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‘A blank stare like a gasp’, Lee Kit, ShugoArts, Tokyo

Walking into a dim room, I find myself in front of a painting by Lee Kit. Spray paint of aqua blue and white on metal. Lee is looking for as little contact with the paintings as possible. When I turn to walk to another work, I think I am looking at the body of water, the ocean at night perhaps. It’s not. The video work behind me is reflected in the very smooth glass protecting a printed work of what I think is the head of the swimmer. Unless I ask Lee what I am looking at, all the works make me question what I am seeing, except the bashed, smashed, and kicked-to-shit washing machines that are in the middle of the room. From where I stand in the exhibition, all the work slips out of focus. They make me work, walking backward and forwards to catch everything. Like the rock gardens, my static position will not give me everything at once.

Umi Jigoku, Kannawa, Oita Prefecture, Japan

I am in hell, a popular tourist destination and it looks just like a painting by Lee Kit. Hundreds of years ago, villagers in the area refused to visit the hells, or thermal viewing pools out of fear. Sitting at the foot of a volcano, this area has the highest density of geothermal activity in Japan. A Buddhist monk calmed the water and encouraged the villagers to visit these pools. Now no one is afraid and there is a clamoring to get the best photo. The pools are blue, green, grey, red, and white, due to the high temperatures ranging from 85 degrees to 100 degrees. Up close, the steam seems out of control, unlike clouds that move lazily across the sky. When seen out of context, (ie from the source), the vapor could be mistaken for smoke, and it provokes a sense of danger, it also provokes other negative feelings like pollution and destruction, wildfire, mining, and so on. From the other side of the bay, I can see the factories in the morning sun emitting large clouds of waste. Each viewing pool is beautiful in its own way, but the most popular is aqua blue, the color of a tiled swimming pool, with steam rising from several different points. I slowly walk around it, daring myself to enter the thick cloud.

‘Inextinguishable Fire’, Scai Piramide, Tokyo

Now I am alone, sitting in the cinema room of Scai Pirimade. I am watching footage of a mushroom cloud in Inextinguishable Fire (1969) a documentary film by Harun Farocki. In Hiroshima, I learned that the picture of the famous mushroom clouds was taken 3 hours after the bomb detonation. I reel from the absolute power that does not linger but remains, steadfast. The film is about the development of the napalm bomb and its design to hurt and maim civilians. ‘When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you’ll shut your eyes. You’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close them to the memory. And then you’ll close your eyes to the context’, says the film. As predicted I close my eyes when the person on the screen stubbs a cigarette out on their arm. There is little poetry to soften the calculated violence.

The Tale of the Flowering Fortunes, Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo

I walk out of the gallery and into a golden hour. ‘Everybody is right’, I think trying to distract myself from Harun Farocki’s work and its relevance to the numerous wars going on at the moment. I take a photo of a Japanese maple, ‘Japan is beautiful in Autumn’. Gold appears often on this trip, on the turning leaves, in temples, and on clothing.

Arriving on the top floor of the Tokyo National Museum of Art we are surrounded by Japanese screens. My son refuses to sit in his stroller, and carrying him is the only way I can take time to focus on what I see. So my research method here is to describe to him in detail what we are looking at as I walk around the exhibits. We are almost immediately confronted by a golden Japanese screen. This is what I tell my son:

The images depict a chapter from The Tale of the Flowering Fortunes, the oldest written tale in Japanese history. The screen is in three parts (with two sections per panel), in the first panel there is a garden and a fence, and in the third panel is the interior of a house. The garden and house meet in the second panel but the entire screen is immersed in a gold cloud. The cloud creates a cinematic effect of the viewer flying down through the cloud and the images below begin to appear, the middle panel is almost completely taken up by the cloud and it’s also where parts of the garden and the house meet. We cannot see everything. Maybe the cloud was obscuring the scene, but now I am wondering if it is revealing something to the viewer. The cloud is slowly dissipating, and I know we should wait.