INOUYE Tomoshi
Born: 3 February 1879 – Died: 9 September 1946
Particulars:
Tomoshi was born in Japan. He arrived in Australia aboard SS Yawata in 1900. He lived in Sydney for four years, Deniliquin for about 10 years, Meanjin / Brisbane for about one year, Gimuy / Cairns for five years, Rockhampton for about 10 years, and the remainder of his time in Mackay in Queensland. He never revisited Japan. When the Pacific War broke out, Tomoshi was a single man working in a laundry in Mackay. When he was arrested, he handed over 3 pounds 2 shillings to the authorities. He also owned one portmanteau or travel bag. He was interned at Hay Internment Camp in New South Wales, then transferred to Loveday Internment Camp in South Australia when there was a camp reorganisation. He was in and out of hospitals and on the ‘seriously ill’ list. After the war, when the Loveday Internment Camp closed, he was transferred to Tatura Internment Camp in Victoria in March 1946, and was immediately taken to the camp hospital, where he died of pulmonary tuberculosis. His grave is in the Japanese Cemetery in Cowra, New South Wales, Australia.
–Mayu Kanamori
More info:
Jennifer K Dick
Artist/s Statement:
It is impossible for someone like me to even imagine the life and experiences of someone like Tomoshi Inouye, yet we both resided for many years in a country that did not birth us. I felt I was trying to reach through the elasticity of time to this man, a laundry employee, who found that the fates of global politics had suddenly collided with his own. I felt about this project like one might feel when invited to tend to a grave for someone without any other family to care for their tomb. We still remember this name now, and imagine the questions that may have been asked, the experiences we cannot reach, the life we will never know. My artwork acknowledges this absentness of connection, which I explored both through a work on a window layering illegibilities, maps, photos of the camps, paint, transparencies with words, light, trees behind the window and glass, and through a text that is in many ways like a letter to Tomoshi. One I can never send.
Artist Bio:
Jennifer K Dick from Iowa, USA, has a long connection to text and image work, both as a scholar and practitioner. Her books include ‘That Which I Touch Has No Name’ (2022), ‘Lilith: A Novel in Fragments’ (2019), ‘Circuits’ (2013), and ‘Florescence’ (2004) as well as seven chap/artbooks. Her visual/text installation ‘En-Coding the Urban’ covered the Le Buffet building at the SBB Banhof in Basel in 2016. She curates Ivy Writers Paris reading series and co-organises the Ecrire l’Art residency for French authors at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse Centre d’Art Contemporain, while teaching at UHA in Mulhouse, France.