Exhibition in Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (原美術館), Tokyo
10/Sep -11/Dec/2011
Last Friday, a kind invitation brought us to the opening ceremony of an exhibition in Hara Museum: Art Scope 2009 - 2011. The Exhibition features 4 young artists - 2 Japanese and 2 German - who are sponsored by an artistic exchange program of Dailmer Foundation Japan.
As the reception pressed its attendants to the nightly museum yard, we ran short of time for most of the works. Fortunately, however, we checked out on the works by Koizumi Meiro (小泉明朗), a video artist. It was the second time for K and I to see Koizumi's work. The last time was in Mori Museum (森美術館) in Roppongi （六本木）about two years ago.
This time Koizumi presents 2 videos on the theme of Invisible Memories: 'Defect in Vision' (ビジョンの崩壞） and 'Portrait of a Young Samurai'(若き侍の肖像）. Upon knowing the theme of the exhibition, I was amused with the thought that the presence of his artwork on such occasion is itself already an interesting paradox: how could a 'video' artist talk about 'invisibility' in his 'visual' art?
Nevertheless, the artist solves this paradox and explores thought-provokingly the concept of vision: visibility and invisibility, seeing and unseeing, and remembering and un-remembering.
'Defect in Vision' (ビジョンの崩壞）is a 2011 production, a work of double projections on the 2 sides of one screen (or, 2 screens with their backs facing each other). The showing space allows audience to walk around the screens and alternate between the two simultaneously on-going projections. The story evolves around a couple at the dinner table in a tatami room at (the end of) the Second World War. The characters chat about the possibility that soon the attacks of kamikaze ('divine wind' in a literal translation, or suicide pilots; 神風特攻隊 in Chinese) will help to draw the war to a closure. They are also planning to visit an onsen (hot spring) once the war cannot ground them any longer.
The two films, which are shown at the same time, basically repeat the same narrative and the same conversation but with differences in every turn of the repetition. Sometimes the couple are both at the table to talk to each other, but sometimes only one of them is monologuing their share of lines on the screen. Sometimes the audiences are drawn very close to details in close-up shots, but sometimes they are objectively detached from the story, especially when the director himself occasionally intrudes upon the scene.
Each repetition functions, I think, as an attempt to recall the conversation on that particular day. Every attempt, by either or both of the couple, intends to reconstruct the conversation, but every attempt only seems to fracture the entire piece of memory further. We never know whether they have made it to the onsen in the end, or what would happen to them afterwards, but that conversation which anticipated a joyful holiday seems to have returned to the couple over and over again as the videos repeat.
The memory about the day is fragmented but remapped with some bits coming from the woman, and some, the man. It is probably how the faculty of memory works. When one tries hard to remember, there are some patches of the memory getting clearer than others. Most of the time, it is difficult for the remembering subject to recall everything all at once; instead that memory is usually loosely recalled by a specific sound, a singularized object, a sharpened image, or a particular sensation. When the videos repeat, those repeated lines leave memorable traces in the audience. Watching them conversing, the viewers are as well reminded that the time, the place, the type of occasion, and the historical background, in the video, are also an integral part to a past that they all share. That period of the Second World War is remote to the viewers in terms of time, but they are intimate in terms of emotion. Especially so with the Japanese public.
When the director steps into the scene to make new arrangements for filming, he would interrupt the mode of recollection and the flow of remembrance. His intrusion has a comical effect on the continuity of the narrative. Yet, the purposeful intrusion probably explains the artist's take on the notion of memory. To record is meant for the convenience of future recollection; to film is both to record and to construct a moment in life. Memory is never true to the remembering subject, as artificial manipulation is always involved. A thinking subject may choose what to remember and what to forget, as they are the directors of their own memory. But there remains a question of whether one can be entirely in charge of the 'fabrication' of one's memory. It is obvious that human beings are frequently seized by panic when a forgotten past confronts them unexpectedly.
The video is full of metaphors of visibility and invisibility. It took me some time to realize that both actors are literally blind. The visually impaired husband reads newspapers at the dinner table: an act of looking but not seeing it. The wife serves dinner without trouble: she is unable to see but is able to see everything to its proper order. This thoughtful characterization has a clever double-play on the notion of vision: one might see, but nothing is visible; one might not be able to see, but all are visible.
In the exhibition catalogue, Koizumi provides several passages which have inspired him for the works. One of them is as following.
'I have a wife and a child. It was clear that if I discussed what I was going to do with my family they would oppose it, so I lied to my wife to put her mind at ease, saying "This time I am going to the thermal power plant at Hirono-Machi in Fukushima Prefecture." (Friday, April 22 ed., p. 21, Kodansha, 2011)'
It was a passage by a technician who was sent to the nuclear power plant in Fukushima after its melt-down after the earthquake in March 2011. In post-quake Japan, there have been protests against nuclear power plants; and the catastrophic consequences of Fukushima Daiichi have brought back to the Japanese public the 'un-rememberd' memory of the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagazaki at the end of WW II. The entire nation is asking how it could have forgotten that unbearable past, and who has again misled the country to believe that nuclear power is a savior of the country's energy problem. When the husband in the video anticipates that the kamikaze will soon end the war, he probably never knows that it was actually 2 nuclear bombs which have concluded the war in tragedy. For the couple in the story, the bombing is in the future; but for us now, it is in our memory but, unfortunately, a forgotten piece. Or, that memory is deliberately hidden from being visible.
Several days after we went to the exhibition, one of the cabinet members of the Noda government in Japan was forced to resign, only 9 days after he stepped in the position. He was criticized for his comment after his visit to the evacuation zone near Fukushima. A dead town (ghost town), he said and was immediately blamed for being unsympathetic to the victims of the disaster. In the end the criticism grew out of control that he had to leave his job.
I do not quite understand the logic behind the criticism against him and the consequences thereof. But it is strange that he had to resign because he made a comment which is inconveniently true to the reality. If the cabinet member was to blame, does it mean that we are supposed to pretend nothing has happened in March and nothing has gone wrong since then? The on-going political infightings have sought to impose on us a distorted version of memory about that disaster, a disaster which might have been avoided if we had a better memory.
