On 9/11, I was lying in bed with a cold watching TV, and when I saw the images on the screen of the collapsing World Trade Center towers, I thought it must be a movie. It was impossible for me to imagine that this might be really happening – it seemed to transcend reality. On October 7th, 2001, the day the U.S. military started bombing Afghanistan, we were holding an event to commemorate 25 years of my workshop, Hidane Kōbō, and to launch the new work Hiruko and the Puppeteers: A Tale of Sea Wanderers at an exhibition at the Daikan Yama gallery. And it was on this very day that the U.S. attacked Afghanistan. So there we were, gathered to launch this new project, and for five years since then, I have continued to work on this series, using images and tales related to puppets, and it has evolved in close relation to world events. For me, this has coincided with the final phase of my life. My last cycle of works has intersected with the events of 9/11 and their aftermath.
This is not the first time I have experienced a war. When I was a fourth grader in elementary school, the Manchurian Incident took place. I began living in Manchuria shortly afterward, just when the conflict began to spread wider and wider. That was in Dalien and Harbin. Year after year, the war and fighting expanded. And when I think of that era and look at the invasion of Iraq, I feel the two periods are really very similar. Back then, Japanese in Manchuria worried about the Mukden (now Shenyang) bombings, which were a kind of suicide bombing, to put it bluntly. In those days, they didn't call it terrorism but hizoku, or “attacks by bandits.” Japan felt it was fighting a sacred battle that kept on getting larger.Footnote 1
Tomiyama Taeko (b. 1921) is a Japanese visual artist and activist, now in her nineties, who cannot be easily and neatly categorized. Firstly, because she has used different mediums to create her art: paintings, prints, collage, lithographs, collaborations with musicians, slide presentations, and others. Secondly, because her visual language has been created through history (her personal as well as her nation's history), through space (her travels to Asia, Africa, Latin America), and through other cultural traditions. Thirdly, because although her fundamental message is the same, she has used her artistic voice to speak about colonial legacies as well as more contemporary international political problems: Korean comfort women, Japanese and Korean miners, political prisoners in the Republic of Korea, and Southeast Asian women trafficked to Japan as sex workers.
What is Tomiyama's message? I am not giving away any secret in this review, for the editors of this collection have put it in its title, “social responsibility”. As Laura Hein states in her introduction, Tomiyama makes us reflect on the fact that sometimes (often?) people are simultaneously victims and perpetrators. Tomiyama, a Japanese who lived her teenage years in Manchuria, a region inhabited by Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Russians, and controlled by the Japanese military government that established the Manchukuo puppet state in 1932, lost her ability to clearly define “herself”, and therefore also the possibility of finding a satisfactory, all-encompassing, and certain definition for words such as “identity”, “victim”, “knowledge”, and “reality”. However, she is no lost woman, for she knows very well when she encounters “needless suffering, hypocrisy, misuse of power, sorrow”.Footnote 2 Being a feminist, Tomiyama cannot but be anti-war, and strongly so. She however cannot teach us what to think or how to live, but has striven to help us discuss what we see, both in her work and in the political world around us. As Rebecca Copeland states, “Tomiyama speaks not just for herself and other creative women but for those who cannot speak, create, or even be at all. She speaks for the dispossessed, the wrongfully dead, the disappeared.”Footnote 3 Being also one who is not afraid of speaking up, she tells us that (Japanese) men and women are very good at believing in their lies, at trying to hide their social, political, and historical responsibilities, at justifying their actions by convincing themselves that they were possessed by an evil spirit.
One has to have time for Tomiyama's pieces. They are not easy to understand and certainly even less easy to digest. They attract the viewer with their bright or deep colours, and they show themselves little by little: a huge, quiet tree might actually disclose a little fox if one looks closely (see Cherry blossoms and the full moon on the website accompanying the book), while a painting full of animate and inanimate characters (see The Night of the Festival of Galungan, p. 61 and on the website) just keeps talking to the viewer.Footnote 4 The sense of peace that one experiences at first when looking at one of her artistic products is soon replaced by the feeling that something is not quite right, that the characters might be silent, but they are not smiling, that the foxes might be jumping softly up and down, but they might not be your friend (as Miyamoto writes, “In Tomiyama's paintings, fox-possession is the most prevalent trope for illustrating evasion of responsibility, as something akin to spirit-possession – a position she critiques as a sham”Footnote 5), and that the bride and the groom are getting married, but that their union might soon be over (see Sending off a soldier, p. 81 and on the website). As Carlo Forlivesi puts it, her art “generates a sort of disquiet that is evoked not through the violence of the images and the music but from their non-violence, which I would venture to define as strongly disturbing”.Footnote 6 The illusion, however, is soon over, and the reality slowly appears; those quiet animate and inanimate characters might start screaming again, and transform our comfortable lives into nightmares.
The most striking aspect of Tomiyama's work for this reader of her art is her courage and strength to put the female body in the (center of the) frame. Not the naked or beautiful body, but the used body, both when it is represented merely by the opened, faceless, women's legs and vaginas stacked one on top of the other that have been used and abused by the soldiers (see The Night of the Festival of Galungan, p. 61 and on the website), or when it is instead the birthing body (see Those who fly in the sky, p. 23 and on the website), because for Tomiyama that body is more important than that of a king.Footnote 7 New mediums, new languages, new ways of looking at life rather than through the patriarchal lens, these are the goals of the feminist artist, and Tomiyama has certainly achieved that. As Hagiwara states:
Tomiyama Taeko has produced on the margins, and sometimes off the margins, of the art world. Her marginalization can be attributed to the issues raised in her work, and it has led her to create alternative spaces for showing it. Tomiyama has attempted to democratize her media so as to reach wider audiences, and thus share the process of critical scrutiny of modern imperial history. 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.Footnote 8
The book that Laura Hein and Rebecca Jennison have edited on Tomiyama Taeko could not but be, and is, very similar to her art. It is eclectic and wide-ranging. It includes chapters on the symbolism present in Tomiyama's art, on the collaboration with musician Takahashi Yūji who wrote the music that accompanies Tomiyama's slide shows, on the common strands between her work and those of other Japanese and foreign men and women (painters Maruki Toshi and Maruki Iri, writer Kurihara Sadako), and even an interview with the artist herself. In the first page of the book, the reader is reminded that there is also a website (http://imaginationwithoutborders.northwestern.edu) that accompanies the chapters. The book itself contains black and white images, but the website contains the colour art pieces, together with more information and artwork by other artists who have been discussed in detail and in relation to Tomiyama in the edited collection. The detailed information in the text is also matched by the lengthy and informative footnotes. Hats off to the editors and the contributors.
Colleagues and students will certainly find topics and areas that interest them in the chapters forming this collection. Like me, they most likely will finish this book thinking that they would like to know even more about this artist, for her imagination is indeed without borders.
