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Heart Mountain Kabuki: Escape was inspired by my pilgrimage in 2019 to the former site of the Heart Mountain concentration camp near Cody, Wyoming. My family and relatives were incarcerated, along with 120,000 other Japanese-Americans from the West coast, in desolate "relocation centers', during World War II.

I created a series of artworks, imagining Japanese-Americans as characters in a Japanese Kabuki drama of tragedy and action. This piece depicts the moment when the samurai rebels defiantly escape to freedom from the Heart Mountain barbed wire enclosure as an act of resistance.

I used acrylic paint, ink and color pencil on scrap cardboard, which I found on the street. It was symbolically appropriate to use material which had been abandoned and discarded. The process of creating these artworks have been a way to heal the psychic scars for both camp survivors and legacy bearers, like myself as a third-generation Sansei Japanese-American.

Ken Sakatani

sakataniarts.com