News at Buckley

Mike Saijo Visits Campus for DEI Symposium

“I don’t like to be confined to just one material,” says artist Mike Saijo of his multi-media pieces that often include photographs, Xerox’d book pages, fabric, and other materials. “For me, art is truth in physical form.”
In a DEI Symposium hosted by Director of Enrollment Management Erwin Wong, members of the AAPI Affinity group, and the Upper School Diversity Club, Saijo spoke to both Middle and Upper School students about finding his voice and media as an artist, his influences, and the role social justice plays in his work.

“Listen to that voice inside,” he said. “Sometimes we’re told to suppress it, but it has the right answers to things.” He added that art was his private sanctuary, and that drawing provided “a little control over life at that moment.”

Saijo showed works from his exhibit, Dream Deferred: Intersection of the Jewish, Japanese, and Mexican Histories Face of WW2. In one image, he wrote the Langston Hughes poem, “Harlem” over a black-and-white photo of a Japanese internment camp. In another work, “Breed Street Exodus,” a photo of a Jewish seder is placed over pages of a Jewish prayer book.
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