On Anniversary of Japan's Tsunami, Japan Society Shows "In the Wake"

New York, N.Y.  Japan Society Gallery in New York will present In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11 beginning Friday, March 11, 2016, five years to the day since an enormous earthquake and tsunami struck northeast Japan, devastating coastal regions and setting off a nuclear power plant failure.

On view through June 12, 2016, the exhibition is the centerpiece of an institution-wide observance of what was the first natural disaster in Japan caught in its entirety by cameras. Public programs, films, performances and special events will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition at Japan Society to commemorate the anniversary and examine issues surrounding post-3/11 recovery and reconstruction.

Lieko Shiga, Rasen Kaigan (Spiral Shore) 45, from the series Rasen Kaigan (Spiral Shore),

2012.  Photograph, chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist. © Lieko Shiga.

Organized by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it was on view last year, In the Wake features more than 90 photographs, videos, and installations created by 17 artists who contemplate what has been lost and what remains in the aftermath of a national tragedy that took some 18,000 lives and displaced another 400,000 individuals.

A special highlight of Japan Society’s presentation is a room-sized installation entitled, Lost & Found , one artist’s painstaking project to collect hundreds of thousands of lost family photos from the region and restore, digitize and in some cases even return the photos to those who lost them.

Naoya Hatakeyama, 2013.10.20 Kesen-Chō From The Series Rikuzentakata, 2013.

Photograph, chromogenic print. © Naoya Hatakeyama, Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery.

“News of the earthquake and tsunami swept through Japan Society offices five years ago, immediately prompting the organization to jumpstart an international effort that has now grown to over $14 million and 66 grants supporting relief and recovery,” notes Yukie Kamiya, Gallery Director at Japan Society.  “This exhibition extends that effort and Japan Society’s mission of more than a century to connect Japan to American and the rest of the world.”

“ In the Wake invites us to accept a challenge: that is, to enter into the reality of devastation through the power of art,” adds Ms. Kamiya. “These are works of art with universal resonance that speak to human resilience.”

The Exhibition

Japan Society Gallery‘s presentation of In the Wake will trace the presence of the sublime in photographs, ranging from more documentary-style pictures to those created by way of more experimental approaches.  It will expand upon MFA Boston’s critically praised installation from two sections – focusing on the earthquake and tsunami, and the Fukushima disaster, respectively – to trace the range of photographers’ responses to 3/11, from documentary-style pictures, to experimental techniques and metaphorical approaches, to a final section on Tōhoku in myth and memory.

In the Wake opens in the Sky Gallery with large-scale projections of before-and-after photographs of tsunami-ravaged villages, shot by master photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, whose life was most directly affected by the 3/11 disaster, his mother having lost her life in the tsunami.

Upon entering the North Gallery, visitors to In the Wake will encounter very different visions of the aftermath of the disaster produced by using a camera in the conventional way.  The visitor will encounter the series “Light and Shadow” by Rinko Kawauchi.  At first glance, wan and seemingly straightforward images appear to document birds flitting against bleached skies and rubbled, leveled ground. But the careful viewer will note that the birds in each frame are the same, a pair of pigeons, one white, one black–mysterious messengers, perhaps, in an apocalyptic landscape. The birds were in fact homing pigeons circling above the debris trying to locate their home.

A number of the photographers featured in this section combine a straightforward approach to picture-making with metaphorical intentions.  These include Tomoko Yoneda, Homma Takashi, and Shimpei Takeda, the last of whom touches something ineffable in the human psyche by using contaminated soil samples to create autoradiograph images resembling the astronomical splendor of the night sky.

A highlight of the North Gallery is the large-format color photography of Hatakeyama, who documented his small coastal hometown, Rikuzentakata, which was devastated when the tsunami breached its seawall. Hatakeyama had been exploring the dynamic between nature and urban development in the area before the disaster.  Afterwards, he went on to photograph the ravages, the cleanup, and the slow process of reconstruction. The death of the photographer’s mother in the tsunami gives terrible new meaning to the series, especially one vast, flat landscape depicting a rainbow over the spot where her house had been.

Kozo Miyoshi’s black and white photographic series is also featured in this early section.  Miyoshi was among the first photographers to travel to the disaster site. He had been photographing Tohoku since the mid-1980s.  After the devastation, he created images in a neutral documentary style, such as one that shows the 4,724-ton cargo ship, Asia Symphony, torn from its moorings.

Keizō Kitajima is one of the photographers whose practice changed following 3/11, when he began to become aware of “the difficulty of distinguishing between the actuality of the predicament I saw with my own eyes and the apparent reality of the profusion of images that invade our lives by way of various media.”  Unlike news images, however, Kitajima’s large-format color photographs in In the Wake convey a weight and silence.  One, of a destroyed house and surrounding buildings awash in garbage, is so beautifully composed that it could accurately be entitled `composition in whites and greys.’

Lost & Found

This project, which has been widely heralded, is situated along a curved wall at the end of the North Gallery, a floor-to-ceiling installation of hundreds and hundreds of restored family snapshots found in Tohoku, the region most hard-hit by the earthquake.  Poignant reminders of precious human ties, these photos were rescued by a loose confederation of police, fire fighters and local residents who call themselves the Self Defense Force and gathered into an installation and book by the photographer Munemasa Takahashi and “Memory Salvage Project. ”  Lost & Found ’s organizers aim to return photographs to their owners.  So far, over 750,000 photos have been found, and tens of thousands have been identified and returned. The Lost & Found project is accompanied by a published book, and is available in expanded form online at here .

This is the first time that Lost & Found has been exhibited in New York City.

Bamboo Gallery

A series of daguerreotypes with irradiated-looking edges around subjects and foreboding surface imperfections will be displayed in Japan Society’s intimate Bamboo gallery, where their jewel-like quality will be enlivened by light. To create these one-of-a-kind photographic works, the photographer Takashi Arai followed the original 19th -century method of making daguerreotypes on silver plate, but strove for contemporary imagery adequate to convey the scope of the disaster and the complex emotions surrounding it.

Scenes limned in robin’s egg blue, peach, and sepia are framed by pinhole darkness suggesting Victorian carte de vistes : but upon close viewing, it becomes clear that Arai’s daguerreotypes capture images of detritus from the Hiroshima atomic bombing, the Bikini Atoll fallout, the 2011 events at Fukushima, and other nuclear crises from Japan’s modern history. This installation of Arai’s works is accompanied by ambient sound recordings that the artist produced during the slow-capture process of creating the daguerreotypes.

The South Gallery

This section features work by photographers who have used an exploration of the photographic medium itself to provide a point of departure for responding to the Fukushima reactor disaster. Many have begun with quotidian images and transformed them into something hyper-real, even sinister.  Five black and white images by Nobuyoshi Araki are an example.  For the series, the master photographer slashed the negatives of black and white photographs in his studio: among them a shot of busy, umbrella-toting city dwellers crisscrossing a street and a glamorous torch singer in close-up on a TV screen. As Araki writes: “… you know what? You don’t need to force yourself to try to express 3/11. It’s all already out there. ”

The celebrated emerging photographer Daisuke Yokota, whose work is being exhibited for the first time in New York City in this presentation, altered the development of a series of black and white negatives by heat processing, producing a set of spare, enigmatic X-ray-like pictures.

Many works in the South Gallery relate specifically to Tohoku, the northern part of Japan that was the epicenter of the disaster and a region that has long been perceived as an enchanted or mythic place. Featured here are large-format color photographs by Lieko Shiga, who narrowly escaped the tsunami in Tohoku and returned to find that she had lost her house, studio, cameras, and a year’s worth of work.  Here, her images purport to document the activities of the “village folk” in Tohoku, like one showing a bundled-up woman seeming to walk her bicycle down the crevice of a perilous, light-strafed cliff.  In another striking photograph from the same “Spiral Shore” series, an elderly couple poses next to the upside-down root of a pine tree that appears to pierce the man’s heart.

The photographers and artists represented in In the Wake are: Takashi Arai (born 1978), Nobuyoshi Araki (born 1940), Ishu Han (born 1987), Naoya Hatakeyama (born 1958), Takashi Homma (born 1962), Kikuji Kawada (born 1933), Rinko Kawauchi (born 1972), Keizo Kitajima (born 1954), Kōzo Miyoshi (born 1947), Yasusuke Ota (born 1958), Masato Seto (born 1953), Lieko Shiga (born 1980), Munemasa Takahashi (born 1980), Shimpei Takeda (born 1982), Masaru Tatsuki (born 1974), Daisuke Yokota (born 1984) and Tomoko Yoneda (born 1965).

PUBLICATION

A publication, In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11 (2015, MFA Publications), by Anne Nishimura Morse and Anne E. Havinga, accompanies the exhibition, with additional contributions made by Michio Hayashi, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Sophia University; Marilyn Ivy, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University; and Tomoko Nagakura, Research Fellow for Japanese Art. The book is available in both English and Japanese. ($60)

SPONSORSHIP

The Japan Society presentation of In the Wake is supported by ITOCHU International Inc., Marubeni America Corporation, Mitsubishi Corporation (Americas), Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), Sumitomo Corporation of Americas; ITO EN (North America) INC., Mizuho Financial Group, Sojitz Corporation of America, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Toyota Motor North America, Inc.; Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, Inc., Canon U.S.A., Inc., IHI INC., SOMPO AMERICA, Tokio Marine Management, Inc.; and Kawasaki Heavy Industries (USA), Inc.

EXHIBITION-RELATED PROGRAMS

Further Society-wide activities to be announced. All events take place at Japan Society.

SYMPOSIUM: New Directions in Japanese Art and Architecture after 3/11

Friday, March 11, 9:30 am to 3:00 pm

This symposium will draw attention to innovations in art and architecture that have arisen after the Great East Japan Earthquake. While the human loss and material devastation caused by the triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis remain urgent issues five years on, the “New Directions” symposium seeks to consider the ongoing rebuilding efforts from new vantage points. A principal theme – namely, the emergence of local community as a determining factor of creative expression – will be explored from a variety of angles, with leading practitioners, artists, and historians offering their unique perspectives on this shift, and its potential as a model for art and architecture globally.

ABOUT JAPAN SOCIETY

Japan Society Gallery is among the premier institutions in the U.S. for the exhibition of Japanese art. Extending in scope from prehistory to the present, the Gallery’s exhibitions since 1971 have covered topics as diverse as classical Buddhist sculpture and calligraphy, contemporary photography and ceramics, samurai swords, export porcelain, and masterpieces of painting from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century. Each exhibition, with its related catalogue and public programs, is a unique cultural event that illuminates familiar and unfamiliar fields of art.

Founded in 1907, Japan Society is a multidisciplinary hub for global leaders, artists, scholars, educators, and English and Japanese-speaking audiences. At the Society, more than 100 events each year feature sophisticated, topically relevant presentations of Japanese art and culture as well as open and critical dialogue on issues of vital importance to the U.S., Japan and East Asia. An American nonprofit, nonpolitical organization, the Society cultivates a constructive, resonant and dynamic relationship between the people of the U.S. and Japan.

Japan Society is located at 333 East 47th Street between First and Second avenues (accessible by the 4/5/6 and 7 subway at Grand Central or the E and M subway at 53rd St. and Lexington Ave.) The public may call 212-832-1155 or visit www.japansociety.org for more information.

Japan Society Gallery hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 11:00 am-6:00 pm; Friday, 11:00 am-9:00 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11:00 am-5:00 pm; the Gallery is closed on Mondays and major holidays. Admission: $12/$10 students and seniors/FREE Japan Society members and children under 16. Admission is free to all on Friday nights, 6:00 pm-9:00 pm. Docent tours are available free with admission Tuesday-Sunday at 2:30 pm (English), and Fridays at 6:00 pm (Japanese) and 7:00 pm (English); no reservations are necessary except for group tours.

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