2024 RT Amination Banner.gif

China Daily

Focus> Offbeat HK> Content
Friday, August 23, 2019, 11:16
Art tonic
By Chitralekha Basu
Friday, August 23, 2019, 11:16 By Chitralekha Basu

Reborn Art Festival has made a significant impact on the recovery and rejuvenation of the people scarred by Japan’s 2011 tsunami by bringing art into their lives. Chitralekha Basu reports.

The former Kankeimura supermarket served as the nodal exhibition site in Ishinomaki. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

For years Tomomi Abe had lived in fear of sirens going off, broadcasting the arrival of yet another tsunami. The one that struck Japan’s northeastern coast on March 11, 2011 had left her homeless and bereaved of several loved ones. In the aftermath of the disaster — in which 29,000 people living in her native Ishinomaki lost their homes overnight — Abe had managed to salvage a few things from her 17-year-old life and was staying in a temporary shelter with corrugated metal sheets for walls. Still, she was better off than the 3,097 people killed by the tsunami and the 2,770 who were untraceable. And yet, the looming presence of a cluster of siren amplifiers hoisted on a pole near her new home was taking a toll on her nerves.

Things began to improve after she started taking photographs. By freezing images of the sirens and other new realities of her dramatically altered life, she finally exorcised the specter of nature’s fury. 

Abe’s photographs of her hometown recovering from the 2011 disaster are currently on show at Reborn Art Festival (RAF) 2019. Held in seven tsunami-affected locations in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture, the exhibition also showcases new works by international heavyweights Yayoi Kusama, Sebastian Masuda and Anish Kapoor. Abe now calls herself Ammy to mark her reincarnation as an artist. RAF has helped several others like her to cope better with the dehumanizing effects of surviving a lethal natural disaster by including them in a biennial celebration of art. Close observers have reason to believe RAF’s pilot edition, launched in 2017, was a turning point in the lives of survivors scarred by the rogue wave. 

White Deer, Kohei Nawa. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Thousand Eyes in the Bowl, Zai Kuning. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Sako, a photographer and curator who moved to Ishinomaki from Hiroshima in 2011, has observed this change up close. “When artists began coming to this area (in the lead-up to RAF 2017), the local people were reluctant to talk to them. It was almost like they were scared of outsiders. But now more people seem to be communicating with the artists,” she says. “I have seen people from Ishinomaki discuss their problems with visitors from other prefectures. This is quite new.” 

In a live performance, the poet Gozo Yoshimasu invites  visitors to step into his workspace and view the Kinkazan Island through glass panes displaying calligraphy by him

Another change, says Sako, is a new excitement and eagerness to see the works created by more than 70 artists, often installed in locations far from the urban node of Ishinomaki. On the opening weekend of RAF 2019, early in August, people stood waiting in labyrinthine queues outside a cave in Oginohama to catch a glimpse of installations by Kohei Nawa. Nestled between the hills and the sea, in a forested patch, the spot was inaccessible by motorized transport. And yet visitors kept pouring in, undeterred by the glare of a strong midday sun.    

“More people are visiting the exhibitions this time,” Sako confirms. “Even in the remote Ayukawa area (the sparsely populated tip of Oshika peninsula), families comprising children and grandparents are coming to experience the art on show.”

Room, Gozo Yoshimasu. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Mirror, Anish Kapoor. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Take the rough with the smooth

When I ask RAF’s founder-director — musician, impact investor and urban farmer Takeshi Kobayashi — if putting up exhibits in locations such as the rarely visited Ajishima Island was meant to test the audience’s keenness and commitment level, he says the decision was inspired by the festival’s core philosophy. 

“The areas covered by RAF are far-flung and do not always have the conveniences of city life,” says Kobayashi. “But then that’s life. One cannot always have things that are convenient. (Therefore) it’s important to be aware of and grateful for the presence of positive elements in our lives.” 

Fittingly, the theme for RAF 2019 is “Textures of Life”. 

“Living in the kind of world that we do makes us forget that we human beings are a part of nature,” says Kobayashi. “Also it’s important to remember that the negative and positive exist side by side in the natural world.”  

A 12.5-meter high concrete wall built along roughly 400 kilometers of Japan’s coastline to mitigate the potentially calamitous effects of future tsunamis serves as a metaphor of Kobayashi’s thesis about the coexistence of hope and cynicism. 

“The wall is highly controversial,” says Tohru Matsushita of the Tokyo-based art collective Side Core. “The government invested a lot in terms of resources and money to build this wall which was imposed on the citizens without taking their consent.” 

The White Road, Shimabuku. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Guideposts to the New World, Yayoi Kusama. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Matsushita and his team have turned a section of the wall in Momonoura — an oyster cultivators’ village that was almost totally mowed down by the 2011 tsunami — into a site for art. Some of the pieces featured offer a visual comment on the act of putting up a barrier between a fishing community and their natural habitat.  

For instance, Taichi Moriyama’s Water God is a live installation where the artist himself sits atop his mock shrine — a wooden platform exactly the same height as the sea wall, propped up by discarded buoys used for oyster farming. It’s the artist’s way of reimagining a local ritual of fishermen paying obeisance to the water god before going out to sea — especially meaningful since all such shrines in the village were washed away in the 2011 tsunami. 

The wall also displays photographs of Christophe Riva’s graffiti on shop-front shutters in Nanjing. In his paintings human faces often morph into mysterious creatures. “(In China) Riva chose to paint in areas under massive and rampant reconstruction,” says Matsushita. “The show is his visual commentary on how landscapes are changing.”

Taking photos of her hometown in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami helped Ishinomaki-native Ammy to reconcile with the altered realities. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Gaping Hole Secret, Sebastian Masuda. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

The origin of food

Promoting local food culture by encouraging sustainable farm or sea-to-table dining practices is a key aspect of RAF 2019. 

The Reborn Art Festival aims to inspire a renewed love of nature in the hearts of the tsunami-affected people of Tohoku

“The Oshika peninsula yields very rich resources from the sea,” says Kobayashi. “The seafood and variety of fish are rich in minerals and other nutrients,” adding that he sometimes goes scuba diving just to watch the sea creatures.

Nine renowned chefs from different cities in Japan have come together to prepare and talk about food sourced directly from nature in the Reborn-Art Dining restaurant — located on a narrow strip of land paved with crushed oyster shells between the hills and the sea in Oginohama, right next to Kohei Nawa’s stunning white aluminum sculpture White Deer.       

Deer meat is a local delicacy and seems to be in high demand. 

I ask Kobayashi about staging the elaborate ritual of skinning a deer by celebrity chefs Jerome Waag and Shinichiro Harakawa at a time when people who care about the environment are ditching meat.     

“The increasing deer population in Kosu Mihama poses a problem, making it necessary to cull a number of them,” says Kobayashi. “However, even as we take their lives we do so with respect. A seasoned deer hunter, Nozomu Onodera, has been demonstrating the technique to the artists and I imagine some of that respect for the natural world is reflected in their art.”

Stray Dogs, Yuko Nemoto. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Lonely Museum of Wall Art, Side Core. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Be in the moment

Indeed, many of the artists and curators featured in RAF 2019 who live in big cities seemed pleased with the opportunity to watch local people go about making a livelihood based on the region’s abundant natural resources. When we meet the poet, musician and filmmaker Gozo Yoshimasu in a hotel room which he says has the best view of the lush Kinkazan Island, he mentions observing the intricate process of hunters cutting up a whale from his window. Happy to have learnt something new at the age of 80, Yoshimasu himself is a live artist-at-work in the hotel room, practicing calligraphy on sheets of paper as well as the glass of the sprawling window panes, even as a steady stream of visitors come and go. 

He says he had no particular expectations when he agreed to participate in RAF 2019. “My philosophy is to not have any preconceived notions about things. I’d rather experience the present and be in the moment,” he says, refusing to share his memories of the 2011 disaster. “It’s not useful.”

However, the artist Shimabuku, who curated the Ayukawa chapter of RAF 2019, including the performance piece featuring Yoshimasu, feels it’s important to memorialize certain things from the past even when they may not be particularly cheerful. “Ayukawa still has traces of things that survived the tsunami,” he says. “(Through the exhibition) I wanted to bring people back here and make this place come alive again.”

Together With the Beach, Atsushi Tomatsu. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Graffiti, Christophe Riva. (EDMOND TANG / CHINA DAILY)

Many of the pieces featured in the singer Ichiko Aoba’s installation, Time Signal, for instance, are found objects. “In Ayukawa it’s possible to find things on the street that are rich with associations of local culture,” says Shimabuku. “It is easy to find whale bones lying here and there, for example.” 

His own entries in RAF 2019 include The White Road — a footpath, paved with pristine white pebbles, winding down into the sea. 

He mentions that the path once led to a hotel in the area. After the hotel closed down, the path fell into disarray and got thickly overlaid with weeds and brambles. “One day I took a walk along that path which led to a very beautiful panoramic view of the ocean. I thought, let me give this path a new life, make it ‘reborn’, as it were,” says Shimabuku. 

“Now that a wall has been built along the coastline, we don’t see much of nature anymore, so I thought of creating a space where people could feel close to nature again,” he adds. “If you walk until the end of that path you come up to a stunning view of nature. Although this land has seen nature’s fury, yet there’s plenty to nature that’s beautiful and worthy of rediscovering.” 

Can art help heal?

There is good evidence that the arts can have a therapeutic impact, not only in cases of trauma following natural and other disasters, but also as an effective way of rebuilding various functions: For example, people who have trouble walking may recover mobility through dance, or those who cannot remember words or names may be able to recall lyrics in songs, thus helping with the recovery of language. 

Tisa Ho, Executive Director, Hong Kong Arts Festival. (ROY LIU / CHINA DAILY)

However, the arts can do many other things than help heal. They can stimulate and rouse to action — think beating drums, martial marches, the St. Crispin’s Day speech (from Shakespeares’s Henry V) — and also inspire the full range of human emotions, from melancholy to horror. In other words, it is possible to explore as well as express all aspects of humanity through practice or appreciation of the arts.

For me, this is the value of the arts — they provide a safe space in which to plumb the depths and scale the heights, perhaps reach catharsis or be inspired, at least to become more actively aware of both possible heroisms and depravities. And we need this at all times, including post-trauma.

Tang Shu-wing, Artistic director, Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio. (ROY LIU / CHINA DAILY)

Art is about feeling and expression. An auto-transformation takes place between these two states, which informs the artist’s mode of expression. People suffering from trauma caused by a large-scale natural disaster or an epidemic usually accumulate negative energy in their minds and bodies. If these people can articulate and express their feelings in a structuralized way, including improvisation via single or mixed art forms, the negative energy is likely to find a way out of their minds and bodies, leaving them open to positive energy and leading them to develop a more optimistic and constructive view of life.

There is a very successful rehabilitation program in correctional services in the United States and Europe that trains inmates to perform Shakespeare. The trainers find that the characters in Shakespeare’s plays often go through a complicated decision-making process before translating their thoughts into action, which is very similar to what criminals do. By identifying with the characters during a performance, prisoners undergo a journey of profound self-reflection and purgation. They become more friendly, cooperative and open-minded. Some of them even become professional actors after completing their jail term. I am going to start such a program in a correctional institution in Hong Kong very soon.

Interviews by William Chang 

If you go

Reborn Art Festival 2019: Texture of Life

Dates: Until Sept 29 (except Wednesdays)

Locations: Oshika Peninsula, Ajishima Island, Ishinomaki City, Matsushima Bay, Miyagi prefecture, Japan

www.reborn-art-fes.jp

Contact the writer at basu@chinadailyhk.com

Share this story

CHINA DAILY
HONG KONG NEWS
OPEN
Please click in the upper right corner to open it in your browser !