"During the Second World War, the US Government opened ten concentration camps to incarcerate 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who had been forcibly removed from the West Coast.

In 2015, I -- an American-Japanese, former NPR journalist, ceramicist -- began a journey to visit all the remains of these camps, most of them now desolate and lonely ruins. In my studio in Massachusetts I had hand-pinched and glazed 120 bright yellow tea bowls: yellow, to represent the "Yellow Peril," as Asians were euphemistically referred to at the time, and tea bowls, to represent man's humanity. My plan was to photograph arrangements of these bowls in each camp, to create a conceptual art project which I called the "Freedom From Fear/Yellow Bowl Project." The intent of this project is to inform and educate. The hope is to diffuse fear not spread it.

It was FDR who created the camps -- the same FDR who had famously made the iconic Four Freedoms speech. My belief, after much research, is that "Japanese-Americans," imprisoned in these ten camps wrongly and unjustly, were about as frightening as the tea bowls I planned to display. It is widely agreed today that there was absolutely nothing to fear from them. And it turns out -- the irony at the center of my art project -- that they had much to fear from the US Government."