Craig Nagasawa’s in-progress animated short, J-Town (2024–2025), is composed of fragments - videotaped performances, hand drawn animations, 3D-rendered sequences, painted backgrounds, voiceovers, and sound effects. This epic experiment uses visual storytelling to explore family history, memory, and immigration.

Since retiring from his position as painting lecturer at UC Berkeley, Nagasawa has been shifting his focus towards time-based work, embracing new digital tools. This marks a personal transformation as much as a technical one. He is pulling away from the constraints of academic life toward something more uncertain and generative; “I wanted to do something completely new… that was about freedom."

The central theme of Nagasawa’s project is immigration as "a serious adventure,” a provocative phrase he uses deliberately, evoking risk, displacement, transformation, and pleasure. His grandfather crossed the Pacific from Japan to Hawai‘i and then San Francisco. His parents ran a fish market and restaurant in Japantown, Salt Lake City, a community that has since been physically razed - the target of cultural erasure. Nagasawa grew up navigating these layered identities and histories, eventually becoming a competitive skier, an art teacher, and a storyteller. J-Town draws on both the trauma and pop culture of the atomic age, while reflecting broader patterns of movement, marginalization, and cultural adaptation. These are personal stories that open out into larger American narratives.

J-Town is an extension of Nagasawa’s career-long engagement with painting; he is known for using hand-ground mineral pigments in a style influenced by nihonga. He has also created new paintings that pull imagery from video stills and screenshots of the animation. Moving fluidly between still and time-based imagery, Nagasawa navigates the complex interplay between different modes of visual communication.

Nagasawa intends this specific personal history to be relevant to contemporary political views about immigration, race, and American culture. J-Town is a work in progress that invites others to consider their own family stories and the ways they are preserved, transformed, and overwritten through time.

This project is supported in part by a Berkeley Civic Arts Grant.