Rea Tajiri has been talking to ghosts.

Forebears may very well be the ones who protect her from the looping machinery of systems that threaten to halt her flow. The ghosts have demonstrated a kind of peace and patience, and it is this patience that one will remark upon when encountering Tajiri as an artist, teacher, caregiver. 

As a filmmaker, Tajiri is exquisitely difficult to define. Her historiographies have ranged from a supernatural indie flick about a teen road trip to the Poston War Relocation Camp (Strawberry Fields, 1997) and uncanny experiments in archival form (Wataridori, 2018) to her most recent and more directly personal work about her mother, Wisdom Gone Wild (2022), which has just culminated a widely lauded festival tour. Tajiri is now assembling another feature documentary, Non-Alien, about her father. In this novel documentary modality, Tajiri has polished the silver completely off of the medium as mirror, rendering instead, a stained and kaleidoscopic window through which we might understand epigenetic memory. The memory of political subterfuge, of medical care, of the Japanese American internment and subsequent resettlement. What we need to know is that this is how Rea Tajiri talks to ancestors. And the ancestors have things to say.

Anne Ishii: So let’s talk about [waves arms around] being Asian in America [laughs]. Identity. Asian art…

Rea Tajiri: There's been some new thinking around that in the last few years, especially in the arts. I’m thinking of Suzette Min and different art exhibits that I've seen. I feel like there's more of an opening to talk about aesthetics. There’s this sort of so-called rediscovery, like what happened with Carl Cheng or Howie Chen's show, you know? Looking, having a different lens and way of recognizing artists who have been working, but their work isn't necessarily identity-based. The work incorporates aspects of identity, but it wasn't necessarily strictly identity-based. 

It's something that I've actually been talking about in my classroom, in a more oblique way. It's not an Asian-American filmmaking class, but I want to open up this space for Asianness. This is the first time in a class that I've assigned a majority of critical writing that isn't European-based. There's lot of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tiffany Sia, and Brandon Shimoda.

Even in the film that I’m now making — which is about my father Vincent Tajiri (who was the founding “picture editor” of Playboy for fifteen years) — and working on with my nephew (Vincent Schleitwiler) who is an American Studies scholar (at University of Washington) and Japanese American historian, the film incorporates some of that history but I’m leaving a lot of space to wander off.

There's this balance between some of the history — most people don't really know about Resettlement, but it opens up this lens into looking at a lot of other things that were happening after World War II and the Great Migration into Chicago — and these small little moments where paths crossed. Paul Robeson, for example, was very empathetic to Japanese Americans coming back from camp. And the veterans. My father was really interested in Sun Ra and told us about him, but we didn't understand his music when we were growing up. I'm working with this kind of information in my film. 

I’m trying to open up this other landscape and to embrace the things that were in these in-between places. This in-betweenness or liminal space... Maybe that’s my own obsession with ghosts and time travel and things like that.

Anne: I'm glad you said liminal space and ghosts and, you know, the bardo, the boundaries, these alternate frameworks… because that is a hallmark of your aesthetic. And that you talk about this framing as an aesthetic. It means a lot to me that the first word you said after “identity” was “aesthetics.” Perhaps our understanding of community is finally blended with our understanding of what we as people find pleasing to look at. If we're really looking at aesthetics from a purpose framework. 

I wonder if you could say a little bit more about your approach toward aesthetics and that foggy place you're describing. That liminal space opening in the landscape of the history that we've all heard about but don't really understand.

Rea: Let's see… Well, okay, in terms of my own work, I’m just trying to find its aesthetic. What that film is going to look like. Sometimes it's really based on basic things, like what resources you have, because physical film is so expensive. But I think even with this new film I am really trying to bring in things that I worked with a long time ago but was never able to fully integrate, like dance. 

I really want there to be movement in this film so I'm working with choreographers. We've been talking about this, but movement, or dance, is really important right now. And it's weird because the source material that I'm working off of is an archive of my father's photographs and his writing. This sense of embodiment of Asian bodies and presence is liberatory. 

There's this archive of the camps and resettlement, and this is maybe my own projection, but sometimes I feel like in the really popular, well-known images, people are very flattened or inhibited. I don't know why. 

I’ve been thinking about this writer, Tina Campt, who talks about listening to images. I like the idea of these other dimensions to photography that seem counterintuitive, like listening to something and picking up a vibration. And also I feel the sense of the body, what's happening with it. So I wanted to bring that into this film by working with dance and not have it so bound in language, spoken language, and dialogue. 

And then the liminal spaces… the bardo… maybe it's cultural: being able to accept a kind of liminality, diffuse borders, being very modular within that, being able to adapt in certain ways.

Anne: Looking back, what are your reflections on your craft and your medium today?

Rea: In the film that I'm making, it's a lot about speculativeness. I have access to things that my father wrote, and I'm realizing it’s all true, but I'm like, why do I know that? And it's because he actually wove those things into bedtime stories. I remembered hearing those stories and then making the connection to his own work and gaining access to his mind. I wonder, how do you bring that back into work? Because it’s this weird reflection and connection with somebody in my family who's dead, right? But then I still have access to their thoughts.

In this conversation that I also had last night with my grandmother, she said, “I don't exist, but I exist because you're conjuring me, you're creating me out of this energy. I left traces, like this photo that I left behind, so you can hold me. I never thought anyone would care, but you're doing that. You're making me exist again.” And then she said something like, “I move around because different people are remembering me. I'm alive in my grandchildren and their memories of me, but as soon as my grandchildren are gone, then I am not known. How am I going to circulate?” And I was thinking, “Okay, well, I don't know.” 

I was just thinking about how people get revived. I have this unique positionality because I revivify this person, my father, in this way. It allows me to also think about that time and also bring alive something in his position in that history. It’s a form of fiction.

Anne: Something you just said about how your grandmother's wisdom is around but moving strikes me. A memory moving around from orator to orator sounds like a kind of migration. It migrates, because if it doesn’t move, it scares us. Because without migrating, it's a haunting, right? Maybe it's the diffusion of that spirit that makes it benevolent. The generosity of the spirit has to be in its ability to be diffused because if it stayed in one place it would be perceived as a haunting.

Anne: Who have you learned from? 

Rea: Hmm, different people. I studied conceptual art at CalArts. And I think that when you're in your twenties, that whole college experience can lay a lot of really deep-rooted stuff inside of you. But I think discovering that — and that's what's so interesting about Carl Cheng. He was around when I was a college student. I should have run into him at openings. I probably did. I just didn't know who he was. And thinking about that body of work he was working on during that time.

But then it was sort of mixed with my own personal obsessions. I just couldn't say some of it. I started entering these Tibetan Buddhist study practice groups over the years, though, and I kind of went in and out of them. Just taking these beliefs that I had about ghosts more seriously, and finding ways to address that dimension in my own work, to concretize or have a version of them. Like, what is that ghost? It's so part of Asian culture, but then what does it mean? And I feel like this is a way of having access to talk about things in these stories that are historic and psychic and personal traumas. They get transformed.

Anne: I'm hearing something about learning to trust your ability to learn. You're learning to trust that your interpretation of the world is accurate, or that it matters. The Carl Cheng story is also compelling to me because I'm in the same boat of like, why didn't I know about this artist sooner? I'm almost kind of embarrassed.

Rea: Right! 

Anne: You know, and I think about right now, maybe this is just the moment for now. Because they were always there and doing amazing, incredible things, but we’re finally allowed to pay full attention.

Rea: Yeah, there's a whole packaging that happens like, okay, I'm familiar with that. I want to watch that, I want to see that. It's big, it's a big story, it's urgent, it's important. And so certain stories and pieces of reality get packaged that way. 

And that's so seductive and really hard to then turn from that and look at my work and go, well, I'm doing this thing over here. It's very strange. 

But I am trying to train people that are in my classes anyway, to think beyond that kind of urgency. The stakes are very high. It's all very urgent. But also: we don't have to talk about it if we don't want to.