Japan House’s first, free photography exhibition, Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai begins with slow-burning suggestions of fire: a box of Lucky Strike cigarettes, its surface crackling and curled; Coca-Cola bottles sinking into a dark bed of crushed ashes. Kikuji took the photographs with a 4x5 plate camera; here they’re reprinted on washi paper, the textures and density of the blackness making them even more evocative of obliteration. They are vestiges of American culture in the wake of American violence – images found in the wreckage of Hiroshima in the aftermath of atomic destruction.
Kikuji, now 93, is a photo geek’s photographer; people have paid up to £25,000 for a copy of Chizu (The Map), the photobook that collects together his tense, ruminative Hiroshima impressions, made when he was in his 20s. A series of seemingly abstract images depicts the stains on the wall – all that remained of bodies in the Genbaku (A-Bomb) Dome. Kikuji was 12 when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. His approach to capturing one of the worst scenes of mass destruction in human history was to tell it with a kind of detachment, indirect and impressionistic, fragmented. It’s a story about proximity to trauma and surviving it. His photographs veer away from truth. The reality is impossible to comprehend – for both Kikuji standing there, and us viewing the images. These were revolutionary photographs at the time – and they still feel new in their search to express the inexpressible.
The dimly lit, subterranean gallery keeps you cocooned in this elegiac, brooding atmosphere. Kikuji is drawn to images that trace the extremities of the Earth, the visible outer edges of our existence – the sky, the horizon, water, burning suns and scorching fires. In the best part of these show, all these parameters collide. Vortex is a three-channel projection of digital images cribbed from Kikuji’s recent Instagram posts. The ambient images jump between projections, reappearing in new orders, creating new affinities and dissonances between them as they do – but just like in life, they’re too fleeting to catch on to and hold for long. You try to keep up, piecing together silhouettes, shadows, smoke, clouds, reflections and blurs of vaporous, vibrant colour as they appear like a mirage in a flickering sequence. It feels like swimming against the current. I give up trying to find the seam, and just let the atmosphere flow into me. Perhaps this is all we can do – let go.
This message primes you for the emotional climax of this exhibition, a series of works by Iwane Ai, a younger, female photographer from Japan. The two are connected loosely by themes of environment, loss and belonging, but more by the spectral, poetic atmosphere of their works. Ai’s section starts with a curving panoramic UV print, glowing red and blue, dozens of larger-than-life hands raised in the air, some holding sticks, suspended in the centre of the space. The 2015 work, Kīpuka: Paia Mantokuji Soto Mission, depicts members of the Japanese community in Hawaii, performing traditional Bon dances, a Buddhist ritual to honour ancestors, that originated in Fukushima.
The image wraps around you, flowing with the heat and energy of lava – the panoramic photograph paying homage to the 360-degree commemorative images made of Japanese funerals in Hawaii in the 1930s, using a hand-wound Kodak Cirkut camera. Kīpuka refers to the Hawaiian term for an oasis in a bed of new lava, an image folding destruction into renewal. The threat of the volcano links life on both islands. Passing between all these hands in the air, you’re in the middle of a celebration and revolt, hands thrown up in protest and defeat, calling out to higher powers for mercy. The communities here and in Fukushima have experienced the catastrophic wrath of nature multiple times. Earthquakes, eruptions, tsunamis – this is also a story of survival.
Humanity feels small and blighted in the works of both artists, and phantoms are everywhere: Ai creates spectral portraits by projecting old archival pictures on to sugarcane fields and photographing them, embedding them in the landscape. I move into another series in this darkened space, Ai’s glowing, glittering visions of cherry blossoms in Tohoku – among Japan’s most widely photographed subjects, but Ai makes them interesting, and somehow more transcendental, imagining among the trees Japanese ogre-like oni figures from folklore, guardians of nature. The ineffable beauty of the cherry blossoms is seared with deep sadness. As Ai recalls in a final personal body of work, photographs taken before she was a professional, presented as a two-channel slideshow – it was under a cherry tree in spring, 20 years ago, that she learned her sister had taken her own life.