Artist Shin Sugino re-energizes past photos at Déjà Vu exhibit

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Toronto photographer Shin Sugino has an unusual life story: Raised by French nuns in Osaka, he came to Canada at age 19 in 1965 and worked as a newspaper printer while studying at night school. After graduating from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University) he got a Canada Council grant to visit Europe where he photographed Catholic churches and monuments that seemed eerily familiar. In Toronto, he spent years as a well-established commercial photographer. Now semi-retired, he has returned to those European images, splicing together photographs of buildings, art and people into dreamscapes showing at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre under the title Déjà Vu.

Can you explain your upbringing?

I was raised by the Catholic nuns from eight months. My parents were not married and, at that time, it was a very embarrassing thing. So my grandma said to my father: “This child has to be adopted.” She put me in an orphanage. To her credit, she kept donating until she died. She paid a monthly stipend for 40 years.

So these French nuns … How’s your French?

How’s your Japanese? They spoke Japanese. Those missionaries, they could do anything. They spoke really fluently.

How did you come to Canada?

At the age of 18, I had my own business doing printing. I would buy beautiful papers and tear them by hand and print them. I was doing very unique wedding invitations and stuff like that. I was doing quite well, but this United Church minister dropped by my shop and shook his head and said, “Why are you wasting your time? You’re 18 years old, working day and night, you haven’t even finished high school.” I said, “I’m doing okay.”

But, I mean, I couldn’t go to school. Japan, it’s not a very kind country to kids who don’t have parents. It’s a very structured society. If you were the child of a single parent you couldn’t work in a bank. He said: “Go to Canada!” because he was studying there and had just came back. “That’s a great country. You can go to school.”

I thought about it and the next day I sold everything. I’m very impulsive. Then I went to his place and said, “Okay, send me off to Canada.” He kind of freaked out but he had to honour his word. A year later I was in this country. I came to Vancouver, and I took a train all the way to Toronto. That was a long trip. It was in November and there was snow, snow, snow. I remember sending a postcard to a friend in Japan. I just used a plain white card. I put on the address and the stamp: This is the winter scenery of Canada.

How did you support yourself when you arrived?

I was working in a Japanese newspaper, The New Canadian; I was working as a printer.

I went to night school in Toronto for three or four years. The teachers were great. I hardly spoke English. I had really bad marks, 25 in English or something like that. At the end, I went to the teacher and said, “I want to go to Ryerson but my mark isn’t good enough.”

They said “Okay, what mark do you need?” And gave it to me. One teacher said, “You deserve to go to school, you deserve to get into the university.”

Déjà Vu is adapted from the Pilgrimage II show you had in Tokyo and Kyoto last year, but that work goes back to 1976. How did the project come about?

As I was graduating I applied for a Canada Council grant and went to Europe. Why did I want to go to Europe? That was a pilgrimage. I grew up as a Catholic. And then I went there and nothing was strange. I’ve seen this before; it’s déjà vu. Like a dream, things you haven’t seen but things you imagined. In your dreams totally unrelated pieces kind of show up at the same time, different symbols, different life experiences. Pilgrimage I was done in 1976, at the National Film Board gallery. Pilgrimage II was the exhibition held in Tokyo and Kyoto.

You have been quoted as saying you feel a part of many cultures but at home in none. Do you still feel an outsider?

I grew up in Japan not belonging. And then I got a sense of displacement when I immigrated to this country. More than anything else, it’s a sense of being a majority and then overnight you become minority. And then you go to Europe and you identify with those images or things you’ve seen, yet, do I belong there? No, you are familiar with it: I’ve seen this before, I experienced this before. A pilgrimage is the journey in search of confirmation of one’s faith. That’s not necessarily religious things. You search your own Mecca.

And technically you make the single images by printing several plates?

That’s the beauty of digital, you just put them together. I used to do it in a black-and-white darkroom and it was extremely difficult. But now it’s digital. I’m not shy about using it. I just use whatever I can because it makes it absolutely seamless.

You established a very successful commercial photography studio in the 1980s. When did you return to the fine art work?

I kept shooting it but I wasn’t able to put a show together. I was too busy doing the commercial work. I’m not smart enough to do two things at once, but at the same time, you either sell your soul or are true to your soul.

It must be very satisfying to return to that work you started in the 1970s.

Yeah, it is. And then at the same time it’s very frustrating. It’s never good enough, you know.