"The Minamata Mural" 1981 Seirinsha
To reflect on and rethink in the present global context the consequences of nuclear war and the violence and suffering it causes, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is currently exhibiting the drawings and archives of Iri Maruki and Toshiko Akamatsu (also known as Toshi Maruki) who created the 15 works known as the Hiroshima Panels over the 32 years from 1950 to 1982. With their committed fieldwork and continuous engagement with people affected by the War and negative aspects of modernisation, the Maruki's collective practice can be described in today’s terms as 'socially-engaged painting'.
A notable figure in the post-war Japanese film scene, documentary filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto was also deeply engagedwith the social issues of his time, such as the dangers of nuclear power, pollution, and particularly the tragedy of the Minamata mercury poisoning incident. Tsuchimoto engaged with the work of the Marukis on several occasions. He directed one of his most beautiful films, "The Minamata Mural" (1981) about the working process of the Maruki as they created a mural painting dedicated to supporting the struggle of the people living with Minamata disease and keeping the memory of this tragedy alive. In this talk, Dr Justin Jesty and Namiko Kunimoto will discuss how artists like Iri Maruki and Toshiko Akamatsu and Noriaki Tsuchimoto engaged critically with the realities of post-war Japan and what their works do for us in the present. They acknowledged public fears, vulnerabilities and anxieties about people’s bodies being contaminated by invisible threats, and tried to keep the public focussed on the issues they addressed. This talk will be an occasion for us to consider the work of those artists and connect it to contemporary issues.
*This film will be shown at ICA London on 18th September, 4pm, as a part of Open City Documentary Festival and their retrospective programme, Tsuchimoto Noriaki: Film is a work of living beings from 1st -25th September.
Dr Justin Jesty is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. He researches the relationship between art and social movements in postwar Japan. He recently published the book Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press 2018), which was awarded the 2019 ASAP Book Prize by the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present. He is currently researching contemporary socially engaged art. In 2017 he edited a two-part special issue on the topic in FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism. He has also published several articles on postwar social documentary.
Dr. Namiko Kunimoto is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art, with research interests in gender, race, urbanization, photography, visual culture, performance art, transnationalism, and nation formation. She is the Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University and Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art. Her essays include Situating “Becoming a Statue of a Japanese ‘Comfort Woman:’ Shimada Yoshiko, Bourgeois Liberalism and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism” in Verge (2022), “Tsujimura Kazuko and the Body Object” (2021) in Asia Pacific Japan Focus (2021), and “Tactics and Strategies: Chen Qiulin and the Production of Space” (2019) in Art Journal. Dr. Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), Ishibashi Foundation Fellowship (2020), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award (2017), and the Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award (2019). She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and is the former Vice-President of the Japanese Art History Forum. Her book, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, was published in February 2017 by the University of Minnesota Press and she is currently working on her next book, Transpacific Erasures: Contemporary Art, Gender, Race, and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism.
