MICHI (Unknown Place), 2013 〜 ongoing, digital photograph, tarpaulin fabric, magnets, 393.7 x 82.6 inches ( 1000 cm x 210cm )
Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, I have watched the state of Japan from New York and have wondered how it will be and have considered what I can do for it. I have no specific relationship to Fukushima, yet when I heard of this disaster far from abroad, it made me homesick and I could not help thinking bout it. What especially shocked me were the dispossession of daily life and the loss of reliable relationship between people and their land because of the accidents at the nuclear power plants, and it made me feel anger. Therefore, I started to produce a series of works based on 'the relationship between people and land' I subsequently joined "hama-dori, Naka-dori& Aizu Tri-Regional Culture Collaboration Project" in 2013.
This is documents of my latest project, which is focused on photographing the foundations of houses that were washed out and devastated by the tsunami and the nuclear disaster, and includes interviews of the victims who lived in those houses. No one can bear to accept the fact that the house that was the most important place of one's living has washed away, and the anxiety of radioactive contamination on top of it. I wondered how I could take those people's feelings-the anger in their silence-into consideration with my work.
Moreover, I am aiming to take photographs of the surfaces of the foundations of houses in order to reconstruct them as another psychological housing map. I became visual archive for the Fukushima Prefectural Museum. I assert it is important to record and hand down the memories of people who have struggled with natural disasters from generation to generation, before the leveled ground become ordinary landscape in the near future. I titled this series of works MICHI (Unknown Place) to open possibilities for knowing the rich histories of this region.
MICHI (Unknown Place) is series of work in progress based on interviews with local people and site documentation, started in 2013 of coastal areas in Fukushima where devastated by tsunami and radiation. I image each room and house reconstructed in my mind, and generate large image, composing a portrait of an invisible home or a group portrait ( tapestry) of homes. It appears an inevitable cycle in this world- destruction and death, followed by a cycle of rebirth/rebuilding. From the surface, the camera captures the details to bring about a tactile sense. I reveal the hidden images, intersected with sight, expanding the possibility of interpreting the world through a physical sensation. My work combines documentary and imagination to show the incompleteness of perception.