Images explore devastation by and of people
the aftermath of March 11, 2011, when a powerful earthquake off the eastern shore of Japan triggered a devastating tsunami and irrevocably damaged a nuclear power plant.
Nearby at the Holocaust Museum Houston, Clint Willour has curated “Genocide? Man’s Inhumanity to Humankind,” works by Texas artists who explore how humans heap monstrosities upon each other. He used a question mark in the title because he wanted to expand viewers’ thoughts about how genocide is manifested — well beyond the four official and two pending genocides recognized by the United Nations.
Visiting the exhibits, I gravitated to standout works from each show that condense sprawling ideas into single images.
At the Asia Society, Ishu Han’s huge “Life Scan Fukushima” pixilates a now iconic depiction of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant (which from an angle also resembles the ruins of a Roman colosseum) with tiny images of 1-yen coins — a reference to human decisions that compounded the disaster.
“Nuclear power is intimately connected with the economy, and the government stirs up the public about it as if life as we know it could not exist without it,” Han writes. “The scene of that ruined edifice is the very image of ourselves.”
In a similar vein, but without the blurred effect that makes your eyes hurt, Houston photographer Joe Aker has layered thousands of small images into the figure of a Tibetan monk for his digital composition “If you kill enough of them, they quit trying.”
Aker said a trip to Tibet inspired him to create his piece.
“I saw what was happening to the people and culture of the Tibetan people, and it really horrified me,” he said. “I got to thinking of what 99 percent of the people in the world really want and came up with four things: peace, safety for family, food and shelter. Then I began to think about all the times in which innocent people were denied these things because of war, hate and greed.”
The images he overlaid onto the figure unfold as a minutely detailed timeline of horrors, taken from a string of conflicts that date from the American Civil War (one of the first wars to be captured in photographs) to the present. He also included images of “people killing others in the name of something to justify their own hate and greed,” Aker said.
Willour awarded Aker’s piece first place in the Holocaust Museum’s juried competition because it encapsulates much of what he wants viewers to take away from the show about genocide.
“How does it start, and how is it being promulgated? What makes it continue to happen?” Willour said. “It’s all over the world, and it’s happening all the time.”
He divided the “Genocide” show into galleries that illuminate atrocities across several centuries and six continents. The “Americana” room containing works about slavery and civil rights is particularly strong, as is a section devoted to Armenia and the Ukraine.
The captivating small paintings of Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak’s “Another Kind of Icon” honor victims of a famine orchestrated by Josef Stalin in Ukraine in the early 1930s. Nestor Topchy considers Ukraine more broadly, also referencing the Ottoman Empire, with “Your Wound or Mine?,” a quiet, small mixedmedia piece that looks like a ruined, ancient painting.
Sharon Kopriva’s “Finale” ends the show with a magnificent drawing that makes a nuclear explosion look spacey. With a statement on the wall label, she challenges viewers to think more about what’s ahead of humanity than behind it: “The past we cannot change. But our future, our destiny, we must own.”
Earth-grown mushrooms make an appearance at the Asia Society’s show, in Takashi Homma’s series featuring specimens shot on white backdrops, in a style somewhere between botanicals and laboratory documentation. These are contaminated mushrooms gathered from woods near the Fukushima nuclear plant.
“In the Wake” covers a range of approaches, from poetic photojournalism to metaphorical compositions, conveying how profoundly life has been altered as a result of the 3/11 catastrophes, bringing seismic shifts not just to the land itself but to peoples’ sense of time, memory and reality.
The tsunami killed 15,000 people and scrubbed the landscape as far as 200 miles inland. The failure of the Fukushima nuclear plant created a no-man’s land with a radius of more than 12 miles that is still too dangerous to approach.
This show offers much to appreciate and ponder, including ominously beautiful and reflective daguerreotypes by Takashi Arai; Rinko Kawauchi’s poignant slide show about a pair of black-and-white domesticated pigeons looking for home in a demolished village; a dark landscape from Lieko Shiga’s “Rasen kaigan (Spiral Shore)” series; and Daisuke Yokota’s surreal, apparitionlike compositions.
“If there has been anything important that has come of this tragedy, it has not been in the act of recording the changes in things that are visible to the eye,” Yokota writes. “It has been in the act of thinking about my own consciousness and how it has inevitably been changed.”
Multiply that thought.