Mother, Skin, Name, Mother
Sumi Tonooka & Jen Shyu
January 2022

This video is the result of my first musical collaboration with vocalist, musician and composer Jen Shyu. The piece was commissioned by the organization Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M3), a platform created to empower, elevate, normalize and give visibility to musicians of historically underrepresented gender identities in intersection with race, sexuality, or ability across generations in the US and worldwide, through a radical model of mentorship and musical collaborative commissions.

The piece grew very organically from conversations that Jen and I had during our time together while building the work and was produced entirely online before we even met each other, during Covid. The piece formed the seed for our next project called In The Green Room.