Artistic photobooks in Japan had originated some years earlier, when photographers and architecture students who had studied at the Bauhaus returned home with modernist ideas. Publications like Sensation of Flight (詩画集 飛行官能 / Hiko Kanno) (1934) and New Compositions of Beauty of Human Anatomy (人体美の新構成 /Jintaibi no Shin Kōsei ) (1932) were part of this avant-garde movement influenced by European photography.³ The Japanese military, recognizing photography’s potential early on, had been using photo publications for propaganda since the late 19th century.

After World War II, the photobook became a key outlet for expression outside the official or institutional art world, especially given the lack of a gallery infrastructure and the overall economic instability. Photobooks were often printed in relatively affordable editions, combining documentary content with a graphic-design sensibility. Notable examples include Hiroshi Hamaya’s Japan’s Back Coast (裏日本 / Ura Nihon) (1957) and Ken Domon’s (ヒロシマ / Hiroshima) (1958), both of which highlight social issues and underrepresented communities.⁴

In this earlier period, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the foundation was laid for the golden age of Japanese photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, when the photobook became an artistic object in itself—the definitive expression of photography. Kikuji Kawada’s The Map (地図 / Chizu) (1965) epitomizes this shift. During this era, photographers challenged modern photography and documentary traditions, using abstraction and experimental visual language as forms of political and social critique. This trend culminated in the radical break marked by Provoke (1968–1970), a magazine that reshaped the trajectory of Japanese photography.

Despite photography’s growing role in postwar Japan, female photographers remained largely overlooked by art historians and critics. The 1950s saw significant changes in Japanese society, with women entering a wider range of occupations, including photography. However, their role in the context of photography was often limited to that of a studio assistant who primarily handled retouching for a male photographer. Moreover, it was a profession that many women abandoned upon marriage. While Japan’s first photographic school for women had opened in 1902,⁵ it did so 40 years later than its male counterpart, reflecting the broader gender disparities in artistic and professional recognition. Within this male-dominated industry, women struggled to gain legitimacy as independent photographers.

Toyoko Tokiwa (1928–2019) was born in Yokohama and grew up during the devastating years of war and occupation. She developed an early interest in photography, inspired by her elder brother who was also a photographer. After finishing high school, she studied home economics in Tokyo but defied family expectations to marry, choosing instead to pursue a career in photography. She joined the Shirayuri Camera Club (白百合カメラクラブ/ Shirayuri Kamera Kurabu), a social club that evolved into a learning hub where women practitioners honed their skills under the guidance of established male photographers. Tokiwa was interested in capturing the lives of working women, particularly those whose work involved their bodies. Through this focus, she critiqued the gendered division within postwar photography culture and asserted the subjectivity and agency of women photographers.⁶

Her series Working Women (働く女性 / Hataraku Josei) was published in the June 1957 issue of Women’s Review magazine (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron). Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick note that her work’s placement in women’s magazines rather than in photography publications shows that she was disregarded by photography historians of her time.⁷ Working Women was exhibited in Tokyo in 1956 at the Konishiroku Photo Gallery in the district of Ginza. Critics at the time agreed that only a woman could have taken these photographs because a man would not have been able to access the spaces they document. Tokiwa, however, disliked the implication that a woman could only produce exhibition-worthy work when she photographed such subjects.⁸ Shortly thereafter, when she was approached by publisher Mikasa Shobo to produce a photobook titled Dangerous Poisonous Flowers (危険な毒花 / Kikenna Adabana) (1957) based on the Working Women series, she became the first female photographer to publish a photobook in Japan.

While many male photographers of the time focused on postwar devastation, urbanization, and political protests, Tokiwa centered women’s everyday lives and labor. As one of few professional female photographers and someone working with explicitly gendered subject matter, she created a photobook that was not only formally democratic in its accessible format but also socially transgressive. In offering a female-centered narrative within a photographic documentary landscape overwhelmingly shaped by male perspectives, it challenged dominant visual and social hierarchies.

Tokiwa’s photographs align with social realism and emerging subjectivity movements of her time, yet they embody a radical form of empathy as a distinct way of seeing. In her work, empathy becomes a critical factor, and the photobook the platform upon which this vision unfolds most powerfully. Tokiwa’s portraits of sex workers and other working women resist voyeurism and instead foreground relational intimacy. Her lens does not objectify her subjects but rather invites the viewer into their world to bear witness. The sequential format and the physical intimacy between the viewer and the photographs—elements inherent in the photobook form—invite personal engagement, offering a more egalitarian viewing experience than is possible in an austere traditional gallery setting. In this way, Tokiwa subverted the visual conventions shaped by the “male gaze,” a concept introduced by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she argues that dominant visual culture tends to position women as passive objects of heterosexual male desire.⁹ This present essay argues that Tokiwa’s photographic disposition fleshed out, for the first time in the history of Japanese photography, a “female gaze,” one that centers empathy, subjectivity, and emotional resonance, and established a new approach to social documentary, one that I theorize as the “empathetic gaze.” The concept of the female gaze emerged as a counterpoint to Laura Mulvey’s framework. As filmmaker Jill Soloway describes it, the female gaze is a sociopolitical, justice-demanding way of art-making. It is a conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool. It changes the way the world feels about women when they move their bodies through the world, fully feeling themselves as the subject.¹⁰

Tokiwa’s Dangerous Poisonous Flowers deepens our understanding of the empathetic approach and exemplifies how the photobook served as its platform while also being a more democratic form of photographic expression. Unlike exhibitions, which are confined to specific spaces and audiences, the photobook allowed for broader circulation and accessibility, reaching viewers from diverse backgrounds. Publisher Mikasa Shobo was not primarily known for art or photography publications; indeed, after the war, the majority of its titles focused on popular literature and translations of works by English-language novelists, such as Ernest Hemingway, and catered to a general readership interested in fiction and Western ideas.¹¹ We can assume that Tokiwa’s photobook reached a wide audience based on its publication history. While exact sales numbers are not available, the book was reprinted multiple times in 1957, the year it was published, suggesting significant circulation and sustained demand.¹² The photobook reached at least its eleventh printing that same year, indicating its widespread popularity and impact.

The title “Dangerous Poisonous Flowers” is a traditional euphemism for sex workers.¹³ The cover of the book features a self-portrait of Tokiwa behind the lens, foregrounding her photographic labor and positioning her as another working woman (fig. 1). This image emphasizes her unique perspective, highlighting her identity as a female photographer. The close-up shot makes the image more relatable for women readers, who recognize themselves in the figure pictured. Inside Tokiwa’s lens, a photomontage shows a man and woman holding each other. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the man is forcing the woman to accompany him, dragging her in a way that suggests violence. Although Tokiwa disliked the image because it was staged (as she reveals in her interview with Kelly Midori McCormick¹⁴), this image reinforces the theme of the book, addressing the struggles of being a working woman in a male-dominated world.

The book was printed using photogravure, a printing process that enriches the black tones and was often used at the time for magazines like Women’s Review (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron) (1916–present) and Ladies’ Club (婦人倶楽部 / Fujin Kurabu) (1920–1988). This printing method, along with the arrangement of the images and choice of paper, mimics those publications in material and composition, perhaps catering to a female readership familiar with such formats. The predominantly dark photos heighten the atmospheric quality of the hidden world revealed in the images. The 248-page photobook unfolds like a memoir, with its extensive first-person narrative evoking the personal nature of a diary. This sense of intimacy is reinforced by its compact size (approximately 7 ½ × 5 ¼ inches), which invites physical closeness with the object, while the absence of borders around the photographs draws the reader into their world. Tokiwa’s autobiographical notes throughout the book enhance its journal-like quality, offering personal reflections on her early years, the process of photographing her subjects, and her evolving thoughts on photography and gender. This combination of text and image, a common style in photo publications at the time, creates a narrative experience that blends visual and written storytelling. The structure of the book—interweaving expansive text chapters with photographic sequences, each marking distinct phases in Tokiwa’s journey—further enhances the book’s diaristic character. The use of first-person narration and the short anecdotal captions accompanying some of the images make it feel as though Tokiwa has directly inscribed the pages, deepening the connection between her and the reader.

A substantial number of photographs in the book are focused on sex workers in the red-light district of Yokohama (fig. 2). The photobook also extends beyond this setting, capturing images of nude models engaged in photo sessions, female wrestlers, divers, and street performers, offering a broader perspective on women who earn a living by using their bodies (fig. 3).

In the accompanying text, Tokiwa reflects on the challenges and dangers she faced while working, particularly within the red-light districts. Armed with her camera and dressed in a skirt and a pair of clogs, she wandered through these shadowy and often dangerous areas. It was precisely her appearance as a young woman that enabled her to move unnoticed and to gain the trust of the women she encountered. They welcomed her into their world and offered her glimpses into their private lives, willingly posing before her lens. “They trusted me because I was wearing a skirt. If I wore trousers, I would have been looked at with alarm,” she explained.¹⁵

As we flip through Tokiwa’s photobook, we witness her evolution from detachment to empathy. Initially, she resents her subjects for what she perceives to be their betrayal of nation and dignity, a feeling evident in her early photographs, most of which were taken from a distance. In figure 4, the prostitutes appear as background figures, seemingly barely noticed by the blurry, shadowy figures in the foreground—perhaps alluding to society’s disregard for their existence. Over time, Tokiwa builds connections with her subjects, capturing them with increasing understanding and compassion. As her work progresses, she moves closer, entering their personal spaces and thereby conveying a more firsthand perspective (fig. 5).

When comparing Tokiwa’s images to those of her contemporary male photographers, such as Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012), a leading figure in postwar social documentary, a noticeable difference emerges. In Tomatsu’s Prostitute, Nagoya (1958), the artist’s famous photograph of a prostitute, his subject appears defensive, her expression suggesting that she is filled with anger at or at least disapproval of the male photographer’s incursion into her private moment. In contrast, Tokiwa captured her subjects in more relaxed, unguarded moments, often during their free time. In her photographs, her subjects meet her gaze, and we sense in this encounter a feeling of approval or trust. In figure 5, Tokiwa has entered the women’s home, where the central figure (on the left), who appears laid-back, is enjoying a drink and a cigarette. She is surrounded by other women, who also seem to be engaging in their usual routines. Tokiwa’s presence feels natural, as if she is part of their world. As McCormick notes, “[Tokiwa] shifts her position from repulsed voyeur to a photographer with a consciousness.”¹⁶ Ultimately, in shedding light on the realities of sex workers’ everyday lives—using photography as a tool for awareness and advocacy—Tokiwa’s work goes beyond documentation. As the photographer comments in her book, “When I first started, I didn’t feel love for them, maybe hatred. However, when I got into their lives—their rooms—and had tea with them, I realized that these dogs were humans after all. . . . I take these pictures to raise awareness of the negative aspects of the prostitution system.”¹⁷

Tokiwa’s ability to gain her subjects’ trust, to position herself as a participant rather than an intruder in their world, enabled her to photograph them in their intimate settings, capturing their true nature and emotions through her lens. This approach constitutes what can be understood as a “female gaze.” Unlike the traditional male perspective, which often imposes power dynamics of control and objectification, Tokiwa’s images center subjectivity and empathy and aim at awareness. Her camera creates space for the women to appear as full, complex individuals rather than symbols of marginalization or desire. This empathetic way of seeing not only challenges the viewer to look at these women differently but also reinforces the role of photography as a tool for sociopolitical change.

Tokiwa experienced the devastation of World War II, including the bombing of her home during the Yokohama Great Air Attack in 1945, which killed her father. After the US military took control of Yokohama’s harbor, she developed a deep resentment toward American soldiers and channeled this anger through photography. As she explains in Dangerous Poison Flowers, “I took my camera and went to the Yokohama port to comfort my feelings of hatred against the American soldiers while pointing my camera at them.”¹⁸.

Tokiwa’s photographs document US soldiers exploiting Japanese sex workers in the red-light districts. This subject matter parallels the work of male photographers like Shomei Tomatsu, Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015), and Daidō Moriyama (born 1938), who likewise captured the impact of the American occupation of Japan. Ross Tunney describes the US military bases in Japan as embodying the “symbolic rape” of Japan, reflecting the fears of “miscegenation” held by many Japanese people.¹⁹ In Tokiwa’s images (figs. 6, 7), this symbolic rape is powerfully evoked, with the Japanese women depicted as both victims and symbols of a coerced and weakened Japan. Tokiwa’s focus, however, is not on the soldiers but rather on the women’s faces and postures. This shift in perspective gives the women agency, transforming them from passive victims into individuals marked by resilience and strength.

In the second photo sequence in the book, we follow Tokiwa as she enters a hospital in which prostitutes are seeking medical treatment. Hiding her camera under a white coat, she pretended to be the doctor’s assistant, which enabled her to capture intimate and disturbing scenes like the moment of injection. As a female photographer, Tokiwa felt a unique connection to these women, seeing and relating to them in a way that male photographers could not. She sought to reveal their lives “under their skin,” to show their vulnerability.²⁰ The women, who in most cases seem unaware of Tokiwa’s presence, appear vulnerable and tired. One image captures a woman who, having just received a penicillin shot, lies on a hospital bed with her face down and a cigarette in hand (fig. 9). Tokiwa has noted on the side of the image, “She looked like she was exhausted from living” and reveals that it was a scene that left a strong impression on her.²¹ Depicting her subjects as patients offers an unconventional portrayal of prostitution while also alluding to the way prostitution is looked upon as a societal illness.

Tokiwa’s ultimate motivation was to shed light on the harsh realities faced by women whose labor involves their bodies. Her goal was to bring attention to their plight and, in doing so, to foster empathy and awareness. At the same time, she aimed to challenge the stigma attached to sex workers, asserting their humanity and dignity in the face of societal judgment. With remarkable honesty, she reflects on their labor and living conditions, weaving together personal anecdotes and the stories of the women she encountered, offering unconventional portraits of women who were typically idealized by male photographers.

Tokiwa’s photobook not only challenged dominant narratives about sex workers and other working women but also made space for marginalized female voices—both those of her subjects and her own as a rare female photographer in a male-dominated field. Dangerous Poisonous Flowers functioned as a feminist manifesto of its time, incorporating powerful language and imagery that not only empowered women but also exposed their gender-based oppression as workers and artists. In these extensive written passages and photo sequences, she reveals the challenges of being a female photographer and the struggles she faced in completing her project.

From the opening sentence of her book, Tokiwa makes a powerful statement about gender biases in photography: “Does being a woman, rather than a man, give you any disadvantage in taking photos?”²² These words not only challenge established stereotypes at the time but also serve as a testament to the sexist discrimination she endured at the beginning of her career. On the contrary, she believed that it was the very nature of women that made them more capable than men in documentary photography. In Dangerous Poisonous Flowers, she declares: “There is a feminine element to photography. Photographers must have a passive stance to get the subject to accept being photographed. . . . Most of my work was made because I am a woman.”²³

Tokiwa’s photographic work evokes that belief, as we see her subjects allowing her to capture them in their most vulnerable and personal circumstances. What makes her approach unique and compelling is her empathetic gaze, which is free of idealization and marked by a sense of belonging. Empathy, in this case, is a transgressive act, as it challenges the dominant documentary tradition characterized by detachment, domination, and objectification. Instead of reinforcing the viewer’s power over the subject, Tokiwa’s gaze fosters proximity and emotional connection. The empathetic gaze is also a female gaze. Both are grounded in care, presence, and a refusal to look from a position of power, allowing the subjects to reveal their own idea of themselves. The term “empathetic gaze” emerges not as a departure from the female gaze, but rather as a way to articulate its specific emotional and political mechanisms—particularly how it invites viewers to feel with, rather than look at, the photographed subjects. In this sense, the “empathetic gaze” is both a way of seeing and engaging with the subject and an artistic practice that challenges dominant representations and redefines the relationship between viewer and subject.

The book concludes with photographs Tokiwa took in a rehabilitation facility in Kanagawa, where young women from the red-light district were sent after the anti-prostitution law was enacted in Japan in 1956. She photographed them during their free time (working at their sewing machines, arranging flowers, eating), believing that these moments reveal their true natures. These images, accompanied by her words, also reveal a deepening compassion for the working women she had followed for several years.

This final sequence, without context, could easily depict a girls’ school. The women are shown during the day, either attending classes or playing sports, with their bright, clear faces exposed to the lens and radiating innocence. They appear relaxed and absorbed in their activities. Tokiwa is no longer hiding from her subjects. She is present in their daily lives, placing them in front of her lens, against the bright sunlight. She has become one of them. In figure 10, the girls are arranging flowers. The flowers take prominence in the foreground, and the girls seem to blend into them, almost appearing as flowers themselves, reinforcing the title of the book. This scene deeply moved Tokiwa, who writes, “The dirt of the past is washed away clean, and the innocent feelings of young girls, placed in a normal environment, are transformed into a flower arrangement. Even withered and lifeless flowers are still flowers.”²⁴

This essay is the outcome of my research trip to Japan in April 2024, which took place in the context of my internship with the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art. I am grateful to curator Yamada Yuri of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, who introduced me to Toyoko Tokiwa’s photobook. I also want to thank Carlos Quijon, Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow at the International Program for his guidance through this process. A copy of this rare publication is available in MoMA’s Library, thanks to the support of the International Program.

The post The Empathetic Gaze: Toyoko Tokiwa’s <em>Dangerous Poisonous Flowers</em> and the Female Photographic Subject in Postwar Japan appeared first on post.

Wong Binghao: Julie, Kang, how and when did you meet? 

Kang Seung Lee: I was introduced to Julie by Young Chung, founder of Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles, sometime in 2016. I think it was right before my second show at the space, titled Absence without leave (2017). I had moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 2013 and was not too familiar with Julie’s recent work at that time, though I knew of their¹ work with ACT UP NY; her early collaborations with Ron Athey and others; their involvement with New York’s queer womxn’s space, the Clit Club; and, of course, the famous 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do” campaign by Gran Fury. Julie is a legend in many ways.

Julie Tolentino: I remember Young Chung talking to me about Kang’s work; I can’t recall when exactly, but it was long before we actually met. I had lived and worked in New York for twenty-seven years and had just moved to the Mojave Desert. I took a chance to define a practice that had been moving through performance, conceptual, and visual art. My introduction to the gallery exposed me to many local artists. I was immediately caught by Kang’s commitment to re-orientations of representation, presence/absence.

KSL: I vividly remember that my first encounter with Julie’s work was Future Gold (2014), their collaborative exhibition with her partner Stosh Fila (aka Pigpen) at Commonwealth and Council. It consisted of remnants of their recent performance in Abu Dhabi, such as honey, gold thread, and saliva that were “smuggled” to Los Angeles and mixed with silicon and mortar in a glass box with a steel frame. The artwork was permanently installed inside a brick wall in the gallery space, visible from both inside and outside of the building, and it became part of the architecture of the gallery. It almost looked like a fish tank full of amber-colored water lit by sunlight. Through this artwork, I began to understand Julie’s artistic ethos, particularly their consideration of the body as an archive of embodied knowledge.

JT: My first performance-based interactive exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, RAISED BY WOLVES (2013), was actually the basis of Future Gold, the work that Kang mentioned. RAISED BY WOLVES was an outreach to a new creative community, in which I sought out physical and conceptual contributions from fifteen local visual and performing artists that I then transposed into drawings on laminated cards. The audience collectively pulled three to five cards from the deck that I, in turn, responded to through an improvised performance. Each artist’s work would “work on” the other, and thus influence me and the objects and people in the gallery space. The exhibition left behind a permanent wall work entitled Echo Valley, for which we had painted an excerpted text from Shame: A Collaboration by Birgit Kemper and Robert Kelly on a gallery wall. Over time, my partner, Stosh Fila and I would age (that is, darken and blur) the hand-painted text. As an additional transformation, and after we toured the durational performance installation Honey (2013) in Abu Dhabi, we repurposed empty oud perfume bottles and smuggled the performance’s excess honey to create an intervention. Removing a concrete block from the wall, we inserted a handmade thin glass container into the opening. The container was filled with the gold metallic thread, saliva, and honey from the performance. The work was renamed Future Gold.

The first work of Kang’s that I encountered was a wall mural that was part of a collaborative piece with Young Joon Kwak and Candice Lin. It emerged soon after RAISED BY WOLVES. I recall that the collection of work was situated on two walls, with a piece hanging from the ceiling, and a soundscore that accompanied it. It was near a door that is often left open and traversed—a social doorway. This work continues to hold significance for me as it embraces and holds my own wish for intergenerational, interdisciplinary, East-West art-activist-queer collisions, and transnational exchange. It was more “writing on the wall,” carrying collective love and many kindred conversations among us. It was a stunning way to meet Kang as I was already in love with Candice and Young Joon. 

WBH: Kang, what do you remember about the collaborative work/exhibition that Julie mentioned? 

KSL: The artwork is a collaborative installation in a hallway of Commonwealth and Council and was assembled by Young Chung. It consisted of my wallpaper installation Untitled (William Yang_The Morning After_1976) (2016) with Young Joon’s hanging mirror ball sculpture and Candice’s sound piece. I remember Candice’s work was played using a cassette player, and Young had to replace the battery almost every day. 

WBH: In what ways have you collaborated since your first encounter? Are there any ideas or projects that you’d like to embark on together but haven’t gotten around to?

KSL: Julie’s engagement in queer activism, kinship, and care are especially pronounced in her work Archive in Dirt (2019–ongoing). The work, also known informally as “Harvey,” is a living cactus that Julie revived, that had been propagated from its “mother” plant that originally belonged to the activist/politician Harvey Milk. It came from their friend, an archivist in the special collections department at UCLA, who acquired cuttings from one of Milk’s ex-roommates in San Francisco. When I saw the work for the first time in the exhibition Altered After curated by Conrad Ventur at PARTICIPANT INC (July–August 2019), which both Julie and I were part of, the plant was quite fragile, with just one new, pale green leaf sprouting. The plant is a container of multigenerational memories of activism and connections in constant transformation as it grows and multiplies.

In 2020, Julie allowed me to include Archive in Dirt in Becoming Atmosphere, my collaborative exhibition with Beatriz Cortez at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. I thought of it as a gesture of transference of intergenerational responsibility and care to Beatriz, me, and the staff at the gallery. With the help of Julie and Young, I became a participant in the evolution of the work through making ceramic planters and repotting the plant, taking care of cuttings, and sharing them with other members of the community, documenting the growth of each plant, making drawings and mapping connections, etc. In 2021, I extended this gesture by including Archive in Dirt in Permanent Visitor at Commonwealth and Council, as well as in New York as part of my untitled installation for the 2021 Triennial at the New Museum.

JT: After submitting Archive in Dirt and my accompanying anxious, Siri-mediated catalogue text for Altered After, which was part of Conrad Ventur’s Visual AIDS project, I was pleased to learn that Kang and I were showing together, and that our works were in proximity to each other. I sensed a mutual responsiveness to the intricacy of Kang’s gold-threaded embroidery on the floor of the gallery and the liveness of “Harvey.” As Kang mentioned, Harvey was a cutting, gifted from friend, beloved, anarchist, educator, archivist Kelly Besser from the still-here garden of Harvey Milk in San Francisco. A gift from a friend of his, then a piece shared with me. My best guess after some research is that its genus may be derived from the Schlumbergera russelliana—a species pollinated by hummingbirds. It’s understood that the birds stab the seed with their beak, then rub it off onto the bark of a tree, which is an impetus for germination and, too, that this species often gives pink or reddish flowers. The particularly opaque seed interests me as it is known to not open easily, and thus needs intervention and movement for growth. I resonate with this personally and related this to the Archive in Dirt’s origin as a gift. Community and archival care are both a form of conjuring and a way to see oneself in others.

Harvey, the succulent, had endured plane trips, various re-pottings, and imperfect conditions in an effort to find its roots as an artwork. It was extremely fragile in the post-exhibition transition—a very key moment for its multi-future as it was sprouting and rooting in different locations, under extreme changes. It was shared with Conrad, Kang, Commonwealth and Council/Young, and was eventually returned home to Pigpen and my apartment in Northern California—just seven miles from its original home, the activist Harvey Milk’s rooftop garden.  Everyone received these tender shoots—experiencing the responsibility of the split, transfer, transition, and reach. Kang posts how Harvey is doing and installed Harvey in a show at the New Museum. There is a rich three-way text thread running between Young, Kang, and myself. Conrad touches in from time to time, and we all gasp at the flowers and any tiny offshoots—signs of life. 

KSL: Skin (2021) and Untitled (Skin) (2021) are two other works in Permanent Visitor that came out of our conversations. Drawing from Julie’s consideration of the body, I was thinking about tattoos and scars as bearers of and witnesses to memories, pain, trauma—a mode of knowledge inscribed directly into the body. The two works are my attempts at capturing lifelong transformations through aging. I scanned the skin of Julie and three other friends: artists Jen Smith, Jennifer Moon, and Young Joon Kwak, who are all represented by Commonwealth and Council, trying to map a multigenerational fabric of our community’s embodied experiences. Skin is a video work in which the scanned images from the four artists are mixed together and move from one screen to another, resembling a flow of a river or human text as one collective body. In the floor installation Untitled (Skin), I embroidered these tattoos and scars on sambe cloth in antique 24-karat gold thread and juxtaposed them with fossilized leaves, seeds, and copper from the Pennsylvanian and Eocene eras. Sambe, a woven hemp textile, is traditionally used in Korea for funeral shrouds. Through the use of these materials, I was trying to honor our shared personal histories, address mourning and reverence, and reimagine collectivity through the flows of forces beyond one single life.

JT: Our bodies are laced together in Skin, tracing an opaque history that is built into the way we find ourselves drawn together—both with and onto each other. We are all UNEVEN in our togetherness—key to the way we use the archive. I lean toward the term “COUNTER ARCHIVE” to activate a liveness in oral recollections—that is, the liveness in the work shares the touch of Harvey, not a representation of Harvey Milk. This is not a critique so much as it is allowing terms around and between us that I experience as productive and queer.

I imagine that we take part in artworks and exhibitions as a kind of “forever practice.” Perhaps what I am saying, especially in the proposition in the tender-holding of Archive in Dirt as an archival expansion, is that we will always have opportunities to think with this kind of affiliation—as advocates for those among us and ourselves. This is always-in-process as our terms shift, as our surroundings and bodies change. I believe that Harvey and all the simpatico Harveys are part of a speculative forever-invitation offered to me—and thus, an Archive in Dirt translates as a verb: a care that is active, in action.  

I hope that we can find ways to continue to talk at all the various stages of our encounters with Harvey. I feel like this interview across time, distance, space, caregiving, touring, artmaking, teaching, research, etc. is a form of continued public and privately negotiated dialogue, writing, and rewriting.

WBH: What first drew you to your engagement with queer histories (for example, genderqueer clubs, community organizing, HIV/AIDS activism) in and/or beyond art?

KSL: Growing up in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s, I was very frustrated with the lack of representation of queer people in the mainstream media. My mining of queer archives definitely started from the desire to be connected and to be part of a lineage. It also meant negotiating with Western-oriented hierarchies that shaped the narratives and histories of the queer community, a complex position for queer Asians, who face oppression and homophobia within their own culture while being on the margins of the White Euro/US–centric queer culture.

As I go back and forth between Los Angeles and Seoul, I try to find ways to contribute to the queer communities in both countries from my privileged transnational position. For example, for the past four years, I have worked with QueerArch, also known as Korea Queer Archive, a personal archive of activist Chae-yoon Hahn that was established in 2002 but became public soon after. 

I make use of resources and funding opportunities from the contemporary art world to exhibit collections of books, magazines, newsletters, etc., and items such as ephemera from Pride parades from the archive, collaborate with younger generations of queer artists based in Korea creating new works influenced by our research at the archive, and also include items from their publication collection within my participation in the biennial in Gwangju, among other venues.

My projects are rooted in archival research. I try to reposition queer archives and collections, to connect distinct geographies and experiences to forge new sites of knowledge. For example, in my 2018 exhibition Garden, I juxtaposed the artworks and lives of two activist-artists, Oh Joon-soo and Derek Jarman, who were from two different continents but both died of AIDS in the 1990s. In a series of drawings on paper called Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi) (2018–20), part of which was exhibited in a recent solo exhibition Permanent Visitor, I appropriated and attempted to create a critical context and history for the Hong Kong–born artist Tseng Kwong Chi’s works. I want to keep the legacies of these artists and HIV/AIDS activism alive to challenge dominant whitewashed narratives.

JT: I grew up deeply impacted by early LGBT and race riots in San Francisco, raised by teen parents and first-generation Filipino and El Salvadoran immigrant grandparents. Language and access bore down on how we navigated progress narratives, access, the reality of living with and among HIV and AIDS, the various forms of belongings and the righteous making of lives through clubs, affinities, drugs, difficulty, disabilities, art forms. . . . In retrospect, I learned to take in isolation as something to address, support, and surround, yet also allow myself to identify and work with. I look at how archives can be challenged to examine and champion other kinds of marks and signs of life—to see into the shape of (im)possibilities. Our experiences are uneven and this is important to remain open to. Legibility can also be elusive, exclusive. Relationships are dreams that need care. Art-making helps us reimagine ways towards another—and along queer lines, past and future.

WBH: How does dance figure (or not) in your artistic practice?

KSL: I am currently working on a new project The Heart of A Hand, which pays tribute to Goh Choo San (1948–1987), an internationally renowned Singaporean-born choreographer who died of an AIDS-related illness at thirty-nine years old. During his lifetime, he performed and choreographed for prominent ballet companies throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. His legacy remains largely absent from dance history in the United States, most likely due to his diasporic identity. His accomplishments have been slightly more recognized in Singapore, perhaps fueled by nationalism, but his place in global queer cultural contexts is still vague.

The research process for this project has been quite challenging as I had to follow traces of Goh’s inherently ephemeral work and life between worlds. Last summer, I took a very rewarding trip to Singapore, where I met with a group of queer artists and cultural workers who helped me move through the huddles: Ming Wong, Jimmy Ong and, of course, Bing, who made all the connections. It felt like we were on a mission to learn about this queer predecessor and his last years, and I had a realization that the invisible memories of queer lives can only be sustained by this kind of cross-generational curiosity.

Through Janek Schergen, Goh’s friend and ballet master, and his sister Goh Shoo Kim, I learned much about Goh’s last years in New York City; his partner Robert Magee, who died of AIDS-related complications a few months before Goh; and how they were looked after by a group of friends for the last year as they became weak. I am trying to find ways to address these untold memories and to convey the ongoing grief and their bodily experiences of caregiving and resistance. The centerpiece will be my collaboration with Joshua Serafin, a performance artist born in the Philippines and based in Brussels. We are in the process of creating a video inspired by Goh Choo San’s Configurations (1982), a queerer, nonconforming, and clubby version, of course.

JT: Dance—ah, so much to say here. I left capital D dance long ago, having trained via a queer, brown, not-designed-for-dance, classed, and racialized body. Coming up, out, and through formal training in the ’80s highlighted how my formation was imbued with mixed racialization—a kind of triple-dosed consciousness and its special brand of impacting encounters with classism, racism, and homophobia. Though it lingers, forty years ago, being an “imperfect and unrecognizable” body in the dance room, in its skinny mirror and stage that prizes the spectacle, there was always something to work through (resist) and break with (refuse). Movement (and movements) create choreographies of being with and listening for other bodies, speculatively echoing back and forth across time. 

I worked professionally in David Roussève’s REALITY, originally a predominantly Black experimental dance company for twelve years. With many other artists, I contributed as performer/mover in more theatrical settings and this propelled my own practice into movement-based durational performance installation in the mid ’90s, when I experimented with folks like Grisha Coleman and Patty Chang. Years later, for my own work The Sky Remains the Same (2006–present), I archived works of other body-centered artists such as Lovett/Codagnone, Athey, and Franko B, as well as choreographers David Roussève and the late Stanley Love into/onto my body as a form of advocacy and community recognition expressed as curation<!>—while fully acknowledging the inadequacy of such a claim due to my own (disintegrating) body. This leans heavily on the necessity of movement—its weight, space, time, gathering.

Movement always leads, as in the 108-hour durational performance and visual art exhibition entitled REPEATER (2019) or the invitation to float and submerge, one-on-one, with audience members underwater in a gold-lined tent and cedar pool in Slipping into Darkness (2019). In recent collaborative and durational performances ECHO POSITION (with Ivy Kwan Arce, 2022), HOLD TIGHT GENTLY (with Stosh Fila, 2022), and LET’S TALK (with Jih-Fei Cheng and other artist/activist/writers, 2022), I consider the potency of collective movement embedded in light, reflection, and glass to call upon the voices of past and future to help us express stealth learning and the intricacies of public and private mourning, kink, care practices that are moving, and complex forms of love. There is so much more to say about the role of dancing and its material contagion—alone, on stage, slow drags, stuck in things, or just being the last messy one still swaying at the bar. Perhaps it’s the feeling of a kind of melancholic punk lingering, an in-person pulsing that remains. All that submerged melancholy drenched in fierce dancer epaulement. A nod to improvisation, ball culture, and the blues. All that swish. . . There is a kind of loosening I aim to engage in as a form of touch. A rigorous shaking (it up).

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Like an unskilled piece of ikebana, lurid and writhing plastic flowers stick out of the horizontally laid triangular prism in Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground (1972–73) by Kudo Tetsumi (1935–1990). The rough texture of the black soil plastered onto the base—whose surface is occasionally broken up by bristles of artificial grass and drools of resin—and the lumps of hair tangled in the flowers evoke intense hapticity. Yet the work’s eventual preference for the eye is reinforced when, through three plexiglass windows located on the frontal panel of the base, one voyeuristically peeks into an interior in which a subterranean city built upon a circuit board flourishes in a climate-controlled underworld, a biomechanical society seemingly detached from the post-apocalyptic life above ground where gnarled vegetation manages to survive only sparingly. Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground is a speculative image of a hypogeal future, in which irreversible radioactive pollution has made epigeal life on Earth nearly impossible. Inside the darkly lit enclosure, a cord irradiating red, yellow, and orange coils around a penis towering over a verdant field of polyester flora; freeways of electrical wires crisscrossing a densely packed urban topography consisting of transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, and relays converge at a crimson brain nested in a bed of cerulean moss. On one end of this landscape of grotesquerie, flies feast on a mustard yellow turd, while on the other, a heart-shaped figure fluoresces in pink and green. A toy snail, bird, frog, eyeball, and cockroaches fashioned out of plastic also dot this vista overseen by a gray scrotum hanging conspicuously just below a black light fixed to the ceiling, the sole source of ultraviolet light giving this gaudy and kitsch diorama its iridescent glow.

The exuberant anarchy of Kudo’s work in the late 1950s and early 1960s ebbs in this meticulously organized piece, though his phallic motif most spectacularly displayed in Philosophy of Impotence, or Distribution of Map of Impotence and the Appearance of Protective Domes at the Points of Saturation (1961–62)—an early installation in which Kudo first advanced impotent male (a)sexuality as a concept of disempowerment and disavowal of biological reproduction—remains very much at the core. His transition to a more measured and inward style in the 1970s is not a sudden rejection of his earlier predilection for exteriority but concludes the formal investigation into the psychosomatic effects of technology and commodity he had been conducting since the 1960s.¹ Two sculptures from 1964, Love and Your Portrait, are good cases in point. Anthropomorphic contours of the ego are reduced to sensory organs such as lips, ears, eyes, nose, hands, and brain, which the consciousness industry has deemed essential to consumption. Your Portrait—Chrysalis in the Cocoon (1967) and Homage to the Young Generation—The Cocoon Opens (1968) then gather and shelter these parts, overstimulated in a commodity-saturated environment, in incubatory cages and cocoons that manage their cognitive intake through feeding tubes. These works describe the mutual dependence of market expansion, relentless consumption, and psychic retreat. But instead of conspiring to break out of confinements, Kudo repurposed these containers as self-sustaining ecological architectures designed to break off from the inward-looking autochthonous (ethnocentric or nativist) society he discovered in Paris upon his arrival in the early 1960s.

Kudo’s formal inclinations toward the interior and dismembered body parts do not intuitively resonate with the use of organic substances and specific sites outside the museum in the ecologically oriented praxes of his contemporaries, such as Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), Robert Smithson (1938–1973), Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), and Suga Kishio (born 1944). Kudo’s flirtatious references to nature and his uncouth aesthetics of “junk art” labor rather awkwardly under the ethical banner of ecology. Reminiscent of the miniatures Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) stuffed in a suitcase, the diminutive “souvenirs” populating the hold of Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground are no more natural than cars or cryptocurrency; polyester flowers mass-produced primarily for ornamental pleasure are a species of plant wholly separate from their biological model. If land art seeks to rekindle the links between art, humans, and nature—though sometimes in a hegemonic manner—then Kudo’s overt use of ersatz nature modestly curtails such hope by betting on the fact that art is ultimately an exercise in inorganic artificiality, a discourse of departure, not return. His works constitute a parade of obvious and inferior fakes: the countless phalli in his oeuvre are generic types; the semen in Instant Sperm (1962) was a concoction of yogurt and vodka; his employment of the term “cybernetics” in the early 1960s to describe the mechanization of organic life is an enticing though superficial gesture; the technological machineries in his works are never quite functional; the Your Portrait series proliferates alternative personas that he in turn occasionally impersonates. He risks his being as an impoverished facsimile that circumvents the real, and in doing so subtly ridicules the facetious nativism underwriting the alliance of art and nature. The destiny of art is the fake. Few artists have dared to envision ecology through such a trajectory.

The fake as an inorganic thing not only evades the question of ancestral or autochthonous origin, it also complicates the ethical synthesis of humans and nonhumans. His promiscuous amalgamations of insentient objets, anthropomorphic signs, and machinic parts satirize the reconciliation of “the two contractual obligations, social and natural,” which French philosopher Michel Serres believes will bind “men [sic] to the world and the world to men [sic]” and keep total environmental calamity at bay.² In further mockery of this posthumanist effort to diligently suture and dress the wound, which “the anthropological machine” has inflicted upon the ontological tissue linking humankind to nature, Kudo draws up, as sculptures and reliefs, an unnatural contract that invokes the monstrous mixtures of the alien flesh against the juridically legible, rational human body.³ In contradistinction to conservative humanists who have elected to maintain this divide as a monument to modern reason against the posthumanist attenuation of anthropocentrism, Kudo further deepens the cut to completely exsanguinate the exclusionary image of humanity until all categories of assimilation—such as nationality, ethnicity, religion—lie lifeless before the bodies and copies once deemed illegitimate by those notions.⁴

The portrait of a Japanese transplant artist who made a name for himself abroad by willingly rehashing the cheap mystical semiotics of hara-kiri, ikebana, and nuclear exposure for the western gaze obscures the connection between ecology and the fake. A more useful though imperfect frame would be that of an immigrant—as opposed to an expatriate—who must survive in a foreign environment. If this perspectival shift is indeed appropriate in reading his movement, then the motif of interiority frequently deployed in his écologie is less an allegory of capitalist mentality or bourgeois solipsism than an internal system designed to harness the energy of displacement. Kudo the Déraciné was not fully Japanese, French, or cosmopolitan. Even though he was more or less a privileged international traveler, he considered himself a perennial outsider and never felt comfortably at home anywhere.⁵ The reference to ikebana in Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground , then, is not an example of cultural identity or nostalgia so much as an ironic transformation of the traditional Japanese genre of floral arrangement into a nihilistic performance of deracination from a natal soil, of the break that had rendered him always alien, set apart.

This separation certainly did not trigger a desire in Kudo for a stronger communal belonging. Rather, Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground is a competing and agonistic image of the displaced imagined against the western monopoly on humanity and globality. As though a prop from a speculative fiction about a failed world after environmental collapse, this severed patch of burned-out soil untethered from nation and blood is a pseudo-mechanical underground vessel tunneling the uncertain depth of allochthony to flee the terrestrial politics of autochthony. Although the connection may be somewhat tenuous without further qualification, immigrants partially inherit the forcible extraction of peasants from their land that prefaced their historical transformation into a class of proletariats.⁶ In that sense of Entfremdung (alienation) and becoming, the ecology Kudo conjured up is not a preventive measure to stave off pollution but rather a complex amalgamation of dissonant and deterritorialized parts assembled to secure autonomy after social identity, national management, and terrestrial belonging have malfunctioned on both ideological and practical levels.⁷ That is to say, there is an ecology that autochthonous subjects (e.g., European and American humanists or Christians) openly espouse as they make themselves comfortably at home (oikos) in the world, and another ecology that allochthonous déracinés (e.g., antihumanists) discretely dream about amid social limitations. However, the antagonistic dichotomy of humanism and antihumanism Kudo rhetorically evoked to stage this conflict (likely perceived as an orientalist binary of east and west by his European interlocutors) overshadows the subtler line his language actually draws between the auto-humanism of western autochthons and the allo-humanism of allochthons, or outsiders adrift who must constantly negotiate their place in the world.⁸ Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground sides with the latter’s migratory claims, in opposition to the former’s aesthetics of proprietorship.

The fact that the three plexiglass windows keep certain aspects of the interior hidden from view contradicts the expectations fulfilled by the technologically superior ecological optics saturating contemporary media. High definition, “state-of-the-art” documentaries such as BBC’s Planet Earth (2006) and Planet Earth II (2016) cynically demonstrate that public understanding of nature occurs concurrently with advancements in the ability to surveil and impose an anthropomorphic gaze onto the very things people allegedly want to protect. There is probably nothing more damaging to the cause of ecology than digital reproductions with which nature, as an economic and technological relation of images, must fiercely compete.⁹ The proliferating panoramic landscapes on UHD screens belie the fact that nature is rapidly diminishing; relentless deforestation and costly wildfires radically compromise nature’s ability to keep up with its visually enhanced and immensely lucrative doubles cinematically generated as part of the market’s aggressive pursuit of consumer attention. Viewers hardly notice the electric signals coursing through circuit boards and wires behind each tree, stream, and animal they witness in stunning detail. Somewhere in this techno-commercial imagination, the immaculate optics of high-resolution capture become synonymous with clearing pollution and removing allochthonous elements to reinstate virginal sights. Contrary to this eco-humanist chimera, the inept entwining of mechanical parts, biological signs, and plastic objects in Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground openly owns up to the polluted mixture without which no delivery of images would be possible. To see is to dirty. Further, the high-angle satellite view of documentaries like Planet Earth presumes that all points on the globe are immediately accessible, conflating hygienic ecological vision with that of intercontinental ballistic missiles ready to launch at any enemy target.¹⁰ Far from picturing a humanist stewardship of Earth, this ultra-expanded field of borderless scenery is a proxy for imperial visuality. As opposed to this pious, optical ascension beautifully promoted in high ecology, the openings on the slanted base of Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground frame, in a downward angle, a darkening descent to low ecology.

Contrary to the eco-eye that assumes a frictionless mobility across a seemingly infinite territory, Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground articulates the discretely withdrawn and immobile aesthetics of frein vital (a constraining of life), a notion that Japanese critic Hanada Kiyoteru (1909–1974; whose writings in the 1950s Kudo could not have been unaware of) proposed against the élan vital of liberal capitalism. Élan wants to always expand, whereas frein actively relinquishes that wish.¹¹ Hanada’s theory takes on an additional register in Kudo’s work: an ascetic and external withdrawal that proceeds through severing ties with nation, humanity, and origin founds a lowly world replete with fakes whose existence and identity are not evaluated and judged upon their distance from, or proximity to, origin or home. If high ecology treats optically enhanced representations of nature as proxies of the real, or encourages the incorporation of organic matter into artistic practice to forge an alliance between human expression and nonhuman nature, low ecology accepts fakes as legitimate actants of a speculative planetary composition. These poor duplicates are not secondary representatives of the real but constitute beings in and of themselves. This is how Kudo carries over into the ecological the potential Walter Benjamin saw in mechanical reproducibility.¹² Fakes pollute the real, the aura, just as immigrants and the other “pollute” the authentic humanism of the few. The division between real and fake, good copy and bad copy, therefore, is tantamount to the one problematically presumed between native and immigrant, autochthonous and allochthonous.¹³ New-Ecology as low ecology rejects the xenophobic danger lurking in the hieratic and assimilationist auto-humanism that seeks to subsume all life on Earth. Turning away from the facetious promises of the Same, the motley crew of déracinés aboard a subterranean vessel called Pollution—Cultivation—New-Ecology Underground navigates a peripheral, hypogeal ocean in search of a heretic shore where fakes deemed subordinate are admitted as equals without question and able to pursue transformative life. This allo-humanist fantasy demands not power but impower or, as Kudo has always insisted, impotence.

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Read the English translation of Okamoto Tarō’s essay here.

In “Watashi to jinruigaku: Pari daigaku minzoku gakka no koro” (“Anthropology and I: My Time at the University of Paris Department of Ethnology,” 1971), the artist Tarō Okamoto (Japanese, 1911–1996) recounts his personal journey through the interdisciplinary, transnational environment of the University of Paris (the Sorbonne).¹ Okamoto’s text first appeared in Japanese in the academic journal Kikan jinruigaku (Anthropology Quarterly) in 1971. It is a retrospective consideration of how he developed a mature painterly style and intellectual framework in Paris in 1930–40—as opposed to a manifesto²— and provides one artist’s perspective on how the Sorbonne led to moments of profound connection as well as of isolation for its international participants. Okamoto registers attitudes and anxieties about how categories of identity (“self” and “other” for example) emerge and find expression. Such iterations can produce alternative epistemologies within a “shared social space,” as Weihong Bao argues.³ And indeed, for its international participants, the intellectual space of the Sorbonne spurred new interest in living cultural forms that troubled existing categorizations of identity.

Okamoto narrates his progress toward belonging within two interrelated Paris-based communities, often cited in studies of his work and career but little explored in English-language scholarship: those of the Abstraction-Création artists with whom he began exhibiting in 1933, and of the scholars pursuing a Durkheimian mode of “ethnology” practiced by Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), Paul Rivet (1876–1958), and others at the Sorbonne.⁴ Okamoto audited classes on Hegelian aesthetics with Victor Basch (1863–1944) from 1932, and he studied ethnology under Marcel Mauss at the Musée de l’Homme from 1937 before returning to Japan in 1940. During this time, he frequently exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants, and elsewhere, with his new artist cohort.⁵

In this essay Okamoto recalls his feelings of isolation as a Japanese artist in Paris, particularly as World War II loomed and his Japanese nationality became a point of tension with his Parisian colleagues. He articulates a frustration with the “sojourn” style of painting practiced by his fellow Japanese expatriates that inscribed them as foreign visitors, and a feeling of “emancipation” from the sojourn mode at finding an intellectual home among the Abstraction-Création artists. Okamoto describes how this association of artists, with their interest in formal relationality, characterized abstraction as an approach rooted in a “globality” (sekaisei), specifically, their shared visual language of abstraction.⁶ Painterly practice began with the “self” and contributed to “movement” or mobilization—of forms, of ideas, outward.⁷

Okamoto’s painting Kūkan (1934/1954; fig. 1) appears in Abstraction-Creation’s 1934 catalogue alongside two works now represented in MoMA’s permanent collection: Vasily Kandinsky’s White—Soft and Hard (March 1932; fig. 2)⁸ and an alternate version of Constantin Brancusi’s The Cock (Paris 1924; fig. 3).⁹ Okamoto’s abstract forms exist on the edge of representation, much like in Brancusi’s sculpture, which seems to be in a process of anthropomorphic becoming. In Okamoto’s work, the left-hand object appears to drift toward the right-hand one within a dark, vacuum-like ground, suggesting the possibility of their coming together, albeit in a meeting that is imprecise or uneven—much like Kandinsky’s colliding and precariously balanced forms. 

In Kūkan, the soft, winglike form seems to be drawn to the dowel-like form—as if by gravity—about to glance off, orbit, or entwine it. This unbalanced duo calls to mind the concept of the informe as expressed by Georges Bataille (1897–1962). For Bataille, the informe is that which denies binary oppositions and instead points to entropic repetition or abrasion. It performs, as Brent Hayes Edwards discusses, a “declassifying process,” or a bending “out of shape” of categories of understanding.¹⁰ In Bataille’s Surrealist art magazine Documents (1929–1930), the aesthetics of the informe are heavily indebted to the “primitive” bodies and cultural artifacts that were also the subject of ethnological study in the 1930s. For Bataille, their juxtaposition to images from contemporary cinema or Montmartre jazz culture undid the usual opposition of modern to primitive.¹¹ Rosalind Krauss describes Bataille’s informe as a method of “deviance” for upsetting “the separations between space and time; . . . the systems of spatial mapping; . . . the qualifications of matter; [and] . . . the structural order of systems. . . .”¹² As Okamoto notes in his essay, Georges Bataille, along with Raymond Aron (1905–1983) and Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001), gathered around the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) at the École pratique des haute études in the 1930s.¹³ In Hegelian terms, their project was one of “reconciliation,” or mediation, of the individual subject to greater and shared goals, and of the modern “now” to histories of community and shared identification.¹⁴ But this process of reconciliation, as both Okamoto’s painting and Bataille’s Documents explore, also uncovers gaps, inequalities, and those areas that resist falling easily into existing categories of understanding.

Kūkan was exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris’s Montparnasse, where Okamoto’s self-expressed aim of emotionality was well received by art critic Pierre Courthion (1902–1988).¹⁵ In his review of Okamoto’s composition, Courthion observes a use of counterpoints to create resonance between objects. He comments that the Japanese expatriate “has a foot on each continent,” but as a painter, possesses “specific Japanese qualities” that allow him to work through the problems of plasticity.¹⁶ Ultimately, he draws a connection between Okamoto’s Japanese-ness; his perceived foreignness among his Parisian cohorts; and the appeal of the “refinement, musicality, and rhythm” in his compositions through 1937 to Parisian viewers.¹⁷ In his view, Okamoto’s artwork “resonates” with contemporary Paris while embodying cultural difference. 

In a series of memoires published in 1941, shortly after his return to Japan, Okamoto recalls often performing the role of a representative of Japanese “tradition” while in Paris—as he does in Courthion’s essay:¹⁸ “Understanding and communicating tradition, I came to feel, was a way of coming to know oneself. When you’re in a foreign country, ‘tradition’ and ‘self’ [jiko] can completely merge in one’s mind. . . . But it’s very dangerous to merge those things even if the latter is often conveyed in/through the former. . . . I came to believe that tradition is my verso [ura].”¹⁹

Tradition is in a person’s “blood and bones,” he says elsewhere.²⁰ In his view “self” sits between inward “tradition” and outward iterations of its significance, or difference as called out by the network or group. We might consider how constructions of racial difference in particular had high stakes in Paris and globally from the time anti-Semitism took center stage in French military justice and national politics during the Dreyfuss Affair (1894–1906). Mauss and his colleagues expressed concern in this period with the potential slippery slope of racial science within academia, the leaking of its judgments into the atmosphere of contemporary society, and the way it textured the rhetoric of colonial campaigns.²¹

Against this backdrop, the sociology-ethnology contingent at the Sorbonne attracted visual artists, writers, and theorists from diverse national and methodological backgrounds. They formulated interdisciplinary discourses in conversation with Sorbonne-based scholars. Okamoto himself attended Rivet’s seminars at the Sorbonne and participated in curatorial research at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in the Trocadero. Through the amassing and curation of collections of specimens (biological and manmade alike) at the Musée de l’Homme, Rivet attempted to bridge the discursive gap between sociology, its new branch discipline of ethnology, and the older race-based physical anthropology.²² Rivet had trained in “in the field” in South America, in the vein of orthodox physical anthropology forged in such colonial contexts that used biological data—such as cranial measurements—to argue that civilization and cognitive capacity varied according to an observable world hierarchy of “races.” Rivet, however, rejected physical anthropology’s isolation of biological data and instead modeled a more comprehensive approach to the study of so-called primitive world cultures, one that included language, cultural narrative (particularly religion and spirituality), and material culture. 

The “primitive” was still a fraught category used by Mauss, Rivet, and other members of their extended circle. But Okamoto observed a developing interest in humanity’s universal, shared lifeforce (seimeiryoku), an understanding that emerged out of conversations regarding the primitive.²³ He recalled in an interview in 1980 that universal lifeforce, or “existence” (sonzai), elucidates commonalities between world cultures.²⁴ But Okamoto also saw this lifeforce as something intimately tied to national, ethnic, and personal identity—the basis for articulations of Japanese-ness, for example, the “original source” (as he calls it in “Watashi to jinruigaku”) of his own “entire self.” Mauss, whom Okamoto pointed out is the nephew of sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), viewed ethnology as a new synthesis of ethnographic and linguistic methodologies.²⁵ He approached the science of man from a “social perspective,” informed by Durkheimian sociology’s interest in the “organs” and systems of cultural narrative and social behavior, particularly religion.²⁶ The “self” in this context is understood within and against cultural systems, institutions, and provisional categories of understanding such as the “primitive.”

As a foreign expatriate and student, Okamoto found himself occasionally slipping between the role of investigator/intellectual/creative producer and subject of inquiry or regard at the Sorbonne—as he does in Courthion’s description above as well.²⁷ We might, for instance, consider his description in “Watashi to jinruigaku” of a blood-typing experiment in the classroom Rivet shared with his research partner and wife, Mercedes Andrade (1875–1973). Students were supposed to prick their fingers and draw blood, but Okamoto “mischievously” (chamekki) recounts evading the experiment and simply reporting that his blood type is “C.”²⁸ Andrade finds Okamoto’s apparent squeamishness amusing, but Professor Rivet runs home to consult literature on the matter upon hearing of this novel type, Okamoto recounts.²⁹ It is unclear in this account whether the “C” blood type caused confusion because it defied assumptions about Okamoto’s “type” as someone of a particular cultural or ethnic origin, or for another reason.³⁰ But we nonetheless can observe here a rejection of the system of scientific inquiry on the part of Okamoto when it rendered him the subject of investigation. He also undertook a playful, perhaps critical, engagement with that system’s rules and history of formation at a moment when ethnology itself was still in the process of becoming.³¹

Okamoto observes in “Watashi to jinruigaku” that “art is a deductive rolling-out of an image from an isolated space.” Abstraction-Création provided Okamoto with a space in which his artwork and ideas were able to encounter those of others. Ethnology, then, provided the artist with the critical tools to question subjective judgment. He writes that Abstraction-Création and ethnology functioned as “two mental bearings” that informed his approach to art as well as to his sense of self. We can also observe how Okamoto actively shaped these intertwined spaces of art and intellectual discourse. His artwork elucidates commonalities as well as divergences among the artworks he and his peers exhibited, pointing to a diversity of interpretations and priorities. His voice in the seminar or museum space likewise shaped the group’s mutual understanding of major ideas, particularly when his actions point to the limits and tensions inherent to existing ways of studying culture.

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Okamoto’s essay “Anthropology and I” sheds light on a widely recognized but little understood chapter in Okamoto’s life. He discusses his participation in the Abstraction-Création movement in Paris, and recalls his experiences at the Sorbonne and Musée de l’Homme, explaining his decision to study ethnology as pre-war hostilities intensified. The text describes his development of a theory of the “entire self”—an objective point of origin for identity that becomes clear in a collaborative environment—and how it bears on his theory of the object. In this shared space of creative-intellectual exploration, we learn, he sought to join other young “Others” in Paris in making a kind of alternative epistemology.

See the essay accompanying this translation here.

Watashi to jinruigaku: pari daigaku minzoku gakka no koro (Anthropology and I: My Time at the University of Paris Department of Ethnology)

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These two photographs, together titled Breathing (figs. 1 and 2), are documentation of a two-part performance conducted by Song Dong in 1996 in Tiananmen Square and on Houhai Lake in Beijing. Song is a leading Chinese artist who works in a wide range of mediums. He is known for incorporating personal and quotidian aspects of contemporary life in his artworks. The first part of Breathing, among his earliest performances and most well-known,¹ took place one cold January night in below-zero temperatures, when he lay face down in Tiananmen Square for forty minutes. As he breathed in and out, his moist breath formed a thin layer of ice on the pavement. The next morning, Song continued his performance at Houhai Lake, a manmade lake not far from Tiananmen Square. This time, he lay face down on the frozen lake and breathed for forty minutes, unsuccessfully trying to melt the small area of thick ice directly under his mouth. His wife, the artist Yin Xiuzhen, who was his only intentional audience member, took photos for the performance being shown here. Even though Song managed to create a layer of ice on the pavement of Tiananmen Square, it melted and evaporated the next day, making no lasting impact on the environment. It is easy to see that in both actions, Song’s efforts ultimately proved futile. 

Song’s seemingly vain attempts in Breathing, however, are significant in the political, cultural, and artistic contexts of 1990s China. While at this time the Chinese government had begun promoting nationwide capitalist-style economic reforms that made market logic increasingly important in Chinese society, ushering in an age of accelerated consumer culture, it had further tightened its ideological control over Chinese society—in the wake of having quelled the popular national movement for democracy and freedom of expression with the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese cultural professionals, and artists in particular, were subject to a new wave of purge, their activities under close watch and sometimes proscribed. For example, as a consequence of the official denunciations of the 1989 China/Avant-Garde Exhibition,² contemporary Chinese art in the form of installation or performance was banned from public spaces by the cultural authorities. By the mid-1990s, the combined forces of political intolerance and consumerism had greatly reduced the social and political impact of the intellectual class. In the wake of failed attempts by cultural practitioners during the 1980s to incite political and social change, the artistic community’s outward aspirations in terms of their work was visibly shifted in the 1990s.

It was in this context that several new artistic trends appeared in the early and mid-1990s as younger artists such as Song arrived on the scene. This next generation avoided the socially and politically charged pursuits of their predecessors, instead turning their attention to the subjects of personal life, physical environment, and mundane existence. One outcome of this transition was what art historian Gao Minglu has called “apartment art,” or the installation, conceptual, and/or performance works undertaken by artists in their own apartments or in other private spaces to avoid official interference.³ No longer seeking publicity for their practices, these artists worked in “critical silence,”⁴ which Gao argues can be seen as a resonant variation of the avant-garde spirit of the 1980s.⁵ Despite retreating to a private sphere, their taking up of artistic forms suppressed by the authorities constituted a protest, albeit a silent one, against imposed censorship.

Song, a key practitioner of “apartment art,” made the predicaments of limited freedom and lack of institutional supports for contemporary art the content of his experimental art, through which he contemplated notions of time, space, and metamorphosis. Using inexpensive household items, the physical interiors of his home, and his own body as materials, he created (sometimes collaboratively with his wife) artworks that merged art with daily experience. His work of this time was private in process, personal in content, and playful in mode—and it related closely to his experience of the everyday. For example, in A Pot of Boiling Water (fig. 3) that Song performed in 1995, he poured boiling water from a pot onto the ice-covered ground in an alley in Beijing. The hot water created swirling fog following him as he moved forward. The fog then disappeared, but a new line of ice was left behind, which disappeared later when the temperature rose. In Writing Diary With Water (fig. 4), which Song began in 1995, he used water to record his daily activities, writing with his finger or brush on the ground, on ice, on the walls, and then on a rock, only to see his chosen medium evaporate—and with it, everything he had transcribed. Central to these experiments of the mid-1990s were his interests in process over results, and in actions that require persistence and physical endurance while yielding only temporary outcomes—if any—of which Breathing is a telling example.

Breathing is justifiably discussed in relation to the significance of the spaces in which it was created. The two separate sites that Song chose bear important political and cultural connotations: Tiananmen Square, which has served as the symbolic center of China since 1949, is a place where political power is exercised and manifested with massive state-orchestrated gatherings and processions. Houhai fringes the western border of the Forbidden City and is a popular recreational destination for local residents. Both sites are important public spaces located in the center of Beijing, which might explain why Breathing is often interpreted as Song’s personal expression of the difficulty in executing bottom-up social change within China’s oppressive political system. Choosing to perform at night and in the early morning, Song intentionally avoided a public scene, which would likely have invited intervention by the authorities. Nonetheless, the act of using his own body to initiate a change in these important public spaces, despite being aware of the minimal impact or futility of his actions, is itself a meaningful artistic intervention.

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To encounter the woodcut print Cropland (1987) by Xu Bing (b. 1955) is to visit a patchwork of garden plots, with vigorous lines denoting orderly rows of plants that recede gently into the distance. Looking closer, plant groupings come into focus, with different carving techniques distinguishing stalks, flowers, and fallow areas. Looking closer still, Chinese characters or hanzi are legible in corners of the plots. Reconsidering the composition as a whole, plantings and characters blend back into a landscape of marks.

These blendings—of plant and garden, individual plot and collective farm, word and image, representation and abstraction—help to locate Cropland in the time and place of its cultivation, specifically as a key moment in Xu’s artistic development in the Beijing region during and just after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

Cropland is a single print from a Series of Five Repetitions (1987-1988), a seminal work exploring the printing process through landscape imagery. Conceived as part of his thesis project at the Central Acadamy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the artist printed the images in stages as he developed and then obliterated each one, beginning with a fully inked uncarved block, culminating in a legible landscape, and then ending with an overcarved, nearly blank sheet. The imagined landscapes draw upon Xu’s memories of working on a communal farm in the 1970s and also from quick schematic sketches of rural landscapes made during travel.

Landscape imagery, visualization of process, and word-image integration in Cropland anticipates their centrality to Xu’s subsequent work. This is seen most clearly in Book from the Sky (1987-1991), his landmark project documenting 4,000 invented characters, and “landscripts” (1999–2013), an investigation of different types of landscape painting in relation to Chinese writing systems.

A deeper dig into the work reveals how these themes represent the cultivation of an adaptive strategy by the artist. This becomes clearer by putting the work in biographical context.

Born in 1955 to educated parents who held positions at Beijing University, the family’s life was thoroughly disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. This experience profoundly influenced the artist, especially his “reeducation” at Shouliang Gou, a farming village 50 miles north of Beijing, from 1974 to 1977.¹

By all accounts Xu adapted by embracing his “advanced educated youth post,” detailed in his brief memoir “Ignorance as a Kind of Nourishment.”² There, he realized, “where no one cared about his background,” one could work hard and “prove himself a useful person.”³ And this he did, tending fields and minding livestock while mobilizing his writing, drawing, and design skills in service of the village. Relevant to Cropland, the artist recalls, “The task I feared most, squatting down to pick weeds, meant that you had to spend the day moving around in a squat . . . . The days are tough in a rural village, but we didn’t feel it then. It’s what we had rushed there for.”⁴

As a result, by the late 1970s Xu was recruited in the first generation of students to attend one of the newly-reinstated art academies. As the rare “educated” member of a class chosen for their Maoist credentials, the artist recalls being “earnest and dutiful for a reason . . . . Some of us had landlords in our families and others were labeled bourgeois or deemed spies with overseas connections.”⁵

At the Academy, blending with fellow students also meant harmonizing disjunctive pedagogies, where residual Beaux-Arts methods (copying from Classical plaster casts, for example) was integrated with the Maoist ethos of “art for the people.” Printing in particular, the department to which he was assigned, carried strong positive associations with the populist New Woodcut Movement (1912–1949) and his instructors were well respected for their practice in that mode.⁶

At the same time, emerging art and social movements meant new ideas and new possibilities for an emerging printmaker in Beijing. The surfacing of No Name painters, working underground since the late 1950s, opened up a space for subjective experience in art, presaging the inception of the Stars Group and April Photography Group in the late 1970s, groups that overtly pushed boundaries on aesthetic free expression and personal points of view.⁷ In this context of change within and beyond the art scene, Xu closely followed these developments and made sense of them as an observer: “[W]hile others filled Tiananmen Square with poems and speeches,” he reflects, “I was sketching among the crowd. I believed it was what an artist should do.”⁸

In that setting, an exploration of the printing process through remembered images of collective farming made both aesthetic, political, and personal sense as a thesis project. At the time of the work’s completion in the late 1980s, the audience for Five Repetitions was largely local, but it became well known in that context, received as a successful integration of the Modern Woodcut tradition with subjective expression to convey a sense of the quotidian.⁹

This integration of Socialist Realism, process-oriented printing, and individual experience into the Five Repetitions goes deeper however. Further meanings surface by digging further into the artist’s blending of word and image, land and landscape, individual and collective into Cropland.

Of the ten works in the series, only Cropland features actual hanzi. The four characters read Zhao, Qian, Li, and Sun. They refer to the first names in a Song dynasty (960–1279) list of one hundred prominent families. Many Chinese viewers would recognize the list as the source for the phrase “old one hundred names,” a way to describe mass, shared culture. In addition, reference to the Song dynasty is significant as the origin point for traditional Chinese landscape painting and a unified writing system (typography in Book from the Sky is modeled on Song-era letterforms).¹⁰

The significance of planting family names into communal cropland is further revealed by an alternate translation of the work’s Chinese title (庄稼地, zi liu di): Family Plots or Private Plots. The term is specific, defining areas allotted to individuals within collective farms,¹¹ rare instances of self-determination in a nationalized system. Though considered the “tail end of capitalism,” as Mao put it, the practice more or less continued until dissolution of the commune system after Mao’s death.¹² The term also conveys intimacy with and fondness for rural life which Xu could certainly claim. 

This distinction between individuated family plots and anonymized cropland becomes clear by comparison with another work in the series, titled Field (田.1987) While the mark-making is similar, a directly aerial view suggests a psychological distance remote from the situated perspective of Cropland/Family Plot, where one can imagine standing in the narrow walkways between plantings. Similarly, a mass of tadpoles swarms a flooded area of the Field, perhaps suggesting collectivism.

In both farming and language, meaningful units are cultivated in an orderly and repetitive way to yield sustenance and nourish new growth. Bringing the Repetitions to fruition by working and re-working the images section by section evokes both the repetitive tilling of land and the process of becoming literate by copying thousands of characters stroke by stroke.

In this way the plantings also evoke the modularity of written Chinese, in which characters can be arranged on a grid to yield multiple readings, as seen in the artist’s Magic Carpet (2006). Writing about Repetitions at the time, Xu also describes the visual regularity as a response in part to contemporary life, where “dramatic advances of industrialization and concomitant standardization” could be infused with “a deeply spiritual, incredibly rational, man-made beauty. . . .”
¹³

Was the composition of Cropland determined by a formal system? Evidence of Xu’s process suggests an intentional but not formulaic approach. To develop the image, he worked the woodblock surface intuitively and spatially, carving out almost all the plots from visual foreground to background. This suggests a process more consistent with the phrase “meaning comes before the brush strokes,” familiar to some Chinese artists, than to a strictly rule-based system. Still, Cropland “reads” like a newspaper page, complete with individual stories and varied typefaces.

These subtexts emerge by close observation and close reading. By articulating some of the stories embedded in Cropland, a rich landscape is revealed, one that incorporates Xu Bing’s life experience and presages major themes of his subsequent work. As the artist wrote at the time,

it breaks with the common understanding that works of art always appear in rigid form, revealing an aspect of art that is hidden . . . . it not only emphasizes process, but also gives complete expression to the artist’s line of thinking.¹⁴

Xu Bing’s Cropland is on view in gallery 207 of MoMA’s reinstalled galleries.

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This is not one of my pictures which I like best, because the picture is seized with forms to [sic] much. I want to take souls of whatever objects which I catch with my camera. This is my attitude always.

—Hamaya Hiroshi¹

Hamaya Hiroshi’s favorite subject was the human being. In his renowned photo books Snow Land² and Japan’s Back Coast,³ he captured the hardscrabble lives of villagers in their stark natural environment in remote Japan. Unlike his more famous counterpart Tomatsu Shomei, who created iconic images of the “Americanization” of Japanese cities, Hamaya focused on the timeless countenances and rituals of Japanese agrarian life in the decade after World War II, aware that they were doomed to obsolescence amid the onslaught of Western convenience.

In the preface to Snow Land, anthropologist Shibusawa Keizo, who was Hamaya’s mentor, observes, “Hamaya’s photographs of Japanese folkways are simultaneously shashin写真 [portraits of truth] and shashin写心 [portraits of spirits],” playing on the homophones “truth” and “spirit.”⁴ Decades later, in 1991, the curator of a Hamaya retrospective at the Hiratsuka City Art Museum remarked on the photographer’s “robust, resilient gaze and above all, his boundless commitment to human beings.”⁵

Why then was Hamaya compelled to photograph a vehicle on a bleak, muddy street in late 1953? To unravel the enigma, we need to trace both Hamaya’s life as a photographer and Japan’s postwar relations with the US.

Hamaya began taking pictures as a teenager in 1930, and he became a freelance photographer in 1937 after the Mainichi, a leading Japanese daily, published his work. By 1941, he was enmeshed in Japan’s war machine, recruited by the Eastern Way Company to produce heroic images of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy for Front, an avant-garde, multilingual propagandist periodical. Unhappy with Front’s manipulation of his photos, Hamaya resigned a year later. In 1944, as the US intensified its firebombing of Japan’s cities, Hamaya moved from Tokyo to Niigata, a port city on the Sea of Japan, whose punishing winters inspired Snow Land. Although drafted into the Imperial Japanese Navy later that year, he was discharged after a week for poor health. He marked Japan’s defeat on August 15, 1945, with a nebulous image of the sun in the sky above Niigata.

During the ensuing Occupation, the US established a massive bulwark of 250 military bases across Japan. When the Korean War started in 1950, the US armed forces used those bases to launch bombing raids and to attend to its wounded and dead soldiers. Although the Occupation formally ended in April 1952, the US kept its military bases, stipulating its terms in the US–Japan Security Treaty, which it imposed on Japan as the price for restoring Japanese sovereignty.

The security treaty, and the US military bases it authorized, generated tremendous public resentment in Japan throughout the 1950s, coalescing into massive demonstrations against the treaty’s impending renewal in June 1960. As daily protests engulfed Tokyo, Hamaya, seemingly everywhere at once, captured the defiant, hopeful faces of millions of demonstrators—from students and taxi drivers to shopkeepers, salarymen, and housewives, all terrified that the presence of the US bases would drag their country back into war. After the treaty’s renewal was rammed through the Japanese parliament, Hamaya’s camera witnessed the marchers’ optimism curdle into bitter rage at the hollow promise of democracy.

Magnum Photos had presciently contracted Hamaya to become its first Asian photographer in January 1960, and his arresting images of the uprising appeared in Paris Match and other European and Japanese magazines—but not in American publications, as Hamaya adamantly refused to allow them to be published there. In his afterword to Days of Rage and Grief, a photo book of protest images, Hamaya, never an ideologue, wrote, “War is the greatest violence of all.”⁶

Hamaya photographed the jeep in December 1953, after the US had signed the Korean armistice agreement and its bases were less active. Nevertheless, although the vehicle lacks the telltale white star of a US military transport, it is most likely an American military jeep since Otaru Bay was the chosen landing port of the US when it first occupied Hokkaido after Japan’s surrender. There is no question that the lopsided security treaty, evidence of which was strewn across Japan in the form of entitled GI’s and their menacing hardware, must have rankled Hamaya. His chronology states that he photographed Tokyo from the air in Japan’s first civil helicopter in 1953. Whether or not that helicopter flew him all the way to Otaru, he had found himself in a position to capture a bird’s-eye view of the jeep when he snapped the shutter, perhaps to belittle the symbol of occupation that still intimidated so many Japanese people.

Hamaya titled the image Composition, which suggests an alternative trajectory of his photography: Although he was largely self-taught, his images from the early 1930s are obviously influenced by Surrealism. Even Hamaya’s on-the-fly photos of the 1960 demonstrations betray an inherent formalism; in fact, he seems incapable of badly composing an image. When the J. Paul Getty Museum hosted the photographer’s retrospective in 2013, it paired him with his contemporary Yamamoto Kansuke, crediting Yamamoto with pioneering “a signature style that merged European-inspired Surrealist iconography with Japanese motifs and concerns.”⁷

Although Hamaya and Yamamoto’s styles diverged, their black-and-white images on photographic paper are manifestly steeped in the aesthetics of sumi-e (charcoal ink painting), honed over centuries of practice by monks and painters for whom distinctions between figuration and abstraction were irrelevant. In Composition, perhaps Hamaya’s eye bypassed the trampled snow, perceiving instead the myriad shades between bright light and darkest shadow that his forebears had harnessed for the alchemy of charcoal ink, water, and brush on handcrafted paper. 

Heartsick from the failed protests, Hamaya stopped photographing human beings after 1960, instead turning his lens to nature. In 1987, he became the first Japanese photographer to win the Hasselblad Award.

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What should the modern house look like?

This simple question has been central, at least at some point, to the practice of almost every modern architect. There is hardly any other architectural commission that is more personal, loaded, and vulnerable than one’s own house. Architect and client are immediately entangled in one of the most intimate kinds of relationship―and not all such relationships end well. Architects are often accused of imposing their own visions of modern domesticity on their clients.¹ In fact, the history of almost every prominent modern house of the twentieth century involves some kind of face-off between architect and patron, as well as failed aspirations, unfulfilled wishes, conflicting agendas, misunderstandings, grudges, threats, and even lawsuits.² The full story is found not only in hand-drawn sketches, architectural models, and publicity photographs but also in the messier, less classifiable realm of the architectural process―in letters of complaint, in personal diaries, and in legal documents. It is in the in-between that the type of life enabled by a house is truly molded.

Take, for example, the Moriyama House in Tokyo (2002–2005), designed by Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa (born 1966). At first glance, its layout hardly resembles that of a typical house. Instead of a single architectural enclosure, the Moriyama House comprises ten prismatic volumes, meticulously arranged at right angles to one another and the site. As if mutually repelled by an invisible force, the volumes never touch. Made of thin sheets of steel, they are painted a clinical white. Every opening is square or rectangular, and precisely cut, as if with a scalpel. The architectural representations of the project give the same impression. For example, consider the three-dimensional model, which betrays no signs of life. There are no material choices, tectonic details, or human figures to be seen here. The whole arrangement could be easily misunderstood as sterile, scale-less, maybe even borderline inhumane. Who was this idea of domesticity dreamt up for? What purpose does it truly serve? The architect’s ambitions and fantasies or the client’s wishes and needs?

The client, Yasuo Moriyama, is a middle-age man who has never left Japan―or for that matter, his home city of Tokyo. In the early 2000s, he wrote to Nishizawa, asking the architect to design a house for him. Nishizawa is said to have responded, “You don’t need a house you need a village in a forest.”³ Although one may wonder if this was a professional recommendation or a diagnosis, Moriyama decided to go along with it. The architect’s design called for breaking an overall structure into “units,” which he simply ordered from A to I. Many of the separate parts serve a single function, such as that of living room (Unit C) or bathroom (Unit D).⁴ Five of them, however, are more complete in and of themselves; each including its own small kitchenette and bathroom, and thus functioning as an independent “mini-house.”⁵ Placing the units almost equidistant across the entire surface of the site allowed each mini-house to have its own small garden⁶―a space in which to plant vegetables, hang laundry, or do work out in the open.

At the time of the commission, Moriyama ran a liquor store. Yet all he really wanted to do was be at home, where he could immerse himself in his vast collections of cult films and musical recordings―and, above all, read.⁷ Renting out the five mini-houses on his plot would allow him to give up his store and to spend every day among his favorite things.⁸ When Moriyama’s mother, his only living family member, passed away in 2006, he was left alone in the world, with only his treasured dog to accompany him on regular visits to his family’s nearby cemetery plot.

Not long after, Moriyami rented out the five mini-houses in his “village.” Having been featured in numerous publications around the world, even before being completed, the project had achieved a certain cult status both inside and outside of Japan. Curious architects and students flocked to see it and to take pictures. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that most of Moriyama’s first tenants were younger architects from Nishizawa’s office, and an editor of a contemporary architecture magazine.⁹ Moriyama’s “village in the forest” soon resembled a designers’ colony. Following in Moriyama’s footsteps, many of his new neighbors began to work from home, blurring the line between life and work, solitude and togetherness. Moriyama’s daily life wasn’t impacted only by the architecture of the house, it now seemed also to be taken over by architects.

Soon, the neighborhood-like arrangement of ten parallelepiped mini-houses resulted in an unexpected social network: a new kind of semi-communal lifestyle. Whereas none of the individual units of the house were intended for communal use, Moriyama’s living room (Unit C) soon served as a kind of common room. There, residents often lunch together, enjoy a cold beer on a hot summer day, or screen a film from the roof. As Moriyami has put it, “This space gives you the freedom to do anything you like, and it makes you want to.”¹⁰ Similarly, the network of earth-covered alleyways between the units has become loci for everyday interactions―to chat, drink sake, or light fireworks.

The Moriyama House is an architectural device that facilitates mingling. Its composition encourages reclusive occupants to cross thresholds, to migrate, and to step outside their comfort zones, just by taking a few steps in one direction or another.¹¹ Every such outing is a short promenade across an urban microcosm.¹² In remaining within the bounds of the house for several days at a time, one still ventures outside―even if only briefly, when traveling from one unit to another. Along the meandering garden paths, one catches a glimpse of street life beyond the site of the house: a slow-moving scooter, the postman on his or her rounds, a woman dressed in a traditional kimono and rolling a plastic suitcase. The more one looks into this arrangement, the more its seemingly dismembered scheme becomes less of an architectural imposition and more of a communal life support for the solitary dwellers who have gravitated toward it.

Could it be that this “life in between” is not a mere side effect, but rather the active ingredient in an architectural prescription? In recent decades, the devastating effects of loneliness in Japan, especially among the elderly, have been identified as an urgent, public health concern.¹³ More and more people live by themselves, often without a family member or close friend nearby. Despite their proximity to one another, the mini-houses ensure a level of privacy, with the windows of one unit never directly facing those of another.¹⁴ The disarticulated layout of the Moriyama House thus can be understood as something other than a quirky architectural caprice. Rather, it is an exercise in domestic proxemics―or an experiment in a new type of familial structure―and as such, an architectural prototype for cohabitation, with individuals living alone, yet nonetheless together.

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“Truth never yields itself in anything said or shown. One cannot just point a camera at it to catch it: the very effort to do so will kill it.” —Trinh T. Minh-ha¹

Xiao Lu’s Dialogue (1989) has been shrouded in layered histories and conflicting narratives since it was brought to fruition at the opening of the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in the Chinese National Art Gallery, Beijing. In February 1989, Xiao Lu shot two bullets into the mirror panel of her installation, causing its immediate shutdown. Born out of Xiao Lu’s struggle to talk openly about the sexual traumas that afflicted her, Dialogue transformed into a platform for broader conversations about Chinese avant-garde art and the political and social ramifications of the art movement. The appropriation of Dialogue into these discourse frameworks shaped the historical trajectory of the work to the extent that the writing and revision of history became a large part of Dialogue. 

Known as “The Gunshot Incident,” Xiao Lu’s shooting of her installation became the pinnacle of Dialogue. It triggered local and international conversations that extended beyond the artist’s initial concerns when developing the work. In the American media, Xiao Lu’s shots were described as a shocking, political act that tested the limits of China in transition in the 1980s.² Seven days after “The Gunshot Incident,” Xiao Lu’s lover, Tang Song, submitted a public declaration to one of the curators, Gao Minglu, explaining that the work was an artistic endeavor that sought to deepen understandings of art and its social values.³ Furthermore, because the declaration was co-signed by Tang Song, he became credited as the second author of Dialogue. The contextualization of the work within the tense sociopolitical climate of China was further entrenched when, four months after Xiao Lu’s performance, the Tiananmen Square protests broke out and her performance was retroactively labeled “the first shots of Tiananmen.”⁴ Dialogue became defined by its abstract relationship to sociopolitical currents rather than the immediate connection between the performance and the installation. In his essay “Can We Talk about Dialogue? A Pre-script to Art and China after 1989,” David Borgonjon critiqued Gao Minglu’s comment that, after the gunshots, the interpretation of Dialogue belonged to society. Instead, argued Borgonjon, “the collective declaration of the death of the author here [looked] like an excuse for appropriation.”⁵

The complexities surrounding the appropriation of Dialogue are echoed through the blurred lines of authorship and ownership that surround the photographic representation of the work. Since 2004, Xiao Lu has been increasingly vocal about Dialogue through conversations with curators and by participating in interviews.⁶. Outside these formal channels of communication, Xiao Lu has also undermined the hegemonic historicizations of Dialogue through creative interventions. In 2006, Xiao Lu enlarged and printed 10 editions of an iconic photographic representation of Dialogue. Shot in 1989, the image shows Xiao Lu’s back to the audience. Although the exhibition was packed with people, only the artist and her installation are captured within the photograph’s frame. Signed and dated “1989,” Xiao Lu’s appropriation of this archival photograph inverts the absorption of Dialogue in broader sociopolitical and historical frameworks. The photograph, part of the Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art, was provided to Xiao Lu by Wen Pulin, her classmate who documented and received multiple photographic records of Dialogue following “The Gunshot Incident.”⁷ Through the appropriation of this image, the collective memory of Dialogue is reclaimed by the artist as part of her reflexive interventions into the historical constructions of Dialogue. 

Rather than presenting the photograph as an archival document that masks the interventions of the author, Xiao Lu exposes the material limitations of the photographic archival media. In the editioned photograph of Dialogue, only Xiao Lu is in focus. The composition leads the viewer’s eye from Xiao Lu’s outstretched arm towards the sculptural installation in the background, the target of Xiao Lu’s aggression. However, the grain of the photograph hinders, without completely obscuring, the details of the sculpture. Comprised of two fabricated, symmetrical telephone booths connected by a mirrored panel, Dialogue depicts a phone conversation between a man and woman. In the left booth, Xiao Lu inserted a life-size photograph of a figure in a skirt on the phone, and, in the opposing booth, a figure dressed in pants. The booths flank a red telephone that sits on a pedestal in the center of the installation, in front of the mirrored panel. The handset dangles loosely from its cord, suggesting a broken line of communication. Seen in relation to the installation, it is difficult to separate Xiao Lu’s gunshots from the reference to communication in heterosexual relationships. The obfuscation of the installation in the photograph calls to mind the blatant omissions of the sculptural references in early interpretations of the work. Through these material distortions, the photographic representation of Dialogue challenges viewers to reflect upon the ways in which historical narratives are constructed.

In his foreword to Xiao Lu’s fictional autobiography Dialogue, Gao Minglu wrote that “Xiao Lu targeted our reality.”⁸ Rather than playing into the dialectical positions that restrict the ownership of her work (hers vs. the masses) and the interpretations of Dialogue (personal vs. sociopolitical), Xiao Lu reveals the complex human and media networks that have shaped interpretations of Dialogue—how they enriched the work with sociopolitical meaning that she never intended, but how they also delegitimized her gendered experience as a social and political issue. Through the photographic representation of Dialogue, Xiao Lu invites the audience to partake as a witness: to question the ways in which historical reality is constructed and truth obscured.

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