

Her advice (and why this blog exists)

We asked what she'd tell young Asian American artists. "Don't let people put you in a box as an Asian American artist," she said. "You are a storyteller, first and foremost." And then: be braver about telling these stories outside our own communities — connecting them with other people's stories, because underneath, "they're all the same story."

A working artist told two high school students, directly, that the record of this moment gets made by whoever shows up to make it. That's more or less why AAA exists. Our first event is this November at OCSA, built around exactly this idea — art as testimony — with student work, an excerpt from our Okubo documentary, and a place to add your own voice to the record.

Come make something that lasts.