asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas
6 (2020) 11-26
brill.com/adva

Contact Zones and Liminal Spaces in Okinawan
and Zainichi Contemporary Art
Rebecca Sue Jennison

Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto, Japanrebecca@kyoto-seika.ac.jp

Abstract
This article focuses on selected art works by third-generation Zainichi Koreans Haji Oh
and Soni Kum, and Okinawan-based Chikako Yamashiro to explore ways in whichthese artists have continued to develop innovative, interdisciplinary practices to explore contact zones and liminal spaces in the East Asian context. Drawing on Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s notion of minor transnationalism, it argues the creative interventions of the three artists shed light on complex histories of minortransnationalism and at the same time alert us to ways in which the legacies of colonialism, migration and war continue to evolve in the present in Okinawa, Jeju Island,
and Japan. Deploying different media, practices and techniques, all three artists aim todeterritorialize dominant visual and historical narratives and draw inspiration fromminor literatures in ways that disrupt binary and vertical relationships, making visible
minor to minor connections and ways of envisioning horizontal networks.

Keywords
minor transnationalism – contemporary art in Japan – Zainichi Koreans – Okinawa –postcolonial studies – Haji Oh – Soni Kum – Chikako Yamashiro

In a previous issue of this journal, contemporary Asian American artists exploring “Islands and Oceanic Imaginaries” were examined by Margo Machidaand others, bringing attention to innovative works that shed light on ways inwhich “islands, island chains, archipelagos, and oceanic passages are conceived both as metaphors for human experience and as real sites where pressing social, political, and economic concerns of local and global magnitude can© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/23523085-00601002

12

Jennisonbe interrogated.”1 My article in that issue discussed three artists based in Japan
at the time – third-generation Zainichi Korean artists Haji Oh and Soni Kum,and Okinawan-based Chikako Yamashiro – who work in a range of media as
they explore themes of transborder migration and the experiences of diasporicsubjects in the contexts of Japan and East Asia more generally. I cited work ofcultural theorist Satoshi Ukai who asked, “How is it possible for an island to
become something other than a dot on the strategic map of a global military
superpower?”2 and argued that the textile art, performances, and video installations by Oh, Kum, and Yamashiro not only touch upon entangled histories
that continue to impact regional relations, but also contribute to the envisioning of links and intersections among islands and other “peripheral” territories
that are relevant in the discussion of Trans-Pacific studies, and Asian diasporasin the Americas. Their works then, and now, resonate with many of the works
Machida discussed and continue to “visualize multi-sited points of attachment
and even fluid Asian diasporic positions that elude territorially determined national boundaries.”3
As the editors of the current issue have noted, important work in the field ofTrans-Pacific studies,4 and the work of the cultural theorists Françoise Lionnet
and Shu-mei Shih are also helping create new frameworks for the consideration of work by artists such as Oh, Kum, and Yamashiro.5 This article takes up
the questions raised by Machida and Ukai, and again asks how a transnational
perspective and the notion of “minor transnationalism” might be useful in approaching new works and projects by these artists. In their discussion of minortransnationalism, Lionnet and Shih note, “what is lacking in the binary modelof above-and-below, the utopic and dystopic, the global and the local, is anawareness and recognition of the creative interventions that networks of

1 Margo Machida, “Pacific Itineraries: Islands and Oceanic Imaginaries in Contemporary Asian
American Art,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 3, no. 1–2 (2017): 9–34.
2 Satoshi Ukai, “Shima, rettō, hantō, tairiku: Tonari au monotachi no wakuseiteki shikō (Islands,
Archipelagos, Peninsulas, Continents: A Planetary View of Those Living Alongside One Another),” in Shuken no kanata de (Beyond sovereignty) by Satoshi Ukai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2008), 165–6.
3 Machida, “Pacific Itineraries,” 13.
4 See, for example, Janet Alison Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen eds., Transpacific Studies:
Framing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014); and Naoki Sakai andHyon Joo Yoo, The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society (Singapore: World Scientific Press, 2012).
5 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih. “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. by Françoise Lionnet and Shi-mei Shih (Durham NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), 1–23.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

Contact Zones and Liminal Spaces in Okinawan

13

minoritized cultures produce within and across national boundaries.”6 I argue
that these three artists continue to find ways through their respective artistic
practices to “unravel,” “destabilize,” and “complicate” dominant nation-centred
narratives, and to develop what Hiroki Yamamoto calls “post-imperial techniques” as they delve into the legacies of colonialism in East Asia.7
Metaphors and images of borders and migrations and the ongoing impact of military presence in Okinawa and Jeju Island feature prominently inmany of their works. Oh uses the materials and techniques of textile art, Kum
and Yamashiro, montage and superimposition, to create radical viewpoints
and a “sensory perception of liminal spaces and contact zones, where marginalization is not explored through vertical or centre-periphery articulation ofMajority vs. Minority, but rather, through horizontal relationships between
Minorities.”8 Based primarily on interviews and written statements by theartists,9 this article examines Oh’s installation Grandmother Island Project(2017), Kum’s new collaborative project with Korean migrants, and Yamashiro’s
recent video works Mud Man (2016) and Chinbin Western (2019).
1

Unravelling History: Haji Oh’s Grandmother Island Project

In Grandmother Island Project (fig. 1), Haji Oh continues to explore the connections between her family history and the migration of Koreans from Jeju Island
to Osaka during the period of Japanese colonization of the Korean peninsula(1910–1945). She also introduces images associated with other histories of migration to islands in the Pacific near Australia. Characteristically, Oh has foundways to integrate the themes and metaphors embedded in the work with theactual materials and techniques of textile art, as the title of the exhibition inwhich this work was shown, Te ni takusu, ito e takusu (Memories in Weaving),suggests.

6 Lionnet and Shih, “Introduction,” 7.
7 Hiroki Yamamoto, “Datsu teikoku no gihō—higashi ajia gendai bijutsu to shokuminchi no isan,”in Gendai bijutsushi—Ōbei, nihon, toranzunashionaru (Tokyo: Chuko Shinsho, 2019), 247–82.
8 Gayle Sato, unpublished invited commentary, “Trans-Pacific Japanese Diaspora Art: Encounters and Envisions of Minor-Transnationalism,” symposium, Kyoto University Zinbunken
Academy, Tokyo, 8 December 2018.
9 In addition to multiple email exchanges, I conducted oral interviews with the artist in June2017 at Wollongong University, nsw, Australia. Unless otherwise indicated, all references tothe artist, her biography and practice, as well as statements, are from the artist’s website orthese communications.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

14JennisonFigure 1

Haji Oh, Textile as Map T.I. (detail), from Nautical Map, Grandmother’s Island
Project, 2017, linen, dimensions variable.
Image provided by the artist.

For the Grandmother Island Project, she used fibre, hand-spun thread, and woven and dyed textiles, along with weaving techniques that help achieve her
aim to reveal “the interconnectedness between untold stories.” The artist had
found a way to run a continuous warp thread through the entire piece using a
traditional Guatemalan technique and backstrap loom, developing a technique whereby she could create an image of an island with the warp and weftthreads interwoven in a way that symbolizes the continuity of memory andtime, making her woven works “an embodiment of space, time and memory.”
Oh’s primary goal is to use the metaphor and material of textiles to unravel
official narratives of history. According to the artist, unravelling fabric serves asa metaphor for deconstructing texts: “feeling the texture of threads and weaving a textile resembles an act of recalling memory.”10 For Oh, Jeju Island is bothan imaginary island, and one that continues to be a site of social and politicaltension in the region. As a young girl, hearing stories about Jeju Island from her
mother and grandmother awakened her imagination, and she continues to10Haji Oh, Oh Haji: Te ni takusu, ito he takusu (Haji Oh: Memories in Weaving) (Oyama, Japan:
Kurumaya Museum of Art, 2019), 56. “T.I.” in Oh’s Textile as Map (2017) stands for “Thursday Island.”asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

Contact Zones and Liminal Spaces in Okinawan

15

this day to spin memories and threads that she says “are becoming my skin.”11
Through her works, Oh creates a new language woven in threads and fibres; therepetitive and time-consuming gestures of creating textile art are inseparablefrom the process of re-imagining narratives of history.
Now based in Australia, Oh returns to Japan regularly and has extended her
body of work to include research on female divers, some of whom migrated
from Jeju Island and worked along the coastlines and on remote islands in Japan, and whose stories resonate with the experiences of present-day migrant
women from Asia. Their migration stories between Jeju and the southern islands of Kyushu in search of work, are suggestive of alternative narratives ofcontested island territories such as Takeshima/Dokdo, or, to use Lionnet and
Shih’s phrase, “minor-to-minor” networks.12
2

Re-imagining ‘Contact Zones’ in Soni Kum’s vegetation andMorning Dew

The notion of minor transnationalism might also be understood in relation to
Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zones,” a term that has been used in thecontext of feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory in reference to social spaces where cultures “meet, clash and grapple with each other,often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world
today.”13 Through her video, performance, and film installation works, interdisciplinary artist Soni Kum has continued to raise new questions about theasymmetrical relations of power in past and present experiences of Zainichi
Koreans. In her recent project, Morning Dew (2019–2020), for which she has
been awarded the Kawamura Arts and Cultural Foundation Grant for Socially
Engaged Art, Kum continues to use montage and the juxtaposition of past
documentary and film footage with present-day oral narratives to explore
these contact zones.

11
12

13

Haji Oh, exhibition wall text, Haji Oh: Memories in Weaving, Kurumaya Museum of Art,
Oyama, Japan, 2019. English translation by the author.
Lionnet and Shih, “Introduction,” 7. Takeshima/Dokdo is a cluster of rocky islands in the“Japan Sea,” which is at the centre of a diplomatic dispute between Japan and South Korea. “Takeshima” (bamboo islands) is the Japanese name and “Dokdo” (solitary islands) is
the Korean name. “Profile: Dokdo/Takeshima Islands,” bbc News, 10 August 2012; Haji Oh,
Haji Oh: Memories In Weaving, 44.
Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

16

JennisonKum was born and raised in a Korean community in Tokyo. She attended
North Korean schools through high school, and later entered a Japanese university in Tokyo; from 2002 to 2005 she studied film and video art in the MFA
program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). In California, she was
exposed to new forms of performance and video art, and discovered fresh directions for her own thinking and work through postcolonial, and critical studies of contemporary art. In a 2018 interview, she explains that at CalArts she
encountered vibrant discussions about postcolonial theory, and learned about
Trans-Pacific movements and dialogues among contemporary avant-garde artists such as Yoko Ono and Teiji Furuhashi of Kyoto-based artist collective
Dumb Type.14
Inspired by these encounters, Kum began to develop her own interdisciplinary practice and experimented with live performance and a range of media inworks such as Story of Light (2001), Sheep (2002), and Red Hunting (2004). In
the video work Beast of Me (2005), created at Cal Arts for her mfa, Kum linked
segments of film footage and a trilingual voice-over narration in English,
Korean, and Japanese. In Foreign Sky (2005), also completed at Cal Arts, shecreated a montage of film fragments drawn from archival documentary andoriginal film footage. Raising questions about the representation of gendered
and racialized bodies, the work explores her own family’s history, beginningwith the imposition of Japan’s colonial regime which led to her great-grandmother and grandmother’s migration to Japan.15 Kum returned to Japan in2005 and entered the doctoral program in fine art at Tokyo University of theArts where she continued to experiment with performance and the juxtaposition of images and voices from existing film narratives, disrupting and opening
up new ways of sensing and representing the gaps and silences in personal and“official” histories.
Kum’s live performance work, vegetation (2009), was inspired by a novel
written by Ki-Young Hyun published in Korea in 1978 about the 4.3 Massacre
on Jeju Island.16 Open discussion of the 1948 Jeju uprising and massacre had
14
15

16

“Dialogue with Soni Kum,” unpublished interview by Hiroki Yamamoto, November 2018,
emailed to the author with the artist’s permission, 4 January 2019.
For more information on Soni Kum’s Foreign Sky, see Brett de Bary, “Looking at Foreign
Sky: Desperately seeking post-Asia: Soni Kum, Nagisa Oshima, Ri Chin’u,” Asian Cinema 6,
no. 1 (2015): 7–22; Hiroki “Decolonial Possibilities of Transnationalism in Contemporary
Zainichi Korean Art,” Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context 12, no. 1 (2019):
107–128.
On 3 April 1948, fearing the permanent division of the Peninsula, many Jeju Islanders rose
up in a protest that was brutally suppressed. It is estimated that thirty thousand people—
or 10 percent of the population—died, and that forty thousand fled to Japan.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

Contact Zones and Liminal Spaces in Okinawan

17long been suppressed, and Hyun’s landmark novel, Aunt Suni (1978), marked aturning point with regard to the taboo subject.17 The novel was later translated
from Korean to Japanese by Zainichi Korean poet and writer Shijong Gim, himself a survivor of the 4.3 massacre and who migrated to Japan in 1949. The links
between the original novel, Gim’s translation into Japanese, and Kum’s adaptation of it as a live performance work might all be understood as examples ofminor literature and minor transnationalism.
It was the image of rich harvests in a field of potatoes where the bodies of
those who had died in the 4.3 massacre had been buried that inspired the installation vegetation. To paraphrase Kum, she was struck by the scenes in thenovel, in which countless dead bodies were dumped into a potato field because there was no other place to put them; the following year, unusually large
potatoes were harvested but the residents could not bring themselves to eat
them, even though it was a time of severe food shortage.18
Since then, Kum has continued to research, deconstruct, and create montaged film narratives using images from documentary and fictional films. In
February 2019, she screened one such work, Kwangjoo is Impeaching (2005)
for the first time in Japan at a symposium on Art and Postcolonial East Asia
in Tokyo (fig. 2). She has also interviewed North Korean migrants/defectors inSouth Korea, and ex-returnees who defected from North Korea to Japan. It wasout of these projects that her work-in-progress, Morning Dew emerged.
The title for the new project makes reference to the artist’s personal memory and experience of first learning the well-known song, “Morning Dew”
(Achim isui in Korean and Asa tsuyu in Japanese) while in elementary school inTokyo. Written by Min Gi Kim in 1970, the song was popular in South Korea
in the early 70s and inspired many engaged in the pro-Democracy movement
at the time. It was banned in South Korea in 1975, but later was taught in Korean
schools in Japan. For Kum, the song symbolizes the regeneration of something“pure and beautiful,” its powerful lyrics and music gave hope to listeners “going
through a dark night of the soul.”19 In Kum’s Morning Dew project, the song is
17

18
19

At the time, the author was arrested, but the work was widely read, and helped open new
spaces for dialogue, something that could be achieved more easily through literature andart than political discourse. See also Hoonjun Kim, “Seeking Truth after 50 Years: The National Committee for Investigation of Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Events,” in The International Journal of Transnational Justice 3, no. 3, (November 2009): 406–423, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijp014.
Soni Kum, “vegetation,” Sonikum.com, artist’s website, accessed 15 November 2019, http://
www.sonikum.com/?page_id=235.
“‘Morning Dew’ by Soni Kum won the grant!,” Kawamura Arts and Cultural Foundation, News Report, 21 January, 2019, http://www.kacf.jp/pdf/vol2_en.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0z
TxibQSDLda8_zYicLwwXdTZ8E4LyEryxPIImOOStr05q4RDtM3Vgnl0. “Morning Dew”

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

18

JennisonFigure 2

Soni Kum, Kwangjoo is Impeaching (still), 2005, video, single-channel, 87 minutes.
Image provided by the artist.

used as a catalyst for dialogue and exchange with the interviewees, invoking aminor literature that links minor-to-minor narratives of memory and resistance to forms of oppression still relevant today.
Importantly, both Oh and Kum have worked with other Korean diaspora
artists including Jane Jin Kaisen, a Korean adoptee whose works include Dissident Translations (2011) and Communities of Parting (2019). The dialogues andcollaborations among these artists that have emerged over the last decade arethemselves generating new networks of minor transnationalism. New forms of
online curation and networking are also helping to build these minor-to-minor
networks in which practicing artists and scholars of the diaspora exchange information and ideas.20

20

was one of the only South Korean songs children were allowed to sing in North Korean
schools.
Crystal Mun-Hye Baik and Jane Jin Kaisen, “Introduction: Korea and Demilitarized Peace,”
Periscope [Social Text Online], posted 21 December 2018, https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/11908-2; Haruki Eda, “Unmaking Borders to Demilitarize Peace:
A Zainichi Korean Experience,” Periscope [Social Text Online], posted 21 December 2018,https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/unmaking-borders-to-demilitarize-peace-a-zainichi-korean-experience/.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

Contact Zones and Liminal Spaces in Okinawan

319“Who is Speaking?” Liminal Spaces in Chikako Yamashiro’s Mud
Man and Chinbin Western

In her early video works, Chikako Yamashiro filmed live performances in graveyards and along visible and invisible borders in liminal spaces near US bases in
Okinawa. Her works sometimes playfully but radically disrupt the notion ofcentre and periphery, such as in Okinawa Tourist—Trip to Japan (2004) where
she is seen standing in front of the Diet Building in Tokyo holding up a photoof an Okinawan tortoise-shaped tomb, and calling out “Okinawa is not OK!!” a
response to a campaign to reassure tourists in the wake of 9/11, that it was safefor them to travel to Okinawa. Yamashiro’s interest in borders and liminal spaces continues to be a central theme in her work.21 Woman of the Butcher Shop, athree-channel video installation first exhibited at the Mori Museum in Tokyoin 2012, combines film footage of an actual weekend flea-market located along
the fence of a US military base in Okinawa, with fictional film segments inwhich several actors perform alongside the semi-documentary footage of themarket. The precarious space of the market – like the shoreline in the earlier
work, Shore Connivance—Shore of Ibano, Urasoe City (2007) – was situated on
unregulated and tacitly approved agricultural land that could be reclaimed by
the military at any time. In fact, since these works were created, the Urasoe
shoreline has been reclaimed in a development project and Shirakawa Market
was shut down for construction of the new Kadena Air Base.
Continuing along this powerful trajectory, Yamashiro produced Mud Man(written in kanji as “「土の人」”) in 2016, her second three-channel video andsound installation work which received the 2017 Asian Art Award and the Zonta
Prize at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 2017. Again, Yamashiro makes
use of images from scenes in earlier works of liminal underground limestone
caves, the Shirakawa Market, and the Oura Bay near Henoko, but here she also
takes viewers on a journey to Gangjeong Village, Jeju Island, where constructionof a tri-lateral Naval Base has been completed. The title is translated from thecharacters for tsuchi or earth (土) and hito or person(人)and read as tsuchi no
hito in Japanese. The installation incorporates new film and sound techniques
the artist acquired over the years, as well as poems – examples of minor literature in Korean, Okinawan Dialect, and Japanese – and fragments of documentary film from the Battle of Okinawa, the Korean War, and the War in Vietnam.
Projected on three screens in a non-linear, filmic sequence, the resulting montage suggests Okinawa and Jeju Island are linked as the images traverse time
periods and geographical locations to create new meanings and associations
21

See Shinjō and Kondō “Open Wounds: What Chikako Yamashiro Portrays,” in Yamashiro
Chikakao, ed., Naoko Fukunda (Tokyo: Yumiko Chiba Associates, 2012), 67–77.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

20

JennisonFigure 3

Chikako Yamashiro, Mud Man (still), 2017, video, single-channel version, 25
minutes, 30 seconds. Produced in cooperation with 2016 Aichi Triennale.
© Chikako Yamashiro. Image courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

(fig. 3). Art critic Masashi Kohara argues that the work makes connections between the US, Japan, and South Korea visible, and that Okinawa and Jeju Island“are like siblings, cursed with having great geo-political value as strategic locations for military bases.”22 While it is impossible to give more than a superficial
account of this complex work in written form, it may be useful to look at sometechnical and narrative aspects of the work that makes apparent this horizontal “sibling” relationship.
On the wall outside of the darkened room where Mud Man was first exhibited at the Aichi Triennale in 2016, an excerpt from a poem by German-speaking
Bohemian writer Franz Kafka reads: “And they have wings.” Available to visitors were copies of a handout with poems printed in three languages, emanating from the centre of the page to form a circular pattern. In the installation
proper, images move in rapid succession on three screens – at times accompanied by sound, other times in silence. Lush fields of green and yellow crops
growing in dark, red earth appear on the screen from an angle suggesting theview of a bird in flight—or a military drone. A man with mud-caked hands
appears and looks up to a large bird’s nest high in a tree. A few seconds later, alonger shot of a field is followed by a hand and arm rising up from the grass,waving in the wind like a plant growing out of the earth. Other figures appear,
their faces caked in yellow-grey earth.
22

Masashi Kohara, “Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud People,” in Kyotographie International Photography Festival 2017, ed., Sayaka Sameshina (Kyoto, Japan: Kyotographi, 2017), 36–37.
Kohara notes the term “Mud Man” simultaneously refers to local residents engaged in
sit-ins and refutes the highly derogatory term “dojin” (another reading of the samecharacters).

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

Contact Zones and Liminal Spaces in Okinawan

21

Audiences clearly hear the thudding sound of clumps of earth—or bird
dung falling to the ground and on the people lying there. A man places a clumpof the mud/dung to his ear, as if listening to a shell for the sound of sea waves.
Others follow as we begin to hear the sound of poems in Korean, Uchinaaguchi, (the Irie Island dialect), and Japanese—that build into a rhythm—thewords not quite decipherable. Yamashiro was inspired by poems that she imagined grew out of the seeds in the droppings of a large, mythical bird. Juxtaposed with images of the landscape and fragments of earlier video works areimages of Jeju Island villagers and present-day peace activists protesting theconstruction of the naval base.
In another segment, several people watch with horror as short clips fromdocumentary films of the Battle of Okinawa and the Vietnam War flip by inrapid succession against a background of sounds of artillery fire that fill thegallery (fig. 4). The soundtrack is actually a contemporary music score producedby three sound artists (beatbox artist ShOh, rapper Tokii, and DJ Shota)—
who joined her in the collaboration. Sequences from the documentary films
recording scenes of war are remixed and sampled into an alternative counternarrative that links Okinawa to Jeju Island and transforms the sounds ofartillery fire into contemporary music. Shots of tunnels and underground/
undersea passages—some filmed at an abandoned US nuclear weapons storage facility in Iejima—simultaneously expose and deconstruct narratives ofCold War history and envision new connections between the islands.
The final segment is silent as the camera pans over a field of luscious whiteteppō yuri (coronet-shaped Easter lilies, cultivated today on Iejima) that sway

Figure 4

Chikako Yamashiro, Mud Man (still), 2017, video, single-channel version, 25
minutes, 30 seconds. Produced in cooperation with 2016 Aichi Triennale.
© Chikako Yamashiro. Image courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

22

Jennisonin the breeze, in and out of focus on the screen. The people have reappeared,
lying in the field among the lilies. One by one, their hands and arms reach upward, like plants with flowers that are beginning to bloom, echoing the initial
image in the film of a hand rising from the grass. As they reach toward the sky,
the hands slowly begin to clap. The sound and rhythm build to a crescendo ina vibrant musical cadence that reverberates throughout the gallery space, leaving audiences with lasting experience of the work’s resonance.
In the fall of 2019, Yamashiro’s new single-channel work, Chinbin Western:
Representation of the Family was exhibited at the National Art Center, Tokyo, inthe group exhibition Hanashiteiru no ha dare? Gendai bijutsu ni hisomu bungaku (Image Narratives: Literature in Japanese Contemporary Art). This video
again draws on the linked trajectory of earlier works on Okinawa, and connects
Jeju Island to Iejima, Iejima to Motobu Port, and in turn, back to Henoko where
protest demonstrations continue to slow down land reclamation and the construction of a so-called “replacement facility” for US Marine Corps Air Station
Futenma in Ginowan City.23 Yamashiro’s practice as an artist has often included references to present-day activism in Okinawa. As the construction near
Henoko in Oura Bay carries on, protestors continue to oppose the destructionof the environment and military expansion.24
Motobu Port, the site where Chinbin Western was filmed, is the port where
tourists board the ferry to Iejima (“Ie Island”). The island is advertised in tourism flyers as an island of flowers and sunsets and tourists are invited to comeand enjoy a range of recreational parks and tours. However, in 1945, Iejima was
the site of a horrific frontline battle in the Battle of Okinawa and today it is stillused as a firing and practice range for US military personnel.25 At a quarry near
the port, tons of sand and rock are excavated daily and transported by dump
trucks and ferries to Camp Schwab US Marine Corps Base. The sand is being
mixed into concrete and used to make thousands of concrete pilings that are
being dropped into Oura Bay for land reclamation.26 Protestors continue to sit
or “lie-in” in front of the gate at Camp Schwabb or protest against the transport
23
24
25
26

“350 People Protest Futenma Replacement Facility as Camp Schwab Sit-ins Enter Sixth
Year,” Ryukyu Shinpo, 6 July 2019, http://english.ryukyushimpo.jp/2019/07/17/30737/.
The Ryukyu Archipelago (Okinawa) lies to the southeast of Japan’s southern island of
Kyushu. Jeju Island lies off the southern end of the Korean peninsula. The distance between Jeju and Okinawa is about 800 kilometres.
“Okinawa Protests Parachute Drill at Kadena Base as U.S. Denies Violating Deal withJapan,” Japan Times, 30 October 2019, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/10/30/
national/okinawa-protests-parachute-training-at-kadena/#.Xjjz9mhKg2w.
Ironically, marine biologists argue that the “soft seabed” in Oura Bay may delay construction. “Soft Seabed Puts U.S. Base Project in Okinawa Back in Tight Corner,” The Asahi
Shimbun, 4 May 2019, http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201905040001.html.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

Contact Zones and Liminal Spaces in Okinawan

23of the quarried sand and concrete in Motobu. Chinbin Western is a narrative of
two families who live near the quarry—in one, the father is a driver of one of
the trucks, and in the other, the daughter is an artist and caretaker of the local
shrine. To earn a living, she also works in a bar in town.
Yamashiro describes the film as a “futuristic western” that plays on the narrative form of both Hollywood Western and Macaroni (Italian-style) Western
films. The word chinbin, refers to a snack food familiar in Okinawa; the playful
pun on Italian “Macaroni” or “Spaghetti Westerns,” alerts the viewer to the theatre of the absurd that awaits us behind the red velvet curtain that opens on adomestic drama in the new home of a young family living near the sand andgravel quarry. Irritated by headlines in the morning paper, the young husband
begins to sing an operatic aria in Italian and the wife responds by reciting verses of poems in Okinawan dialect. Their children are watching this scene fromthe side of the room, hidden partly behind curtains. The husband’s job, presumably to help pay for their new house, is driving one of the dump trucks that
hauls sand from the quarry to be shipped by barge around the northern tip of
the island to Camp Schwab. In the next scene, he puts sunglasses on to hide his
identity as he drives through lines of local protestors who are trying to preventthe movement of trucks hauling sand and gravel for the construction of thebase at Henoko.
The second narrative focuses on a young painter who lives with her grandfather near the quarry and a sacred site where a heavenly boat thought to protect the villagers was once enshrined. At different points in the film, the twodifferent narratives intersect, such as in the scene where the frustrated housewife looks out from her window at the artist who sometimes also joins the antibase activists. In another scene, the artist, dressed as a cowgirl, dances withother women in the bar that the truck-driver father frequents (fig. 5).
In the final scene, the family of four again sits in their house in front of awindow that looks out onto the desert-like landscape of the quarry (fig. 6).
The curtain opens on a drama within the drama, staged on the dusty slagheap of sand where the local shrine’s heavenly boat once was. The contemporary fable is interrupted with a scene from a drama suggestive of traditional
Okinawan performing arts.. A battle is ensuing between two village ancestors.
After having left the village, unable to make a living there, the first elder has
returned after many years and chastises the other for allowing the complete
destruction of the shrine and the village. The latter responds, saying the only
way to survive was to allow the destruction of the sacred site. As the battle
continues, a priestess in white robes slowly climbs onto the barren mound ofearth and makes gestures to restore order, at least for the moment.
Again, Yamashiro reveals an Okinawa not seen before, images that disrupt
and contradict an expected image of the lush, tropical landscape in Okinawa.
asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

24

JennisonFigure 5

Chikako Yamashiro, Chinbin Western—Representation of the Family (still), 2019,
video, single-channel version, 32 minutes.
© Chikako Yamashiro. Image courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

Figure 6

Chikako Yamashiro, Chinbin Western—Representation of the Family (still), 2019,
video, single-channel version, 32 minutes.
© Chikako Yamashiro. Image courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

Contact Zones and Liminal Spaces in Okinawan

25This envisioning of Okinawa presses audiences to think about the violence inherent to the modern-day imperial and neo-colonial projects, ongoing military
expansion, the climate crisis, and desertification. It also suggests that Okinawa
is seen by some as a “frontier” in the “Wild, Wild West” of US military expansion, and that Indigenous resistance to that expansion is ongoing.

…

Through the use of diverse forms of media and each with their own uniqueartistic practices, Haji Oh, Soni Kum and Chikako Yamashiro continue to present new ways of sensing and understanding experiences of migration, andpresent-day tensions in the East Asian and Trans-Pacific regions. Their works
bring awareness to what Lionnet and Shih have called the “creative interventions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within and across national boundaries” and to richer, deeper, and more horizontal connections in theregion; their respective practices as artists also help foster “the collective assemblage of enunciation,” and point to the possibility of future “transformation through active participation in the production of local knowledge andglobal cultures.”27 As apparent from their recent projects, possibilities are
already unfolding.
Rebecca Sue Jennison
teaches courses on gender, literature, and contemporary art in the Department of Humanities, Kyoto Seika University. She was born in the US, grew up in California, and has
lived in Japan since 1980. She received an MA from Cornell University in East Asian
Languages and Literatures, and has written articles on Japanese women writers andartists. Her publications include the co-edited volumes Still Hear the Wound, Toward an
Asia, Politics and Art to Come, edited by Lee Chonghwa, translated and co-edited with
Brett de Bary (Cornell East Asia Series, 2015), and Imagination without Borders: Feminist
Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility, co-edited with Laura Hein (Center forJapan Studies, University of Michigan, 2010).

References
Baik, Crystal Mun-Hye and Jane Jin Kaisen. “Introduction: Korea and Demilitarized
Peace.” Periscope [Social Text Online], posted 21 December 2018. https://socialtext
journal.org/periscope_article/11908-2/.
27

Lionnet and Shih, “Introduction,” 21.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26

26

Jennisonde Bary, Brett. “Looking at Foreign Sky, desperately seeking post-Asia: Soni Kum, Nagisa
Oshima, Ri Chin’u.” Asian Cinema 6, no. 1 (2015): 7–22.
Eda, Haruki. “Unmaking Borders to Demilitarize Peace: A Zainichi Korean Experience.” Periscope [Social Text Online], posted 21 December 2018. https://socialtext
journal.org/periscope_article/unmaking-borders-to-demilitarize-peace-a-zainichi-korean-experience/.
Jennison, Rebecca Sue. “Reimagining Islands: Notes on Selected Works by Oh Haji,
Soni Kum and Yamashiro Chikako.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 3, no. 2 (March 2017): 155–177.
Kaisen, Jane Jin. Dissident Translations. Aaurhus, Denmark: Arhus Kunstbygning, 2011.
Kim, Hunjoon. “Seeking Truth after 50 Years: The National Committee for Investigationof Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Events.” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 3,(2009): 406–423.
Kohara, Masashi. “Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud People.” In Kyotographie International
Photography Festival, 2017, edited by Sayaka Sameshina, 36–37. Kyoto: Kyotographie,
2017.
Lionnet, Françoise, Shu-Mei Shih. “Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally.” In
Minor Transnationalism, edited by Francoise Lionnet and Shi-Mei Shih, 1–23. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Oh, Haji. Oh Haji: Te ni takusu, ito he takusu (Haji Oh: Memories in Weaving). Exhibition
catalogue. Edited by Hanae Nakao. Oyama, Japan: Kurumaya Museum of Art, 2019.
Shinjō, Ikuo. “‘Open Wounds: What Chikako Yamashiro portrays,’ Interview with Kondo Kenichi.” In Yamashiro Chikako, edited by Naoko Fukuda, translated by Pamela
Miki, 67–77. Tokyo: Yumiko Chiba Associates, 2012.
Yamamoto, Hiroki. “Decolonial Possibilities of Transnationalism in Contemporary
Zainichi Korean Art.” Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context 12, no. 1 (2019):
107–128.
Yamamoto, Hiroki. “Datsu teikoku no gihō—higashi ajia gendai bijutsu to shokuminchi
no isan.” Gendai bijutsu shi,: Ōbei, nihon, toransunshyonaru, 247–282. Tokyo: Chuko
Shinsho #2562, 2019.
Yamamoto, Chikako. “Tōkereba tōi hodo, todoku koto mo aru” (The greater the distance,
the more that can be heard). Interview with Okamura Keiko. In Bijutsu Tecchō, no.
1044, Nov. 2016, 168–175. Tokyo: Bijutsu Tecchō.
Yamashiro, Chikako. “Yamashiro Chikako: Talking About Her Own Work.” In Circulating World: The Art of Chikako Yamashiro. Ed. Asanuma Keiko. Tokyo: Yumiko Chiba
Associates, 2016.
Yoneda, Naoko. “Literature in Japanese Contemporary Art.” In Gendai bijutsu ni hisomu
bungaku. Tokyo: The National Art Center (2019). 26–37.

asian diasporic visual cultures and the americas 6 (2020) 11-26