Roy Kiyooka, the subtly influential Japanese Canadian painter, poet, photographer, musician, educator, and philosopher, died in 1994 at the age of 67. But among the creators of Marginalia: Re-visioning Roy Kiyooka, Vancouver New Music’s Alcan Performing Arts Award–winning celebration of the late artist’s life, there’s a sense that his work lives on—and that he does, too.

VNM artistic director Giorgio Magnanensi is the main force behind this interdisciplinary investigation, which debuts at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre from Wednesday to next Saturday (February 20 to 23), but the Italian-born composer didn’t arrive in Canada until after Kiyooka’s death. Still, he feels that in assembling Marginalia he’s encountered a kindred spirit, and made a new friend.

“It’s been very interesting to meet this guy that I didn’t know at all,” he says, on the line from his Vancouver office. “But when I started looking into this man’s work and art, I became really fascinated by his wide and complex vision—his expression of creativity in many different fields.”

Soundscape artist and Marginalia participant Hildegard Westerkamp uses almost identical terms when discussing her own immersion in Kiyooka’s life and art. She, too, talks about “meeting” the late creator, although she expresses some trepidation about coming to terms with such an eclectic artist.

“I was rather puzzled by the whole thing, I must admit,” she says in a phone conversation with the Straight. “I had said yes to the project because it interested me, and then I said, ‘Oh, my God, how do you converse, musically and sonically, with someone who had such a multi-artistic life, and who was obviously a very, very complex person?’ ”

Westerkamp used archival recordings of Kiyooka interviewing his elderly Japanese-born mother, splicing them with her own elderly German mother’s reminiscences. “It ended up as an open-ended conversation about the family connections that you carry within yourself,” she explains. “I also decided to have an imaginary conversation with Roy at one point in order to try to seriously ‘meet’ him, so my voice is in there as well.”

Kiyooka’s paintings, poetry, letters, and photographs have been well documented, but archival materials don’t really convey the rich texture of the artist’s life. To reflect Kiyooka’s intense curiosity and eclectic interests, Magnanensi has stepped away from the usual concert format to present Marginalia as an open-ended and intermission-free “happening” in which poet Kedrick James, the Standing Wave ensemble, and his own electronics will add to or interpret scores by Westerkamp, Stefan Udell, Stefan Smulovitz, and Jocelyn Morlock. Each of the project’s four nights will be different, Magnanensi says, and he hopes attendees will go away with their faith in art and transformation renewed.

Some of the participants have already noticed an effect. “Roy Kiyooka’s willingness to experiment—to try things and not really worry about them—is very interesting to me,” Morlock says in a phone interview. “It kind of goes against what I tend to do, which is to worry over things endlessly, to fuss and obsess. This time, I tried working differently, making many things and then getting rid of some of them, but trying for this fast, unified effort. It seemed scary at first, but I’m happy with how it turned out.”