David Fujino Pioneering Artist Award
The David Fujino Pioneering Artist Award is presented every few years to a notable Japanese Canadian artist. David Fujino was a multidisciplinary Sansei artist who was a concrete visual poet, actor, reviewer, interviewer, and opinion piece writer. Born in Greenwood internment camp, Fujino went on to become a fixture of the Toronto Japanese Canadian community and arts scene. David passed in 2017, and the prize was inaugurated in his memory.
The award acknowledges and honours a pioneering Japanese Canadian artist on behalf of the Japanese Canadian community. Recipient selection is led by the Arts, Culture, and Education (ACE) Committee, whose members are familiar with the artistic contributions of Japanese Canadians in a wide array of disciplines.
Past Recipients
2025
Joy Kogawa
Acclaimed author and activist Joy Kogawa is one of the most influential writers of Japanese Canadian descent. Born in Vancouver in 1935 to Issei parents, much of Kogawa’s writing chronicles her family’s forced uprooting to Slocan internment camp and her later active involvement in fighting for Japanese Canadian redress in the 1980s.
Kogawa is best known for her award-winning debut novel, Obasan, a groundbreaking text that was among the first to speak of the unjust wartime persecution of Japanese Canadians. Joy Kogawa has gone on to publish numerous collections of poetry, four novels, two children’s books, and a memoir.
She has been widely recognized for both her literary and advocacy work, having been made a Member of the Order of Canada and a Member of the Order of British Columbia. In 2010, Kogawa received the Order of the Rising Sun “for her contribution to the understanding and preservation of Japanese Canadian history.”
Kimiko Koyanagi
A third-generation member of the renowned Muraoka doll-making family of Tokyo, Kimiko Koyanagi has spent over sixty years mastering her craft, following in the family tradition. Since childhood, Koyanagi has been honing her painstaking practice of intricately molding and carving doll-like sculptures composed of wood shavings, paste, and rice paper delicately painted with a seashell powder pigment.
More than an expert in her medium, Koyanagi is a rare keeper of the endangered skills and knowledge of traditional doll-making, a craft that is rapidly becoming a lost art. She is regarded for her large and distinguished body of work that blends classical technique with her own contemporary vision, creating forms that are unlike anything native to either Japan or North America.
Since immigrating to Canada in 1966, Kimiko Koyanagi has begun teaching a fourth generation of artists the ways of her craft. Her extensive collection has been exhibited in Canada, Japan, the United States, and Mexico, in both group and individual exhibitions.
Nobuo Kubota
Nobuo Kubota, a survivor of internment in the Slocan Valley, began his path as one of Canada’s most illustrious intermedia artists after a decade-long career in architecture. Since leaving the field in 1969, Kubota has drawn on both his architectural background and Buddhist roots for creative inspiration.
For more than fifty years, he has blended Japanese and western cultural and artistic influences, creating work spanning a range of media, including sonics, performance, sculpture, installation, and film. He is best known for his innovative vocal techniques and sound poetry, which often transcend disciplinary borders.
Kubota’s work is featured in major Canadian art institutions and has been showcased in exhibitions and performances across the country and abroad. He has been honoured with the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Allied Arts Award, Canada Council for the Arts’ Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and a Doctor of Fine Arts, Honoris Causa, from the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) University.
Nobuo Kubota sadly passed away on September 30th, 2025, shortly after being honoured as one of the NAJC’s 2025 David Fujino Pioneering Artists.
Naoko Matsubara
Naoko Matsubara is an esteemed woodcut print artist who grew up in a Shinto family in Kyoto and now resides in Oakville, Ontario. Beyond her acclaim as one of the foremost Japanese woodcut artists in the world, Matsubara’s innovative and exuberant German expressionist-inspired work positions her at the forefront of the modern art canon.
An extremely active and prolific artist, Matsubara has exhibited her work in over 80 solo shows throughout North America, Europe, and Japan, participated extensively in group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, and published more than twenty books and portfolios of her work.
Matsubara’s work is held in major public collections worldwide, including at the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Albertina Vienna, the Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, and many others. Naoko Matsubara was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1981 and received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Chatham University in Pittsburgh in 2009.
2017 – Takao Tanabe
“Out of nothing, Takao created great beauty, which reflects an entire generation of Japanese Canadians,” muses Terry Watada, a member of the committee that selected Mr. Tanabe as recipient of the inaugural NAJC David Fujino Pioneering Artist Award at this year’s AGM in Ottawa.