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the landscape 311

Miriam Cahn, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Taishi Hirokawa, Mariko Matsushita, Tomoki Imai
Closed on Sun. Mon. Holidays

Wako Works of Art hold the annual exhibition focusing on social issues this spring.
Taishi Hirokawa’s 1991 photographic work documents nuclear power plants across Japan, including the Genkai Nuclear Power Plant, one of many destined for decommissioning after forty years. Capturing them along with their date of photography, his work preserves these structures as if they were specimens, highlighting their impermanence.
Tomoki Imai, in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, walked within a 30km radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Regardless of whether the plant itself was visible, he consistently framed its direction at the center of his compositions, making our gaze and awareness the very subject of his work.
Noritoshi Hirakawa, on the other hand, turned his focus away from the plant itself and toward its surroundings, documenting the everyday lives of people in Iwaki City and Hirono Town, as they
continued beyond the disaster.
Miriam Cahn, through her watercolor paintings of nuclear explosions, challenges our unconscious biases by portraying destruction in an ostensibly “beautiful” form. This disrupts the assumption that beauty is inherently comforting and that horror is necessarily ugly, prompting deeper reflection on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics.
Additionally, this exhibition will feature a new oil painting by Mariko Matsushita. She held a solo exhibition titled “Human Animal” last year at the Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels.

profile

Miriam Cahn

Born in Basel, Switzerland, 1949. Lives and works in Basel and Bergell (GR), Switzerland. Miriam Cahn was part of the generation that, at a young age, witnessed the footage of nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll; influenced by the further historical context of the scientists–predominantly Jewish, like Cahn–who both invented the atom bomb and opposed its use. Cahn has repeatedly painted watercolors taking the discord between the beauty and the ethics of the atom bomb as their theme. Her oil paintings, on the other hand, include a number of themes, such as humans, plants and animals, and architecture, each of which is explored individually. In her images of humans, in particular, people are at times painted in vibrant colors standing motionless against dusky toned landscapes. Cahn’s paintings, which lack the clear, explicit lines used to bring out individual beings, might be understood as hinting toward harmonization or fusion, rather than strict boundaries. They confront their viewers, however, with a cold, salvationless world, questioning the nature of humans under the difficult situations in this era of uncertainty.

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