Asuka Goto: lost in translation

About

lost in translation is the culmination of three years of work, documenting Goto’s process of translating Elizabeth, a novel by her father, page by page from Japanese to English. The resulting 200+ works do not exist as a traditional readable manuscript but rather as a series of annotated mixed media works on paper, one for each page of the novel.                       

While the initial impulse to translate her father’s novel was a way to acknowledge and explore the space that exists between Goto, a bi-racial American-born woman, and her Japanese father, the project as a whole becomes something much larger and more complicated than a way to explore the space between father and daughter. lost in translation attempts to hold many pairs of ideas together – translation project/drawing series, art object/annotated text, Japanese/American, father/daughter. 

This tension becomes like trying to touch two like ends of a magnet together. The in-between space becomes charged with energy and meaning, the two ends constantly threatening to slip past each other, never touching.