Translations: The Art and Life Of Elizabeth Yeend Duer—Gyokush

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Sunday, January 13th, 2019
10:00 AM to 4:00 PM

Co-curators: Carolyn Butler Palmer, Legacy Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art of the Pacific Northwest, Art History & Visual Studies, University of Victoria; Mikiko Hirayama Associate Professor of Asian Art History and Director of Asian Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Cincinnati; and Janice Okada, B.A., M.M.St.

Translations showcases the movement of ideas, aesthetics, politics, and people between England, Japan, and Victoria, Canada, by looking at the life and work of Anglo-Japanese artist Elizabeth Yeend Duer (1889–1951). Born a British citizen in Nagasaki to an Englishman and a Japanese woman, Duer studied Nihonga, a traditional Japanese-style painting, with the renowned painter and teacher Atomi Gyokushi. Duer took on the artistic identity of Gyokush. She immigrated to Victoria in 1940 and is among the remarkably few people of Japanese heritage who were not interned during World War II. Instead, she Japanized her new environment by producing Nihonga-style paintings of local indigenous wildflowers while her own identity was being anglicized.

A project of the Williams Legacy Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art of the Pacific Northwest.

Image: Kamass Camassia quamash; Camas, Elizabeth Yeend Duer—Gyokush, 1941.