Tomorrow is a New Day

Tomorrow is a New Day: The Artwork of Lauren Iida and Morn Chear

McNichols Civic Center Building

144 West Colfax Avenue, Denver, CO 80202

January 20-May 1, 2022

Admission: Free

Review by Genevieve Waller

February 19, 2022 marked the 80th anniversary of the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066—the mandate that authorized the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in internment camps in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. Nearly 120,000 individuals were incarcerated for up to four years, leaving behind—and in some cases losing—their homes, possessions, jobs, and businesses. No evidence was ever found that these Americans were serving as spies for Japan during World War II, and many of them were in fact children.

An installation view of Tomorrow is a New Day at the McNichols Building during the opening night reception on January 20, 2022. Image by DARIA.

Lauren Iida is an artist of Japanese descent whose family members were among those imprisoned in these camps. Drawing on her own family’s stories as well as images, documents, and oral histories from the Densho organization—a nonprofit that has amassed an archive of the Japanese American internment—Iida creates “paper cutaway” works that explore a chapter of American history that is steeped in racism, xenophobia, and dehumanization—but also in resilience.

In the exhibition Tomorrow is a New Day at the McNichols Building, artworks from this series and others fill half of the third-floor gallery space, while the other half features block prints by the Cambodian artist Morn Chear. The latter artist is a member of Open Studio Cambodia, an artist collective with six members that Iida founded in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in 2018. In his work, Chear documents his life in Cambodia, illustrates folk tales, and conveys his own philosophies of life forged through hardship.

An installation view of Morn Chear’s work in Tomorrow is a New Day at the McNichols Building during the opening night reception on January 20, 2022. Image by DARIA.

When I visited the exhibition during the opening evening event and artist talk by Lauren Iida, red flood lights shone from the floor in between the artworks and in empty spaces, painting splashes of red on the walls at intervals throughout the space. White string lights hung from the ceiling and wrapped around the columns in the middle of the gallery. The red color complemented the floor-to-ceiling digital wallpaper prints of an image by Iida featuring red paper cranes and an image by Chear of a figure rendered in black and white with red butterfly wings.

Morn Chear, Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad, 2019, limited edition block print, 25 x 25 inches. Image by DARIA.

Most of Chear’s works are black and white, however, while Iida’s works are a mix of color and black and white. In Chear’s piece Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad (2019), the artist depicts a sea of ducks in profile using flat black ink on a white paper ground. They fill the frame and crowd around a central seated figure with three plant fronds rising from behind their shoulders. From Iida’s artist talk, I learned that this is a self-portrait of Chear. When he was twenty, he lost his arms from the elbow down in a construction accident. After recovering and learning to use his arms differently, his first job was herding his uncle’s flock of thousands of ducks. Spending his days outdoors, he used palm fronds to shade himself from the sun.

Morn Chear, Believe in Yourself, 2019, limited edition block print, 12 x 18 inches. Image by DARIA.

With this knowledge, I looked again at Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad, noticed that the figure’s arms end just beyond the elbows, and recognized this work as a self-portrait. Similarly, Believe in Yourself took on new meaning when I realized it also portrays Chear after his accident. Like the field of ducks in Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad, here the image is filled with clothes hangers taking up the available space like puzzle pieces, and they surround a standing figure hanging laundry from a basket onto a clothesline. The pleasure of the repeated pattern made by the distinctive hanger shapes takes on a new aspect when we discover this work represents Chear’s new mastery of this domestic task. Iida recounted Chear’s own intention for this piece to show how “the hangers look weak, but they have to be strong to hold heavy, wet clothes.” 

Lauren Iida also illustrates figures within packed compositions, akin to elaborate wallpaper patterns. Using her cutaway technique on white paper, she removes paper in certain areas to represent blank spaces or details on figures and objects, and she displays the finished pieces on black backgrounds so these cut regions remain dark. Similarly, Chear’s block print technique involves cutting away areas of the block that will appear white in the print and carving around raised lines and designs that will catch the ink in the printing process to make an image that looks like a drawing in even, black pigment.

Lauren Iida, Peril, 2021, hand-cut paper and watercolor, 38 x 50 inches. Image by DARIA.

Iida’s process includes a further step in adding black ink and sometimes bright watercolor to the cut paper pieces. In Peril, for example, two arm-wrestling boys in baseball caps are surrounded by flowers and vegetation painted in bold watercolor hues. The contrast between the boys on blank white paper and the colorful plants is striking, and the fact that these flowers and leaves represent poisonous and carnivorous specimens like foxgloves and pitcher plants adds an extra layer of meaning. When I asked Iida about the concept behind this piece, she said that it is “a reflection of the darkness, anxiety, and angst that the pandemic's shadow cast on the world.” [1]

Lauren Iida, Endangered, 2021, hand-cut paper and watercolor, 38 x 50 inches. Image by DARIA.

In the work Adventure of the Incarcerated, Iida uses only black ink on top of the cut-paper substrate. As Iida explained in her talk, the image is based on a photograph from the Densho archive taken at the Tule Lake Internment Camp in California. It shows young Japanese Americans climbing a snow-covered mountain and pulling a sled with them. As Iida noted, the guards at the camp allowed these prisoners to hike and sled in the area because it was remote and there were no towns or structures nearby to which they could escape. The stark black and white painted image mimics the original 1940s black and white photograph, but also conveys a sense of the detainees’ bleak situation of indefinite imprisonment.

Lauren Iida, The Five Points Merchants, 2021, hand-cut paper, watercolor, and ink, 24 x 10 inches. Image by DARIA.

For the exhibit at the McNichols Building, Iida created a new piece that is specific to Denver’s own Japanese American history. Using a photograph taken in the 1950’s of Denver’s desegregated baseball team called The Five Points Merchants, Iida depicts the Black, Latino, and Japanese American boys as cut-paper line drawings on the blank ground. She frames them with a border of oversized columbine flowers painted in shades of gray, which eventually morph into purples, greens, and yellows, as well as grasses and matsutake mushrooms—all species that grow in Colorado. Highlighting this history of desegregation in Denver, Iida also sends a message of belonging with this work while questioning Colorado’s record of racist practices.

By bringing together these works on paper by Morn Chear and Lauren Iida under the title Tomorrow is a New Day—a Cambodian proverb about optimism and perseverance—the exhibition advocates for a brighter future. Without allowing the viewer to forget the adversity and crimes of the past and the present, the exhibit honors the resilience of Japanese Americans and individuals like Morn Chear.

Genevieve Waller (she/her) is an artist and writer originally from Wichita, Kansas who is the founder and editor of DARIA. She has a BA in art history, an MFA in photography and art history, and an MA in visual and cultural studies. She is also a long-time college radio DJ, most recently on Radio 1190 in Boulder.

[1] From my email correspondence with Lauren Iida on February 1, 2022.