Higa Toyomitsu Brings Skeletons Out of the Asia Pacific's Cultural Closet
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Okinawa · Jeju· Taiwan Peace Art Exchange Exhibition at VT Artsalon (11 September–18 October 2021) introduces ten artists from the 'Mabuni Peace Project', an Okinawa-based arts initiative launched in 2015.
Left to right: Hanashiro Tsutomu, VALUE (2021); Higa Toyomitsu, 'Hone no Ikusayu' (2004–2010); Oshiro Yuzuru, Sisyphus (2019). Exhibition view: Okinawa· Jeju· Taiwan Peace Art Exchange Exhibition, VT Artsalon, Taipei (11 September–18 October 2021). Courtesy VT Artsalon.
This is the fourth volume of the Taipei-based VT Artsalon's ongoing 'Island Hopping — Reversing Imperialism' transnational art venture. Begun in 2017, the format envisions a cultural exchange along the geopolitical fault lines of the East Asian and Pacific 'Island Chains', defined by United States military strategy during World War II and the Cold War.
Artist Higa Toyomitsu curates and features in this edition, which focuses on the relational triangle between Taiwan, Jeju, an island off the southern coast of South Korea, and Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture, consisting of over 150 islands in the East China Sea.
Works selected for the show align shared experiences that permeate across the islands where participating artists in the show come from: Jeju for Kang Jung Hyo, Lee Myoung Bok, and Ko Hyun Joo, and Okinawa for Toyomitsu, Oshiro Yuzuru, Hanashiro Tsutomu, Gibo Katsuyuki, Kinjo Toru, Kodama Misaki, and Nakashima Seijiro.
Toyomitsu, whose work since the 1960s and 70s has focused on Okinawa's culture, people, and history, presents his 'Hone no Ikusayu' (2004–2010) prints, a series of photographs showing Japanese soldiers' remains unearthed from Okinawa's red soil.
Toyomitsu's colour inkjet prints present a stark headline to a show about peace and finding a post-colonial, post-pandemic sense of East Asian identity. They were taken at the site of some of the bloodiest fighting in the Pacific during World War II, where thousands of Imperial Japanese soldiers and civilians were hastily buried by islanders as they rebuilt their homes and livelihoods.
Toyomitsu's prints tap into tensions between plans for building a new U.S. military airbase on the island and local desires to leave undisturbed the soil estimated to still contain the remains of 2,800 war victims.
Themes of suppressed histories fit with the broader aims of the Mabuni Peace Project, which seeks out inter-island exchanges and pan-island, pan-Asian aspirations of peace.
Brightly lit within the sombre and darkened exhibition space, each print reverently draws attention to these lost and forgotten lives, questioning how to address this history in the context of today, and how to incorporate its legacy into Okinawa's identity.
In obvious parallels, Korean artist Kang Jung Hyo's inkjet prints series 'Trampling History' (2020) focuses on the forgotten dead of the Jeju April 3 Incident. Victims of mass extra-judicial executions perpetrated between 1948 and 1954 to suppress an alleged 'communist uprising', hundreds lay buried under the island's airport for over 70 years.
Since 2007, due to pressure from local activists and surviving victims, three successive exhumation programmes around the airport have unearthed and reinterred 403 bodies. Hundreds are believed to remain buried.
Kang Jung Hyo presents colour images of remains from these exhumation sites: piles of bones conveying the brutality of what took place. Accompanying these are captures of long-awaited forms of closure: reburial ceremonies, families performing traditional ancestral rites, and memorials.
Presenting these images, the artist re-examines Jeju's assumed identity as a holiday destination divorced from this past until recently, with holidaymakers on commercial airliners literally trampling over this history as they touch down on and take off from the island.
Fellow Jeju artist Ko Hyun Joo presents digital photographs of precious heirlooms from victims of the April 3 Incident. Poetry accompanies each image, written by the artist to create slow, contemplative encounters with the objects.
Themes of suppressed histories fit with the broader aims of the Mabuni Peace Project, which seeks out inter-island exchanges and pan-island, pan-Asian aspirations of peace: aims that extend to Taiwan through VT Artsalon's 'Island Hopping — Reversing Imperialism' project.
Visualising this desire for connection, Kodama Misaki's six-part photographic series 'Horizontal line' (2021) references the physical and conceptual space between islands, with views from Henoko and Oura Bay in Okinawa, Jeju Island, and Japan's seacoast appear in print and in a projection on fabric. While painter Lee Myoung Bok's epitaph for Myanmar activist Ma Kyal Sin, Everything Will Be OK (2021), expresses transnational solidarity with the democratic cause.
Forward-looking, Hanashiro Tsutomu's VALUE (2021) is a sprawling network of interlinked safety pins suspended in a delicate balance, reflecting the complex relationships that shape today's world. As the artist explains, the work aspires to create 'connections of thought that transcend people, regions, and national borders.'
Referencing the mythical Greek trickster condemned eternally to push a boulder up a mountain, Oshiro Yuzuru's colourful abstraction Sisyphus (2019) punctuates a deeper question that infuses this exhibition. Is humanity condemned to repeating oppressive cycles of violence and suffering despite the cumulative wisdom of grief, regret, and hindsight?
That question is starkly accentuated by Toyomitsu's images of long-forgotten bones of people who lived and loved before nationalist wars buried them into the ground.
Within the wider context of VT Artsalon's five-year 'Island Hopping' project—a project calling for a redefinition of regionalism and identity beyond geopolitics—that question expands. Can meaningful engagement, interaction, and exchange foster a new peace? —[O]
