David William McDonald/Supplied
At Toronto’s Music Gallery in 1977, Japanese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist Nobuo Kubota installed a sound sculpture composed of five steel blades and a corresponding number of speakers and organ pedals. From this came a stream of growls and rumbles which had been passed through a synthesizer.
When Globe and Mail critic Adele Freedman expressed to the artist that the noise left her “overwhelmed, even oppressed,” Mr. Kubota instantly understood the reaction and offered help.
“If you accept the sounds, they won’t depress you,” he told the writer. “If you reject them, they will.”
It was the kind of patient philosophy that came naturally from the architect-turned-avant-garde-artist, experimental musician, teacher and groundbreaking sound poet. He died of a subdural hematoma at Toronto’s Michael Garron Hospital on Sept. 30, at age 93.
A soldier’s son who spent his formative years in a Japanese internment camp in British Columbia’s Slocan Valley, Mr. Kubota was a curious artist whose work reflected the elegant intelligence of Japanese culture, a builder’s understanding of space and mechanics, a creator’s intriguing whimsy, and a Buddhist’s serenity.
“Zen is a word I would not use to describe many people, especially in today’s society,” said filmmaker and artist Annette Mangaard. “But that’s what he was.”
Governor General Michaëlle Jean congratulates Nobuo Kubota on winning the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in March, 2009.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
His pieces found homes in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. He published two books (Phonic Slices and Deep Text, by Coach House Books) and he was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
In 1990, Mr. Kubota’s art was part of Paul Wong’s exhibition Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, which toured Canada and celebrated 25 Canadian artists of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese descent. In 1999, the Kelowna Art Gallery mounted a retrospective of his work titled The Exploration of Possibility.
Some called him Nobby, but he preferred Nobi. “He was always very forgiving and flexible about stuff like that,” said Ms. Mangaard, a friend and former student. “He didn’t think what people called him was important. The important thing was to just keep on moving and doing and making things.”
Mr. Kubota’s first big move came at the end of the 1960s when he left his career as an architect for the artist’s life. By that time, he was already playing alto saxophone as a co-founding member of the Artists’ Jazz Band with painters Gordon Rayner (on drums), Graham Coughtry (trombone) and Robert Markle (piano/tenor sax). The renowned artist Michael Snow was a casual member of the underground free-jazz group that often played overground in Mr. Rayner’s loft space.
The painters were associated with the abstract-expressionist movement of the late 1950s and were connected to Toronto’s Isaacs Gallery, run by the taste-making dealer Avrom Isaacs. At regular beer-drinking sessions at the Pilot Tavern, they encouraged and eventually convinced their friend Mr. Kubota to put down his mechanical pencil and fold up his drafting table for good.
His debut solo exhibition was in 1969 at Isaacs Gallery, where The Globe’s art critic Kay Kritzwiser found Mr. Kubota’s work to be polished, exciting and original, while proving that “space is as much an ingredient in art as material.”
Mr. Kubota supplemented his artist’s income by teaching over the years at York University, the short-lived New School of Art, and the Ontario College of Art (now named OCAD University). He lived for a time in an apartment above Gwartzman’s Art Supplies on the city’s bustling Spadina Avenue.
In 1974, Mr. Kubota was one of seven artists commissioned to produce pieces in the new National Science Library at the National Research Council in Ottawa. His sculpture consisting of 40 curving waves each weighing 70 pounds and constructed of thin birch plywood with a cedarwood core was “easily the most visually beguiling” of the commissions, according to Ms. Kritzwiser.
Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts winner Nobuo Kubota with his work, Phonic Slice, 2000, at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in March, 2009.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
That same year, Mr. Kubota and others including Mr. Snow established the Canadian Creative Music Collective, a pioneering improvisational group self-defined as a “composing ensemble united by a desire to play music that is fluid, spontaneous and self-regulating.” Later known by its initials CCMC, the group established the musician-run Music Gallery venue in 1976, initially appearing there on a twice-weekly basis.
“A typical CCMC performance might begin with a barrage of fast, chopped notes played in clusters, building up into a frenzied dash and suddenly falling into a quiet pool of sound,” The Globe’s David Lancashire wrote in 1976, noting Mr. Kubota‘s “saxophone shouts.”
The collective released several albums and toured internationally, with showcase performances at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and Expo 86 in Vancouver.
Mr. Kubota also created frisky experimental music on his own. Singer-songwriter and visual artist Kurt Swinghammer recalled him using an electronic noise-making device known as a cracklebox at the Niagara Artists Centre in St. Catharines, Ont., in the early 1980s.
“He did a captivating and playful solo performance conjuring a cacophony on percussion and cracklebox that ended with a shot from a toy gun hitting a gong across the room. The cracklebox instantly went to the top of my want-list of cool gear.”
When Mr. Kubota developed hearing issues due to Ménière’s disease in the early 1990s, he mostly withdrew from CCMC but performed solo as he developed his inimitable vocal techniques as the country’s foremost sound poet. Inspired by Kabuki theatre and the improvisational sensibilities of free jazz, his unusual art blurred disciplinary as well as cultural borders.
“What came out of that man, the creaks and groans and splutters and trills and yelps, was really astonishing,” said Sarah Milroy, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection executive director and chief curator. “He was a true virtuoso of the spontaneous.”
Preparing for a live performance at the Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in 2024, the 91-year-old reflected on his past work and expressed concern about performing extemporaneously.
“Looking back becomes an existence, or a type of existence, which is fraught with doubt,” he says in Ms. Mangaard’s forthcoming documentary I am the Art: Nobuo Kubota. “But that’s okay. Doubt is very useful. It tells you who you are.”
A still from I am the Art: Nobuo Kubota.Annette Mangaard/ I am the Art: Nobuo Kubota/Supplied
He was born in Vancouver on June 27, 1932, one of the four children of Hide Kubota and Sainosuke Kubota, a fisherman and descendant of samurai, who came to Canada from Japan at age 16 and fought as a Canadian soldier overseas in the First World War.
“You don’t want a samurai as a father,” Mr. Kubota would say later of his disciplinarian dad.
After the Japanese bombed the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in 1941, British Columbia’s Japanese population of approximately 22,000 were forced into internment camps throughout the province’s interior. As a former Canadian soldier, Mr. Kubota was exempt from confinement, as was his family, but he chose to stay with his community. They relocated to a Slocan Valley camp where the children enjoyed a relatively carefree existence.
“Who cares about the war?” Mr. Kubota later recalled. “We got the mountains to climb up. We had a beautiful lake. We had a river. We played baseball and hockey, and we had a great time.”
After the war, young Nobuo and his parents worked on fruit farms in B.C.’s Okanagan region before moving to Toronto. He attended Central Technical School and attained an honours degree in architecture at the University of Toronto.
Shortly before graduating in 1959, Mr. Kubota was one of five architecture students asked by The Globe to comment on the university’s expansion plans.
“It is unfortunate that nothing has been done to relate the feeling of the old university with that of the new buildings west of St. George Street,” he said. “The old buildings are quite gay and playful, while retaining their academic atmosphere.”
When he left architecture after a decade in the field, his parents were devastated. The profession had reflected well upon them. “They were extremely unhappy about it, and it created a lot of friction in their relationship, especially with his father,” Mr. Kubota’s stepdaughter, Jessica Mallette, told The Globe. “But it didn’t stop him from doing what he wanted to do.”
As an adult, Mr. Kubota studied Buddhism and practiced meditation in Japan for more than a year but returned to Canada to marry a widowed mother of two in 1979. Lee Kubota (née Fowler) was a singer and dancer in her early 20s and later a writer with the CBC. She died in 2024 following years of dementia. “When my mother died, it broke his heart,” Ms. Mallette said of her stepfather.
In 2023, Mr. Kubota said he felt fine health-wise and that he would likely live for another three or four years. “Maybe that’s enough,” he told filmmaker Ms. Mangaard. “I just want to present what I do before I leave this planet.”
Just before his experimental music performance at MOCA in 2024, he was asked by a young woman if he had pieces showing at the museum. “No,” he replied, “I am the art.”
Mr. Kubota leaves stepchildren Jessica Mallette and Stephen Sherman; and a grandchild, Caela Butt. The film I Am the Art premieres at Toronto’s Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on Dec. 7.
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