Interview with Devon Tsuno

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Photo: Elon Schoenholz.

On the Day of Remembrance 2022, the 80th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and evacuation of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, Devon Tsuno shared an Instagram post detailing the story behind sixteen cents each and a stage for plunder (2022), a project that had been commissioned by the Descanso Gardens for the annual celebration of its famed camellia collection.¹

Scholar Wendy Cheng has characterized the history of Descanso Gardens and its camellias as “an instance of racial plunder: a morally and affectively inflected act of theft structured by racism that is as much about the act’s preconditions and afterlives as it is about the act itself.”² Tucked into the hills of La Cañada Flintridge, Descanso owes the existence of its camellia collection to Los Angeles newspaper owner Elias Manchester Boddy’s wartime purchase of the stock of multiple nurseries in the days before their Japanese American owners and families, including the Yoshimuras and the Uyematsus, were forced into incarceration with the signing of Executive Order 9066. Star Nurseries provided Boddy with a collection of camellias—many of them rare breeds—that had been imported, cultivated, and developed by its owner Francis Miyosaku Uyematsu, known as “the camellia king.” In the ensuing decades, Uyematsu, like the other nursery owners, was not credited for this contribution to the Garden’s beginnings, and many of the breeds Uyematsu developed are to this day identified with Boddy’s family name.³

Such stories of wartime profiteering are devastatingly common—incarceration-related economic losses for the Japanese American community are estimated to be between $1 and 3 billion without inflation.⁴ During the course of her research in 2020, Cheng connected with Descanso Gardens to illuminate some of her findings, joining journalist Naomi Hirahara, who had been contributing research on the history since 2018. Descanso has since updated its website to include the Uyematsus’ and Yoshimuras’ stories, and a planned future renovation to the Boddy House will include a room dedicated to the history of the camellias.

Tsuno, an artist known for painting native and nonnative flora as visual stand-ins for uncomfortable questions related to the history of Los Angeles, created a proposal for Descanso Gardens that was informed both by Cheng’s research and the poetry of Amy Uyematsu, a granddaughter of the original Star Nursery owners whose work has been foundational in the Asian American Movement. Uyematsu and other Japanese American poets had been planning an outdoor reading at Descanso in February 2022. Inspired by Uyematsu’s poem about the red camellia, Tsuno proposed a painting that would be digitized and turned into a vinyl wrap for the outdoor stage. He was eventually able to produce both pieces, though the process of the works’ making, circulation, and continued existence remains fraught.

Earlier this year, Uyematsu passed away after a lengthy battle with cancer. This loss to our community, as well as the uncertain status of Tsuno’s project, prompted my conversation with Tsuno. He and I are both yonsei, or fourth-generation Japanese Americans, as well as fourth-generation Angelenos. We have been engaged in a years-long dialogue about navigating our lives as art workers, grounded by shared histories of Asian American organizing and solidarity. As is the case for much of Tsuno’s artwork, this conversation seeks to continue dialogues around finding new forms of cultural preservation and solidarity, out in the open, together.

Ana Iwataki: How did Descanso Gardens first approach you about working together?

Devon Tsuno: They told me that they had hoped I would do some type of art project for their annual celebration of the camellias because they were familiar with the work I had done painting [the] flowers and plants of Los Angeles.

I [initially] offered criticism about [Descanso’s] description of how they came to exist. I felt that the narrative [as they were telling it] was inaccurate from my knowledge about it and that it positioned the institution as a white savior of this [camellia] collection. I didn’t want to perpetuate that narrative.

AI: How did they respond?

DT: They seemed surprised I was so critical. But they said that the institution was working with Wendy Cheng to take steps to correct that writing.

They didn’t seem to have a budget [for my project] thought through, and they hadn’t completed [the] process of rewriting [their] narrative. I told them that I wouldn’t do the project until those things were completed. [I also asked] if the family was aware of my work and into the idea of me doing something.

AI: What do you think Descanso was hoping an artist could do that they couldn’t?

DT: [I felt like they were] looking for artists who [would] celebrate the beauty of the narrative that they’re presenting. It’s also a way for them to show, in a public-facing way, that they’re working with communities of color, especially in correcting mistakes the institution has made over their existence.

AI: What happened to make you accept the project?

DT: [Some time] had gone by and, to my surprise, [Descanso] emailed me and said that they had spoken to the family, who would be happy to see me do a project. They had come up with a budget for the project and they had completed the work they were doing with Wendy Cheng to correct the writing on their website. So, I accepted, [and] start[ed] the conversation about what the project would be.

I wanted to find a way to amplify Amy Uyematsu’s poetry. The painting I made is an abstraction of those red camellias, one of the rare breeds her grandfather propagated. Red can be an ambiguous color—it can be beautiful, but it can also be violent, very intense… but also very calming. I tried to embody that in the color and the layering of the acrylic and spray paint.

I thought that would be a beautiful way to participate and to direct focus to Amy, because it’s her family’s history. I requested that Descanso purchase the painting for their permanent collection and put it in public view. [I wanted them] to honor the family and have the narrative be seen in the didactic of that painting. [P]eople should be aware of [that history] when they visit Descanso.

I titled it sixteen cents each and a stage for plunder, which is the amount that [Boddy] paid per plant to Amy’s family.⁵ The word “plunder” comes from how Wendy Cheng has written about Descanso Gardens and the camellia. I thought it was, again, important to amplify and be true to the language of other people who had already been doing the work. This was really the only way it would be appropriate for me to do a piece. It couldn’t be something that was temporary to celebrate the annual bloom of a flower.

Devon Tsuno, sixteen cents each and a stage for plunder (camellias) (installation view) (2022). Descanso Gardens, La Cañada Flintridge, California, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.

AI: Wendy’s writing focuses on the camellias as a way of addressing broader systems—looking at how one camellia got to the gardens helps you untangle something that’s a big mess. And so, by asking you to make a project about the annual camellia celebration, they were really asking you to address the very reason why Descanso Gardens exists. That seems like a difficult ask because the story goes way beyond the annual celebration.

DT: Definitely. I was probably naive, but I felt that it was a moment for me to take a risk even though I knew there were a lot of hurdles.

After the painting was done, they said that now, they didn’t think they could afford to wrap the stage with the vinyl, and asked if they could use the [digital artwork] and turn it into banners. I told them: “This isn’t a decoration for your festival. This is an artwork and process that was intentional, and was created with the blessing of the family.” I was ready to give up, but kept reminding myself it wasn’t for me. It was really to honor Amy and their family.

AI: Right. You didn’t want to leave them alone in this struggle as Descanso tried to figure out their responsibility to the Japanese American community.

DT: They pretty much said they couldn’t do it because of the budget. [A]nd even though I was frustrated, I decided to let go of that aspect of the project. It only ended up happening because one of the fabricators, the Wilson Cetina Group, reached out to me and said they felt so strongly about the project [that] they would do it within the budget constraints. I was very against the institution accepting that, [but] Eder [Cetina] from Wilson Cetina convinced me, because he [had] heard about the context of the piece.

And then, I found out about the event celebrating the camellias with the poetry reading through an ad on Instagram that popped up in my feed on the day of. I had not been invited. There was no acknowledgment of my piece anywhere on their website, on social media, or at the event.

So on the Day of Remembrance, the anniversary of E0966, I made an Instagram post to tell the story myself [of] why I made the piece and what had happened to Amy’s family, and why it was important that people knew. There was a huge response by not only the art community and the Japanese American community but also people just wanting to see [the piece, but it had already been taken down].

AI: It’s so challenging because artists are asked to bring different perspectives. But when presented with what that means, it’s often not what institutions actually want.

DT: I email [Descanso] periodically to ask if the painting is on display yet. They always respond with a very nice email saying they’re planning on displaying it in the remodeled Boddy House in a room dedicated to the history of the camellias.

AI: Descanso Gardens didn’t acknowledge Francis Uyematsu for so long. He created breeds of camellias and Boddy took credit for them. And to do the same thing to another Japanese American, in an effort to repair this whole history, demonstrates a lack of understanding of the underlying issues.

DT: For me, one of the big lessons learned is that I was never trying to repair the issue. I was trying to attack the issue.

I think Wendy’s writing says it really well. We default to the word “development” [to describe the Uyematsus’ role in Descanso’s history], but it was plunder… I think we’ve come to a point, especially in Los Angeles, where we no longer can survive on our own as a cultural group. I think our generation is starting to understand that our survival also is contingent
on other people surviving.

The very little bit of privilege that we do have as Japanese Americans, having our parents and grandparents survive so that we could make it to this point, we feel very obliged to use that privilege and to relinquish it to other people. The only way we can learn how to do that in an effective way is to understand how it was taken from us—how plunder works, how it shaped our history. That’s the road I’ve been going down. And it’s not a road that any artist can go down by only making art. It’s my belief that you have to do the work in your daily life as an artist, but also as a human being. That [work] has to become necessary, even though capitalism tells us that making money and being a middle-class American is how you survive, which actually isn’t true.

AI: How has your family history helped you think through these issues?

DT: My family’s been here since around 1910. [But] because so much of my cultural history has been erased from common knowledge, it’s been a process of peeling back the layers, going backward in time to learn about my own history and my family’s role in the development of what’s now Southern California… Different people in my family have fought for equality and social justice over those four generations through their labor, through education, and through the arts. It took 40 years for me to really understand that’s what I was doing.

I know that there are huge gaps. I have to seek those things out. And oral history is how it’s passed on. I’ve learned that from other artists, like Alan Nakagawa and others from the generation before me. It’s just been a process and it’s been enjoyable even though there are moments of frustration, like this project. I don’t regret doing any of it. You told me one time that the struggle has to be in public view. [T]hat’s really stuck with me.

AI: I think that we share a concern for how culture functions in the landscape that you’re talking about, in the development of Southern California as a place that we’re engaged in, but also where similar attempts of facilitating racial justice are really mishandled. It’s very difficult to know how to navigate that.

DT: I think it’s really easy to give up. Sometimes I want to give up and stop making work, but I also know that that’s what I do best. And even though I make mistakes and fail, it’s something that I have to continue to do. We’re all trying to survive in a system of capitalism, and artists have to do so as well. And, to stop being an artist, or to stop making work, or stop showing work, for me, is surrendering.

Editor’s note: Descanso Gardens provided Carla with a statement regarding their work with Cheng, Hirahara, and the Uyematsu and Yoshimura families to better understand the history of the camellia collection. They noted that “from this work we not only were able to tell the story more accurately, but we continued to build relationships with the families that have proven to be invaluable as we tell the story of Descanso. This work is ongoing.”

Devon Tsuno is an artist and fourth-generation Angeleno. Tsuno’s work is a yonsei story, indissociable from the complexities of intergenerational and collective trauma, agriculture, fences and cages, gentrification, displacement, water, and labor politics. Tsuno is represented by Residency Art Gallery, is a member of J-TOWN Action と Solidarity, and is an Associate Professor at California State University Dominguez Hills.

This interview was originally published in Carla issue 34.

Fred W. Yoshimura with wife Mitoko and their children Florence, Hayao, Raymond, and Margie. Image courtesy of San Gabriel Nursery & Florist and Descanso Gardens.

Lathhouse at the original Star Nursery in Montebello, California (c. 1920s). Image courtesy of the Francis Miyosaku and Kuni Uyematsu Collection.

Ana Iwataki is a cultural historian, writer, and curator from and based in Los Angeles. She is also a PhD candidate in Comparative Media and Culture at the University of Southern California.

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