Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Trevor Paglen
Tabita Rezaire
Beatrice Glow
Renée Green
Deborah Jack

KANTEN 観展:
The Limits of History
curated by Eimi Tagore-Erwin

March 24 - May 20, 2023

June- JulyA.
31,Miller2022
curatedby3 Mae

A Thousand Secrets

Cover image: Ken Okiishi, Untitled, 2022, 84 x 48 x 98 cm, Glazed terracotta

apexart © 2023
ISBN: 978-1-946416-54-4

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Kyun-Chome
Bontaro Dokuyama
Ken Okiishi
Taro Furukata
Haji Oh
Soni Kum
Motoyuki Shitamichi

KANTEN 観展: The Limits of History
KANTEN 観展 is a play on the Japanese kanji forperspective 観点 (kanten), and art exhibition 展
覧会 (tenrankai)—coming together to indicate an
exhibition of many perspectives. This exhibition
reveals legacies of the Asia Pacific War from anarray of viewpoints, demonstrating the ways inwhich the trauma of the past continues to have
impact in the present.
Although often overshadowed in American history
books, the Asia Pacific War comprised the largest
theater of World War II—culminating in some of
the most brutal battles, bombings, and atrocitiesof the 20th century. The contemporary artists
presented in KANTEN 観展 each engage with theaftermath of Japanese imperialism, presenting
audiences with a range of complex political andpersonal ramifications of wartime violence that
may be overlooked by nationalized historicalnarratives.
At a moment when nationalism and neoliberalchauvinism are on the rise, their artwork reevaluates what has been established as “history,”
considering material and immaterial traces thathave been passed down over time. The artworks
in this exhibition confront the enduring logic ofempire, exploring topics such as imperial subjectmaking, wartime displacement, and lingering
ethnic discrimination, while also bringing attention
to the role of the US in the postwar.
Japan’s development as a modern nation-stateis a story of colonial expansion. Starting withterritorial annexations of Hokkaido and Okinawa,
the newly established Japanese state adopted
colonial policies already in use by many western

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Bontaro Dokuyama, My Anthem, 2019, Video (still)

Motoyuki Shitamichi, torii ♯06 Hualien, Taiwan, 2006-2010, 2017-Present, 20 x 24 in, C-print
on Dibondpowers, spending the first half of the 20th century
expanding the borders of their empire by taking
over Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, Sakhalin,
the Liaodong Peninsula, the Northern Mariana
Islands, the Marshall Islands, and Northeastern
China. Japan reached the height of aggressive
expansionism during the war, occupying many
locales across the Pacific in its ambition to create
the so-called “Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere.”This dark period is directly witnessed in thephotographic work of Motoyuki Shitamichi. His
ongoing series torii (2006-2012, 2017-Present)
traces the shifting historical significance of the
Shinto gates called torii that were inserted
throughout Japan’s territorial conquests todemarcate the growing borders of the Empire.
Shitamichi photographed torii that still exist outsideof the boundaries of the modern-day Japanesenation, documenting remnants of imperial subjectmaking (kōminka) in which religion was used as
an assimilation tool for colonial subjects. Each of
Shitamichi’s photographs captures the way thesestone monuments have been altered since thewar—repurposed as infrastructural support ina residential neighborhood, disguised within acemetery, or removed from view completely.
Forced assimilation policies of colonial subjects
also included compulsory language education.
Bontaro Dokuyama’s haunting video work My
Anthem (2019) exposes these education policies
directly by presenting interviews with a choirof Taiwanese elders who were schoolchildren
during colonization. More than seven decades
after the war, the deeply entrenched impacts oflocal residents about their bizarre idea, weaving
together transpacific, geopolitical dynamics withthe realities of daily life to show the vast complexityof Okinawa’s dual-colonization. Ultimately, KyunChome’s quippy, unpretentious film highlights
Japan’s prolonged complicity with US militarism.

Haji Oh, Three Generations, 2004, 22 x 98 x 2 cm, C-print and framethese assimilation methods are carried on in thememories of Taiwan’s elderly community. Viewers
may be unsettled as an older gentleman recites
the entirety of the Imperial Rescript on Educationfrom memory, and the choir group dons school
uniforms to sing the Japanese national anthem
together as they did when they were children.
The systemic violence of the colonial period
persists today in the form of intergenerational
trauma passed down to the descendants of thesubjugated. Haji Oh delves into the politics ofmemory and identity as a “Zainichi Korean,” or
ethnically Korean resident of Japan. Oh’s work is
not politically motivated, but rather an intimate
exploration of the way trauma lives within and ispassed down. Oh’s grandparents immigrated fromJeju Island in the 1930s but repressed stories fromthis time. Three Generations (2004) is a series ofself-portraits in which Oh wears traditional Korean
garments belonging to herself, her mother, andher grandmother. Through these photographs,
Oh represents three generations of her family line,expressing the “unknowability” of the past andfuture of her family line as well as the unspoken,
and perhaps unspeakable, memories that remain
entombed in her ancestral home.
Soni Kum, also a third-generation Korean artist,takes a more direct political approach. She urgently
engages with the echoes of the past, striving forreconciliation between the living and dead. Kum
created the installation Colorblind: violence iscontagious (2023) for this exhibition, emphasizing
fragmented and concealed aspects of war trauma
in a piece that unseals old wounds as well as
unexpected opportunities for healing. Soni’s
research-based art practice studies the division ofKorea after the war, which led to countless Korean
laborers in mainland Japan becoming a “stateless”

population that faced prejudice as an ethnic minority
in Japan. Inspired by the novelist Toni Morrison,
Colorblind foregrounds the voices of the buried byexploring the fallout of colonial “liberation” and thebrutality of the Korean War that followed. Kum’s
work poignantly identifies the glaring similarities
between the violence faced by Koreans of the 20thcentury and US policies towards Black communities
in America.
Furthering Kum’s approach to the underside of history
are Kyun-Chome and Taro Furukata. The artist duo
Kyun-Chome, made up of Eri Honma and Nabuchi,
produced a feature-length art film Making a Perfect
Donut (2019) surveying the geopolitical position ofOkinawa, Japan’s southernmost island prefecture.
Housing 75% of US military bases in Japan, Okinawa
is considered the cornerstone of American military
power in the Pacific. The premise of the film is theartists’ proposal to make a “perfect donut” bycombining a traditional Okinawan sātā andagi donut
and an American donut through the military fence.
The film documents the artists’ conversations with

Kyun-Chome, Making a Perfect Donut, 2019, Video (still)

Born and based in Hiroshima, Taro Furukata
scrutinizes the paradox of US-Japan relations andpropaganda in the postwar. The Perfect Hug (2018)
unpacks the messaging of the renowned Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Park, which was constructed tomemorialize the devastation of the atomic bombingof the city by US forces while also venerating
Hiroshima’s emblematic commitment to futurepeace. Furukata’s video installation informs viewersthat the park’s design is eerily similar to unrealizedarchitectural plans for the “Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere Memorial Hall.” Comparing thepark designs with the widely publicized image of
Barack Obama’s embrace with an atomic bomb
survivor in 2016, Furukata demonstrates that both
“perfectly” center the violence of the past in blithelyreconciliatory ways, a form of historical revision that
deliberately obscures the past.
With this exhibition being held in the US, it isvital to recognize that the war also had extreme
ramifications across the Pacific—following thePearl Harbor attack, Japanese residents of thewest coast of the US were forcibly removed fromtheir homes and relocated to concentration camps
further inland. American artist Ken Okiishi grapples
with the aftermath of displacement policies in
Untitled (2022). Okiishi’s family held a longstandingtransnational presence between Hiroshima andHawai’i in the years before the war. Legend has itthat after the bombing his grandfather dumped
all traces of his family’s Japanese ancestry into
Māmala Bay to avoid arrest. Generations later, theartist deliberates on the yet “unconfirmed relations”
that he holds with this history in a process he has
called “illiterate calligraphy.” Created from glazed
terracotta, Untitled evokes the altered possibilities
of identity that Okiishi has been able to perform in
his everyday life as a Japanese American.
The final component of this exhibition is a selectionof imperial war postcards from the East Asia Image
Collection at Lafayette College. Widely publishedand circulated in Japan and its territories during thewar, postcards played a vital role in perpetuating
intra-imperial propaganda of its notions ofPan-Asian “co-prosperity” at a grassroots level.
Particularly disturbing is the proliferation of children

Unknown artist, Published by Osaka Teikoku Shikō,c. 1942-45. East Asia Image Collection, Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman
Library, Lafayette Collegein this collection of postcards—Japanese children
posed as future imperialists, as well as children ofoccupied territories being cared for by Japanesesoldiers. Domestic, familial imagery may have madethe nation’s aggressive warfare more palatable forlaypeople. They may have imagined Japan as thefilial parent of the region, benevolently paving theroad to Asian modernity. By juxtaposing the works
of contemporary artists with historical materials
that showcase empire-mandated perspectives ofthe era, this exhibition aims to reveal the limits ofmemory, narrative, and testimony.
Art has the uniquely provocative power to express
the inexpressible, activate nuanced conversations,and bring forth parallels that may remain hidden
otherwise. KANTEN 館展 confronts the limits ofhistory, bringing together artworks that bothconstruct and dismantle our understanding of
the Asia Pacific War and its fallout. This exhibition
broadens the resistance against the enduring
aversion towards discussing and informing future
generations about histories that are damning,reprehensible, and unpatriotic—the dark side ofhistory that those in power often benefit fromforgetting.

The curator would like to express gratitude to theartists, many of whom take on great risks in theirartmaking. She also thanks all who have supported
her research for this exhibition.
Eimi Tagore-Erwin© apexart 2023
Open Call Exhibition