Roy Kiyooka

Roy Kenzie Kiyooka (Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, 1926 – 1994) was a Canadian painter who also worked as a poet, photographer and arts teacher. A Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Canadian, he was born in Moose Jaw and raised in Calgary, Alberta. His maternal grandfather was a samurai who led the Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū school of swordsmanship, a detail that reflects the family background in which he grew up.

In 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the family moved to Opal, Alberta. He studied at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art from 1946 to 1949 and attended the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende in 1955. From 1957 to 1959 he took part in the Emma Lake Artists' Workshops at the University of Saskatchewan, where he worked with the critic Clement Greenberg and the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman. He began teaching at the Regina College of Art in 1956. Moving to Vancouver in 1959, he gradually turned from painting to photography and later to filmmaking.

His works include Barometer No. 2 (1964), in which he used the ellipse form, and the sculpture Abu Ben Adam's Vinyl Dream (1969), made for the Canadian pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. In 1965 he represented Canada at the Eighth Sao Paulo Biennial. The Vancouver Art Gallery organized a twenty-five-year retrospective of his work in 1975, the same year he published Transcanada Letters, which combined photography, letters and experimental writing. In 1978 he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.

His legacy lies in the link between image and text and in his reflections on the identity of Japanese Canadians. Several collections of poems and letters appeared after his death, including Pacific Windows.