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― 246 ― Prayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s Socially Engaged Art
In “Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed,” Ayelet Zohar points to a shift in the
practice of some contemporary artists in Japan indicating a new willingness on their part to examine
wartime memory and trauma.1 Zohar identifi es three postwar generations of artists who have engaged
in different ways with these changing conditions. According to Zohar, while the first and second
postwar generations for the most part remained silent or had to face the challenge of “practical
rehabilitation,” younger artists of the third generation (born in the 1970s onwards) “suggest facing the
dilemmas, pain and suff ering of the past through accepting the idea of Japan’s responsibility, in a more
direct and honest manner” (Zohar 2015, 12).
I find this framework useful when considering the question of where to locate the work of
Tomiyama Taeko in postwar and contemporary art history. Tomiyama is in her late 90s, and thus
chronologically of the fi rst generation described by Zohar; nevertheless, throughout her life and career
as an artist she has been devoted to questioning the silences and omissions in dominant historical
narratives, in a context where“refrain from public engagement with discourses of war responsibility,
aff ect and memory” has been the norm (Zohar 2015, 12). The unique creative practice that Tomiyama
has developed over the last five or more decades does not fit easily into histories of postwar and
contemporary Japanese art; at the same time, as I will try to show here, the artist’s evolving practice
which draws on the media of painting, printmaking, collage works and collaborations with composer
and musician Takahashi Yuji (b. 1938) can also be seen as a precursor to performative and socially-
engaged practices seen in works by younger, contemporary artists.
Hagiwara Hiroko has argued that Tomiyama herself felt estranged and marginalized in relation to
the emerging contemporary art world in Tokyo in the postwar era where “American Abstract
Expressionism and Pop Art” were fashionable. Her depictions of the world of mines she had discovered
Introduction
Rebecca JENNISON
Socially Engaged ArtPrayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s
― 247 ―京都精華大学紀要 第五十三号
in Kyushu and Hokkaido were viewed as “unwomanly” or dismissed as “left-wing” or political art by
critics in Tokyo; at the same time, she was seen as a “bourgeois, city-bred painter” and a “questionable
outsider” in the mining towns (Hagiwara 2010, 133). As Tomiyama herself stated in an interview with
Hagiwara, “ If I am to be marginalized anyway, I would rather remain on the margin, to be
independent and be myself ” (Hagiwara 2010, 133). As Hagiwara goes on to argue, the unique creative
practice that Tomiyama has developed since establishing her one-woman studio, Hidane Kobo, in 1975,
has enabled her to create alternative, more democratic means of circulating her art “on and off the
margins” of the art contemporary art world. Hagiwara writes:
In Tomiyama’s case, creating an alternative to established modes of showing, reviewing and
reproducing art has entailed creating alternative audiences, and also alternative perspectives for
both making and seeing art. Ironically, the very conditions limiting Tomiyama’s production have
served to create a unique alternative base for the artist, which has, in turn enabled her to keep on
producing and developing her art for decades. (Hagiwara 2010, 146)
As Hagiwara shows, Tomiyama’s choice to work independently, outside established institutions of the
art world, aff orded her a freedom to pursue her own creative path that in turn has created spaces for
interaction and engagement. Critic and curator Kitagawa Furam and Tomiyama’s long-time
collaborator Takahashi Yuji have also commented on the artist’s alternative and innovative practice.
In the “Introduction” to From the Asians (1998) more than twenty years ago, Kitagawa Furam
wrote that there has long been a tradition of “the outsider artist” who is on the margins of the art
market but who “expresses our anxieties and hopes for the future, who revives forgotten memories,
who unearths small wonders. Ironically, this approach has earned art and artists a certain level of
respect, even though society often considers the artist as an unwelcome presence, and his or her
artworks unnecessary” (Kitagawa 1998, 4). Kitagawa goes on to explain that artists who sought
acceptance in the museum and institutional system began to become disassociated from society, which
in turn contributed to “a gradual weakening of the personal, prophetic, nonconformist role of art”
(Kitagawa 1998, 5).
In response to these conditions, Kitagawa described new directions in 20th century art that aim
to reestablish the link between art and societymostly emerging from the so-called “third world.”
According to Kitagawa, artists were beginning to look directly at issues and themes such as “ethnicity,
political borders, north-south problems, disease, gender and so on…aiming to connect with the public, in
this sense can truly be called, ‘public art’.” It is in this context that Kitagawa comments Tomiyama
Taeko and her work:
― 248 ― Prayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s Socially Engaged Art
Taeko Tomiyama is an artist who has challenged the distortions of history from a feminist
viewpoint, and her works in this show are closely connected to the situation in South Korea since
the Kwangju Massacre in 1980…Tomiyama’s works do not simply document historical events,
but express their potential…It is these qualities, together with her long and deep association with
two major Asian cultures that have helped her succeed in reaching the general public. (Kitagawa
1998, 5-6)
Tomiyama Taeko’s long-time collaborator, musician and composer Takahashi Yuji, also writes of
the stance and creative practice of artists who work on the margins of the mainstream art world, and
who aim to create new perspectives and a new kind of “public” art. Of such artists, Takahashi writes:
Individual artists who have been forced to live on the periphery of the art system are joining
hands voluntarily to create alternative perspectives. This goes beyond making interesting objects
to the building of communities whose creative acts allow us to question social norms and the way
we live. Our collaboration with slides and music is such an experiment. Free of frames on
museum walls, images appear and disappear. Music no longer fi xed to a musical score, reenacts
live performance. This space, this moment when sound and image interact becomes a mirror
before the viewer who questions our time. And all questions come back to the one who asks.
(Takahashi 2001,12)
Here, Takahashi highlights the unique use of multi-media slide works that he and Tomiyama developed
after establishing Hidane Kobo. He not only notes the practice of questioning social norms, but explains
this in terms of the aff ective and relational encounter between artists and viewers who interact in live,
performance spaces where both can respond to pressing issues of the times.
In 2009, Embracing Asia: Tomiyama Taeko’s Art ~ 1950-2009, aff orded an opportunity to show
Tomiyama’s works and present a live performance with Takahashi Yuji at the Echigo-Tsumari Art
Triennale. News articles and interviews at the time touched on the question of social and political
themes in art and the freedom of expression of the artist to treat them.2 Discourse and publications on
questions surrounding “socially engaged art” have continued to evolve over the last two decades and
new research and curatorial projects too numerous to discuss here have emerged. More recently, new
critical spaces for the discussion of art that is both experimental and socially engaged have appeared in
― 249 ―京都精華大学紀要 第五十三号
the online journal, Field: A Journal for Socially Engaged Art . 3
In “Japan’s Social Turn: An Introductory Companion,” art historian Justin Jesty insightfully
reviews recent developments in discussions of socially engaged art in Japan and points to the need to
“highlight places where Japan’s social turn might require that our assumptions, expectations and habits
of seeing relative to socially engaged art be revised” (Jesty 2017, 1). At the end of his essay, he cites
examples of works that have been left out of the “canonical history of the neo avant-gardes in the U.S.”
and refers to Tomiyama Taeko as an example of an artist who has “devoted most of her artistic career
to social and political causes” (Jesty 2017,10). Citing the “representational modes” Tomiyama deploys
in her work as one factor that has led her to be overlooked, he goes on to conclude that the 2009
retrospective of Tomiyama’s work in an abandoned school building demonstrates that the “format of
the eclectic art project can accommodate more political diversity than any museum has been able to
do” (Jesty 2017, 11). Still more recently, in a chapter of his new study on contemporary art history,
Yamamoto Hiroki outlines a trajectory of techniques and practices of “post-imperial art” in the context
of a discussion of legacies of colonialism in East Asia and notes that Tomiyama Taeko is a rare
example of an artist who has consistently examined the question of war responsibility in her art
(Yamamoto 2019, 253).
In the following sections, of this essay, my aim is to look at selected works by Tomiyama Taeko
that have continued, as Jesty notes, to circulate outside major museums, “primarily through activist
networks, local and university art museums, small galleries and in the work of historians and
anthropologists” (Jesty, 2017, 10). While focusing on three themes or tropes that recur in
Tomiyama’s worksprayer, memory and revelationI will also aim to examine the formal practices
of the artist more closely, focusing on her use of collage as a preferred medium of expression in a
context where new technological media are constantly evolving. In Section II, I will discuss selected
mixed-media collage works that were exhibited in a group exhibition held in Berlin in 2015, titled
Verbotene Bilder/Banned Images . Revised and updated versions of three of Tomiyama’s and
Takahashi’s slide/DVD works that were also included in the exhibition Prayer in Memory Kwangju
May, 1980 (1980/2001) , A Memory of the Sea (1988) and Revelation from the Sea (2014) have been
reissued by Voyager Japan, Inc. 4
I. Prayer and Protest in the Banned Images ExhibitionIn the fall of 2014, Tomiyama Taeko was invited to show works in a group exhibit titled
― 250 ― Prayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s Socially Engaged Art
Verbotene Bilder: Kontrolle und Zensur in den Demokratien Ostasiens/Banned Images: Control and
Censorship in East Asian Democracies , at a small, alternative gallery in Berlin. The exhibit included
works by Nakagaki Katsuhisa and an essay by curator Arai Hiroyuki who curated Hyogen no Fujiyu
tenkesareta monotachi (The non-freedom of expression exhibitthose who have been erased), an
exhibition held at the Furuto gallery in Tokyo in 2015. The curators of the Berlin show, Han Nataly
Jung-Hwa, Yajima Tsukasa and Yoo Jae Hyun, brought together works by six artists including Chen
Chieh-jen (b. 1960, Taiwan), Chen Ching-Yao (b. 1976,Taiwan), Hong Sung-dam (b. 1955, Souh Korea),
Nakagaki Katsuhisa (b. 1944, Japan), Sunmu (b. 1972, North Korea) and Tomiyama Taeko. While the
styles of each artist and specifi c contexts from which they emerged were diff erent, the curators found
that they all, “cast a critical eye over present-day policies, trespass into taboo areas in their respective
countries, take a stand on freedom of opinion and human rights, treat sensitive topics from the past and
do not shy away from the social and political conditions inherent in their works” (Han 2015, 6).
Tomiyama, the eldest and only woman in the show, submitted 50 works that were shown under the
title, Silenced by History RevisitedFrom the Life of a Woman Artist , and included mixed-media
collages on paper, lithographs, silk screens and digital reproductions of oil paintings. The works were
organized in four chapters or acts with accompanying DVD/slide works, each organized around a
theme selected by the artist.
In the introduction to Verbotene Bilder/Banned Images , art critic Vladimir Tikhonov refl ects on
the intersecting geopolitical histories of the region and how these histories have shaped cultural
production in East Asia. After 1945, although Japan’s empire had offi cially disappeared, its shadow was
cast over the postwar era. He notes that Japan’s postwar economic boom, spurred on by the Korean
War, created conditions in Japan “not unlike much of the capitalist world…self-censored by infl uential
public and private bodies which largely regulate the access to the public space of expression”
(Tikhonov 2015, 114). He argues that in Japan, “pre-war ‘hard’ authoritarian structures evolved into
the softer, less explicit authoritarianism of the post-war consumerist society, tightly controlled by
bureaucratic and corporate might” (Tikhonov 2015,13-14).
When selecting work to include in this exhibit, Tomiyama insisted that prints from the series,
Prayer in Memory ~ Kwangju, May 1980, and the accompanying DVD work be included. This series
and the collaboration with Takahashi Yuji that has continued since then was a defi ning moment in the
artist’s career. Both in this work and in the earlier series, Chained Hands in Prayer (1975), based on
the poems of Kim Chi Ha, “prayer” is the central trope used in a context of protest against the military
dictatorship in Korea in the 1970s. This trope recurs, but takes other forms in later series of works on
― 251 ―京都精華大学紀要 第五十三号
memory and war trauma. A brief discussion of the trajectory that led her to produce this work may
provide background to Tomiyama’s later works.
Tomiyama traces the roots of her concern with the role of art and society to the “underground”
stream of artists and musicians ten years her senior who were active in the proletariat art movement
during the 20s, and during WWII. In the 1950s, she produced drawings, oil paintings and printssome
experimenting with modernist styles of painting, but many in the “reportage” style of the early
postwar-- on the theme of copper and coal mines in Kyushu and Hokkaido (Hagiwara, 2010, 130-134).
In the early postwar era when energy production shifted from coal to oil, many miners migrated to
South America in search of work and Tomiyama followed them; the theme of miners, energy resources
and migration continue to appear in her work today. After returning from these journeys to South
America and the Middle East along sea routes that taught her the history of European colonialism, she
turned her attention to Japan’s own colonial past and current conditions on the Korean Peninsula. In
an essay refl ecting on this period, Tomiyama writes:
In 1970, I traveled to Korea. Though the war had ended a quarter of a century earlier, I saw the
wounds and scars of the Korean War everywhere. The Korean War, virtually a proxy war
between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, in the wake of Japan’s colonial occupation, had
severed the North and South. It was as if the grid of the Cold War were frozen in the earth itself.
This was a country closely watched by the military, a country in darkness, both yesterday and
today. I tried to describe Korea’s dark path in the night with my art. (Tomiyama 2001, 2)
Soon after news of the people’s uprising in Gwangju in May, 1980 reached Japan, Tomiyama
began working on a series of black and white prints; at the same time, Takahashi was composing music
for a TV broadcast. When they learned that the television productions they had worked on would be
censored, they transformed the prints and music into a portable, multi-media slide work, produced as
“Three Messages,” a slide-show, pamphlet and SP recording. Of the events leading up to the creation
of this work, Tomiyama writes:
May, 1980. The people of Kwangju rose up against the curfew that had been imposed by the U.S.
backed military regime, and reclaimed Kwangju. But more troops were sent in and the people
were once again suppressed and silenced. I worked quickly to produce Prayer in Memory at a
moment when Korean artists risked arrest and suppression if they responded with art work.
Prayer in Memory was made into a series of slides shown in South Korea, Europe and the U.S. by
human rights groups. It was shown at churches, universitieswherever people gathered.
― 252 ― Prayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s Socially Engaged Art
(Tomiyama 2001, 2)
Tomiyama Taeko and Takahashi Yuji first met at a gathering celebrating the publication of
Midnight--Poems by Kim Chi Ha, Lithographs by Tomiyama Taeko , and they later produced a
recording to accompany the book. In 1975, Takahashi composed music for the first slide work
produced by Hidane Kobo, Chained Hands in Prayer ; in it he interwove musical themes from a
composition by Hayashi Hikaru (b. 1931), student protest songs of the time, and well-known Korean
folk songs.5
Curator and photographer Kobayashi Hiromichi has also collaborated with Tomiyama on
numerous projects for over two decades and has contributed greatly both to the production and
analysis of the multi-media slide works. He notes innovative formal and technical practices the artist
has developedincluding collages such as those shown in Berlin, and the multi-media slide and DVD
works she has continued to produce. He explains:
It is not unusual nowadays for an artist to use her or his own works as materials to produce fi lm
or videos…The process of taking apart and reconstructing paintingsalready a complete system
of representationto create a diff erent system of representation, has the potential to do much
more than just technically alter the form of the work. The artist’s practice constitutes a critique
of painting itself and the concepts underlying modern art that have helped shape the very values
and foundations of modern society. (Kobayashi 2009,10)
Kobayashi shows that Tomiyama was producing paintings with the process of taking them apart and
making them into slide works already in mind. He adds that Tomiyama’s work can be viewed in the
context of a longer tradition of “anti-authoritarian” art that extends, in part, from the Dada artists of
the 20th century:
Like artists of the Dadaist and Surrealist movements in the early 20th century who took apart
and reconstructed recognized works of art, making them into collages, Tomiyama uses historical
documents and iconographic images that constitute important traces of history in her collages.
(Kobayashi 2009, 11)
Hagiwara Hiroko has also focused on the techniques and materials used by the artist in collages that
― 253 ―京都精華大学紀要 第五十三号
allow for the juxtaposition of images from diff erent temporal and geopolitical contexts to produce new
images and meanings. In her insightful discussion of collages in the series titled The Fox and the Coal
Mines (2000), Hagiwara highlights the artist’s use of a marbling technique that evokes “ancient
geological strata.” She writes:
The audience is invited on an imaginary journey to the ancient geological strata formed hundreds
of thousands of years ago, while simultaneously being urged to face the modern imperial history
that exploited both the ancient natural resources and the people of the 20th century who were
conscripted to mine them. (Hagiwara 2010, 141)
In the following section, I will discuss selected collage works that were exhibited in the Banned Images
exhibit in Berlin; these works are visually dense and demanding for viewers but at the same time
showboth conceptually and in terms of technique that Tomiyama is continuing to use collage as a
means to deconstruct and reconstruct images as she interacts both with her own works and ongoing
events to create an alternative visual narrative of history.
II. Memory and Revelation in “Sorrows of War and the Postwar Ear : What a Woman Artist Saw”
While prayer and protest were central themes in earlier works, “remembrance” and reconciliation
became central themes, and the fi gure of the miko or shaman the vehicle for this in works such as A
Memory of the Sea . Here we will look more closely at selected works from the series of collage works
exhibited in Berlin and ask how Tomiyama juxtaposes fragments of earlier prints and paintings to
create new meanings and associations between past and present. In these works we see that
Tomiyama continues to discover ways to explore a collective, international experience of war memory
and trauma and fi nds that her message connects unexpectedly with others in seemingly unassociated
places.
When Tomiyama was asked to show work in Banned Images , she decided to create a new series
of fi fteen works on paper titled, “Sorrows of War and the ‘Postwar’ Era: What a Woman Artist Saw”
which became “Act Three” of the exhibit. Acutely aware that the show was going to open in Berlin on
the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII and the fourth anniversary of the triple disasters in Northeast
Japan, Tomiyama was determined to exhibit these new works. She had fi rst visited Germany in 1967
― 254 ― Prayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s Socially Engaged Art
when she traveled to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
When she returned to Berlin in 1982 to exhibit
prints and slides on Kim Chi Ha’s poems and the
people’s uprising in Gwangju, she discovered a
vibrant community of artists, musicians and
feminist activists there. When she came again in
1985 to show the fi lm, Hajike Hosenka (Pop-Out
Balsam Seed), her visit coincided with President
Richard von Weizsäcker’s well-known speech on
the 40th anniversary of WWII.
As Hagiwara has argued, collage has
proven to be a critically important medium for
Tomiyama, helping her to make “new analytical
and artistic connections” (Hagiwara 2010, 139).
Many examples of collage works in The Fox and
the Coal Mines (2000) and Hiruko and the
Puppeteers : A Tale of Sea Wanderers (2009)
attest to Tomiyama’s skill in using this medium. Another example, “Shaman’s Prayer” (2002) was
created for an exhibition in Tokyo and featured in two exhibitions titled Remembrance and
Reconciliation held at the International House of Philadelphia, Ruhr University in Bohm, Germany and
later at Northwestern University in 2005 - 6. In this collage, powerful black and white images from the
artist's early lithographs form the background for fragments of printed text and the decorative Korean
style character for rei (禮), a gesture of respect toward Korea, the land of "courtesy and respect." The
fragment of the face of a woman, taken from earlier black and white lithographs appears as a shaman
and witness, off ering prayers for Korean miners and "military comfort women" who suff ered during
the war. This shaman or mudang connects the living and the dead, the past and the present.
Techniques that Tomiyama had been developing in earlier collage works like this were again deployed
in the new series produced for the Berlin exhibit.
The fi rst three works in the new series were titled “Wars in AsiaThe Race for Colonies, “The
Road to EmpireKorea, Manchuria,” and “Puppet State Manchuria.” In “The Road to Empire,” a
reproduction of a section of an oil painting depicting the plains of Manchuria at sunset and hand made
paper form the background on which Chinese cut paper art is collaged over details from works in the
Image #1 “Shaman’s Prayer” (2002) Mixed-media collage on paper (70cm ×50cm).
Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Kobayashi Hiromichi
― 255 ―京都精華大学紀要 第五十三号
series Harbin: Requiem for the 20th Century
(1995); details used in the multi-media slide work
photographed by filmmaker, Hara Kazuo (b.
1945) form pillars at the base of the composition.
Here, Chinese folk art is juxtaposed with
fragments of earlier works on the theme of
Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria and the
colonization of Korea and refer to a time that for
Tomiyama marked the beginning of the era that
led to the “sorrows of war.”
In the next work in the series, Sending off a
Soldier , elements of the collage seem to give
shape to a fi gure that stands fi rmly at the center
of the composition. The faceless figure in a
decorated military uniform comes from earlier
works such as Spirit of Yamato (1955) and a
collage work from the Hiruko series in which “an
Asian diplomat without a head, who is dressed in
a densely embroidered Western suit, symbolizes
the collusion of the unprincipled elite with
Western powers” (Hagiwara 2010, 144).
In this collage, along with fragments from earlier
works, we see a family of foxes surrounded by
banners inscribed with the war-time slogan hakkō
ichiu , (all the world under one roof) at the
wedding of a soldier before he is sent off to war.
Above this image of what the artist calls an era
of “fox possession,” hovers the towering, but
faceless fi gure of an imperial ruler.6
The next two collages in the series
touch on the theme of “military comfort women.”
Tomiyama juxtaposes more symbols and artifacts
Image #2 “The Road to EmpireKorea, Manchuria” (2015)
Mixed-media collage on paper(70cm × 50cm) Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Kobayashi Hiromichi
Image #3 “Sending off a Soldier”(2015) Mixed-media collage on paper(70cm ×50cm).
Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Kobayashi Hiromichi
― 256 ― Prayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s Socially Engaged Art
of shamanism, an image from her slide works,
news clippings and fragments of photographs
documenting an installation she exhibited at the
Women’s International Tribunal on Japanese
Military Sexual Slavery held in Tokyo in 2000.
Tomiyama worked quickly on this series in the
winter of 2014; as she thought about sending the
works to Berlin, she continued to add and
juxtapose more references to the sorrows of war
in the twentieth century and included a piece
titled, “HarbinUnit 731,” a reference to the
biological warfare unit operated by the Japanese
military outside Harbin where she had lived with
her family as a school girl. In this work she also
incorporates documentary photographs that
make reference to the Nazi concentration camps
in Auschwitz, and fragments of images of barbed
wire fences and fingerprints that evoke
associations with present-day issues of migration
and border crossings.
Five of the collages in the series touch on
the title theme of sorrows in the postwar era. In
“Corporate Warriors ‘Let’s Go to Japan!”
enlarged fi ngerprints are juxtaposed with images
of paintings and prints from Tomiyama’s series,
The Thai Girl Who Never Came Home (1991);
while touching on the theme of contemporary
women migrant workers from Southeast Asia,
the work also draws attention to the issue of both
past and present controls on cross-border
migration. Around the time when the original
series of paintings and collages was created,
Image #4 “Military Comfort Women”(2015) Mixed-media collage on paper(70cm × 50cm)
Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Kobayashi Hiromichi
Image #5 “Harbin, Unit 731”(2015) Mixed-media collage on paper(70cm × 50cm)
Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Kobayashi Hiromichi
― 257 ―京都精華大学紀要 第五十三号
Korean residents of Japan were leading a protest
movement against fingerprinting, a strict
requirement under the Alien Registration Law.
The fi nal image in the collage series is titled,
“Song of Seabirds Drowned in Oil Tip…tap…tip
…tap ‘Let us have light’.” Here, Tomiyama
takes fragments of images from earlier works
including In Toxic Seas (2008), a large painting
from the Hiruko and the Puppeteers series
(2009)first shown at the Echigo-Tsumari Art
Triennale. On this undersea stage, towers
reminiscent of the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in New York, destroyed in the
terrorist attacks of 2001, burn as a chorus of
skeletal sea birds that drowned in oil tap on
abandoned computer keyboards. An ominous eye
(from Night of the Festival of Galungan, 1985)
looks out over the scene. Relics of modern
civilization like a computer “mother board” also
appear in his mixed-media work.
The dense arrays of images in these works
are challenging to viewers and leave them with
many questions; to untangle their multiple
meanings is on ongoing task that asks viewers to
reconsider questions of history and memory and
to ask new questions about how these things are
entangled with events that unfold before us in the
present.
In Act One of the Banned Images exhibit,
Tomiyama showed reproductions of new
paintings from Revelation from the Sea (2014),
the series of paintings and collages (and
Image #6 “Corporate Warriors‘Let’s Go to Japan!” (2015)
Mixed-media collage on paper(70cm × 50cm) Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Kobayashi Hiromichi
Image #7 “Song of Seabirds Drowned in Oil Tip…tap…tip…tap ‘Let us have light’”(2015) Mixed-media collage on paper(70cm ×50cm).
Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Kobayashi Hiromichi
― 258 ― Prayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s Socially Engaged Art
accompanying DVD work produced
in collaboration with Takahashi
Yuji) that she created in response
to the triple disaster (earthquake,
tsunami, nuclear disaster) that
struck northeastern Japan on
March 11, 2011. Again, she chose to
make the sea the stage for her
“revelation” and reflections on
these disasters. Tomiyama began
working on large paintings in mid-
April, 2011. In the fi rst of what was
to become a series of fi ve paintings,
Revelation from the Sea: Tsunami,
guardian deities appear, riding the
waves of turbulent, dark seas
alongside burning fi res and debris
left in the wake of the tsunami. In
other paintings in the series,
Tomiyama included images of
Fujin and Raijin, the gods of wind,
and thunder and lightening, and the
skeletal remains of the Fukushima
Power Plant. Images of these
works can be seen on the website, Imagination without Borders.7
After completing the series of large paintings, Tomiyama began to learn of mutations and high
mortality rates among butterfl ies in the Fukushima region and produced an "epilogue" of nearly twenty
collages on black marbled paper like that used in her earlier series on The Fox and the Coal Mines .
Just a few of these works were shown in Berlin under the subtitle, "To the Dead Butterfl yFukushima
1- 5.”Here, images of these fragile creatures seem to float on the dark, swirling background that
reminds us of layers of geological strata and time, and the precarity of all life.
Tomiyama also heard and saw reports on the news of tanks fi lled with radiation-contaminated
Image #8 “To the Dead Butterfl y: Fukushima 4” Mixed-media collage on paper(70cm × 50cm)
Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Kobayashi Hiromichi
Image #9 “To the Dead Butterfl y: Fukushima 5” Mixed-media collage on paper(70cm × 50cm)
Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Kobayashi Hiromichi
― 259 ―京都精華大学紀要 第五十三号
waste water from the nuclear plants which prompted her to create this collage(Image #9). The
vision of countless tanks of contaminated waste water reminded the artist of Goethe’s poem, “Der
Zauberlehring” in which a sorcerer’s apprentice attempts to use powerful magic that he doesn’t
understand and belatedly realizes the danger he has unleashed.
III. Revelation from the Sea (2014) and “Land(Sea)scapes of Emergency”
How might we view these works not only in the context of Tomiyama’s long career of producing
her own style of socially engaged art, but also in that of the emerging, interdisciplinary field of
ecocriticism which explores the relationship between art, literature and the environment? Can
Tomiyama’s recent works be compared to other works by artists and writers who are concerned with
environmental disaster or climate “emergencies” or to works of “Post-Fukushima” art and literature
which are the subject of new anthologies, exhibitions and critical cultural studies? A more thorough
inquiry into this question is beyond the scope of this essay, but I would like to end here by suggesting
one possible approach.
In an essay titled “Landscapes of Emergency” San Francisco-based writer and art critic, Rebecca
Solnit, invokes the words of pioneering environmental and anti-nuclear activist Rachel Carson, as well
as poets and philosophers in her discussion of works of contemporary art that alert us to environmental
“emergencies.” She writes:
Emergency comes from the word to emerge , which comes from the addition of e-to mergere,
which means to be within or under a liquid, immersed, submerged. An emergency is, then, an
emergence speeded up, the point at which change accelerates out of control--beyond the ability of
the system to respond. (Solnit 2003, 167)
It strikes me that Solnit’s notion of “emergency” might help shed light on images that appear in
Tomiyama’s paintings and collagesas both “landscapes (and seascapes) of emergency.” In Revelation
from the Sea , we encounter the artist’s response to a crisis that has accelerated “out of control” and a
situation that far exceeds the “ability of the system to respond.” At the same time we see that in
Tomiyama’s earlier works things that were submerged in the sea or in memory “emerge” to the
surface in the work; fi res burn unexpectedly in twin towers on the sea fl oor, and fi nally emerge to the
surface in Revelation from the Sea on dark, tumultuous waves alongside deities in the wake of a
tsunami. Within the trajectory of Tomiyama’s work, it is also no wonder that this 'revelation' from the
― 260 ― Prayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s Socially Engaged Art
sea is linked to a narrative of human exploitation of natural resources that began with coal mines,
shifted to oil and then from oil to nuclear power.
As I have tried to show here, Tomiyama Taeko’s “aesthetic politics” have continued to evolve
over many decades; in the 1970s, while centering on the trope or theme of prayer, her early black and
white works can be seen in the context of reportage art that aimed to convey a direct message of
protest. In the 1980s, while developing a body of works on the theme of memory and the suppressed
histories of Korean miners and “military comfort women” she found oil painting in more nuanced
colors and tones as well as the metaphor of the mudang or shaman to be more suitable tools of
expression. In the new millennium, as seen in Hiruko and the Puppeteers, the scale of the works has
continued to expand both in terms of time and geography; in Revelation from the Sea, we can recognize
“landscapes (and seascapes) of emergency,” post-human existence, and nuclear time. Elements and
themes that appear in all of these works are incorporated into the collage series, “Sorrows of War and
the ‘Postwar’ EraWhat a Woman Artist Saw.”
Late in 2016, Tomiyama’s most recent series, Owari no Hajimari, Hajimari no Owari (Beginning
of the End, End of the Beginning) was exhibited in conjunction with the annual “Anti-nuclear, Anti-war
Exhibit” at the Maruki Museum in Saitama, Japan; she currently is hoping to complete a DVD work
based on this series in collaboration with Takahashi Yuji. At the same time, preparations are underway
for a retrospective exhibition of Tomiyama’s work at Yonsei University in Seoul in 2020, the 40th
anniversary of the Gwangju uprising and the 45th anniversary of the founding of Hidane Kobo.
In this essay, I have also tried to suggest that this body of work deserves renewed attention in
the context of recent discourse and research on “socially engaged” art and the emerging
interdisciplinary fi eld of ecocriticism. In 2019, thanks to support from Kyoto Seika University, Tama
University Art Museum, and Voyager Japan Inc., two public events were held, a seminar at Kyoto
Academia Forum in Tokyo, and an exhibition and seminar held at Fujino Club in Kanagawa Prefecture.
At a time when ‘postcolonial’ issues continue to resurface in the East Asian region and as both man-
made and natural disasters are on the rise all around the globe, Tomiyama Taeko’s works will continue
to be a catalyst for dialogue as we reflect on the past and try to move forward in the face of an
uncertain future. With thanks to Tomiyama Taeko and Kobayashi Hiromichi for permission to use the
images and photos, and to Sakamoto Hiroko and Rebecca Copeland for their helpful and generous
comments on drafts of this paper.
― 261 ―京都精華大学紀要 第五十三号
Works Cited:
Denitto, Laura, 2019. Fukushima Fiction. Honolulu , HI: University of Hawaii Press.
Hagiwara Hiroko, 1993. “Off the Comprador’s Ladder” in Disrupted Borders: An interventions in
defi nitions of boundaries, edited by Sunil Gupta, 55-69. London, Rivers Oram Press.
,2010. “Working on and off the Margins.” In Imagination without Borders: Feminist Artist
Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility, edited by Laura Hein and Rebecca Jennison, 129-147.
Ann Arbor, MI : Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan.
Han, Nataly Jung-Hwa, Tsukasa Yajima and Jae-hyun Yoo. 2015. Verbotene Bilder : Zensur und
Kontrolle in den Demokratien Ostasiens/Banned Images : Control and Censorship in East Asian
Democracies. Berlin : ngbk (neue Gesellschaftfur bildende Kunst).
Hein, Laura and Rebecca Jennison. 2010. Imagination Without Border : Feminist Artist Tomiyama
Taeko and Social Responsibility. Center for Japan Studies, Michigan University Press, Ann Arbor,
MI. (Also see related website: https://imaginationwithoutborders.northwestern.edu/
Jesty, Justin. 2017.“Japan’s Social Turn.” In Field: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art, vol. 7. http://
fi eld-journal.com/category/issue-7
, 2018. Art and Engagement.in Early Postwar Japan. Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press.
Kitagawa Furam, 1998. “Introduction.” In From the Asians: Tomiyama Taeko Hong Sung-Dam, 4-6.
Edited by Acting Committee of “Synergy of Soul : /5・18 Foundation. Tokyo : Tama Art University.
Kobayashi Hiromichi, 2001. “Kaiga kara suraido he/From Painting to Slides.” In SLIDES, translated by
Rebecca Jennison, 1. Tokyo: Hidane Kobo.
, 2009. “Slides and Collages,” in Hiruko and the Puppeteers: A Tale of Sea Wanderers, translated
by Rebecca Jennison, 10-11. Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2003. “Landscapes of Emergency.” In As Eve Said to the Serpent : On Landscape
Gender and Art, 160-177. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press.
Takahashi Yuji. 2001.“Suraido to ongaku/Slides and Music.” In SLIDES, translation by Rebecca
Jennison, 4-5. Tokyo: Hidane Kobo.
Tikhonov, Vladimir. 2015. “Modern East Asia and the Freedom of Expression.” In Verbotene Bilder :
Zensur und Kontrolle in den Demokratien Ostasiens/Banned Images : Control and Censorship in
East Asian Democracies, 13 -15. Berlin : ngbk .
Tomiyama Taeko. 1995. Silenced by History : Tomiyama Taeko’s Work. Edited by ‘Ajia e no shiza to
hyogen’ Organizing Committee. Tokyo : Gendai Kikakushitsu.
2001. “Memory and Narrative.” In SLIDES, translated by Rebecca Jennison, Tokyo : Hidane Kobo.
― 262 ― Prayer, Memory and Revelation~Tomiyama Taeko’s Socially Engaged Art
2009. Hiruko and the Puppeteers: A Tale of Sea Wanderers. (Bilingual book and DVD, translated
by Rebecca Jennison. Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu.
2015. “From the Life of a Woman Artist” In Verbotene Bilder/Banned Images, 51-56. Berlin: ngbk.
2020. Seas of Memory: Prayer, Memory, Revelation. DVD of three works created in collaboration
with Takahashi Yuji. Tokyo : Voyager Japan, Inc.
Yamamoto Hiroki. 2019. “Decolonial Possibilities of Transnationalism in Contemporary Zainichi Korean
Art,” in Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, 12.1, 107-128. Seoul: Yonsei University.
http://situations.yonsei.ac.kr/product/data/item/1553949880/detail/0bdb 035e13. pdf Accessed Jan.
6, 2020.
, 2019. Gendai Bijutsushi: Oubei, nihon, toransunashionaru. Tokyo : Chuo Koron Shinsha.
Zohar, Ayelet. 2015. “Beyond Hiroshima : The Return of the Repressed, Wartime Memory,
Performativity and the Documentary in Contemporary Japanese Photography and Video Art,”in
Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed, Wartime Memory, Performativity and the
Documentary in Contemporary Japanese Photography and Video Art, 11-25. Tel Aviv, Israel :
Genia Schreiber Art Gallery.
Endnotes :
1 Zohar, Ayelet. Catalogue essay for the exhibition, Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed:
Wartime Memory, Performativity, and the Documentary in Contemporary Japanese Photography
and Video Art. Tel Aviv : Genia Schreiber Art Gallery.
2 See Hidane Kobo Newsletter, 2010 for selected news articles and reviews of the exhibition.
3 See Field, A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, Issue #7, Japan’s Social Turn, Vol. 1, 2017.
http://fi eld-journal.com/category/issue-7(accessed Jan. 4, 2020)
4 Seas of Memory: Prayer, Memory and Revelation, Voyager Inc, 2020. See also “Imagination without
Borders” for an introduction of Tomiyama’s works.(http://imaginationwithoutborders.
northwestern.edu/index.html).
5 Excerpts from Takahashi’s essay in “Slides” will be reprinted with the revised and updated
versions of the DVD.
6 The original oil painting seen at the center in the lower half of the composition is in the collection of
Kyoto Seika University.
7 See, Imagination without Borders website. (accessed Jan. 5, 2020)
https://imaginationwithoutborders.northwestern.edu/collections/revelation/
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