Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork has created a sound installation emulating second world war spaces: a Japanese internment camp in California and caves used as bunkers in Okinawa

In 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa, the great-uncle of the Japanese-American, Los Angeles-based artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork was stationed on the island as a US solider, having volunteered for service probably in the hopes that his family might be spared from the Japanese internment camps back home. They weren’t, and so while his siblings and parents were incarcerated at Tule Lake in northern California, he was on the frontlines in what has been deemed one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Pacific during the second world war.

The caves of Okinawa were used “almost as bunkers to protect people”, Kiyomi Gork explains. “But they were also spaces of mass suicide because of Japanese propaganda.” Local Uchinanchu who took refuge there were instructed by Japanese soldiers to kill themselves, rather than face what they were told would be a violent fate at the hands of the US army. As one of the few American soldiers who spoke Japanese, Kiyomi Gork’s great-uncle worked to ensure their safe passage.