― 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 identifies 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 suffering 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 first 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, affect 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 Art Prayer, Memory and Revelation ~Tomiyama Taeko’ s
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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