The memory of Fukushima visualizes a forgotten "future"

Eugene Kangawa was born in the United States in 1989 and is currently based in Tokyo. Since his time at Kyoto University of Art and Design, he has participated in exhibitions both domestically and internationally, presenting video works, as well as installations using photography and sculpture. He has been invited to the ggg "Ginza Graphic Gallery" as a representative designer of his generation, established ON,inc, and is also attracting attention as a next-generation artist involved in collaborative research on urban planning and technology, as well as software design.

The video work "from the future," which captures serious subject matter and emerges from traversing the distinct contexts of Fukushima and Cambodia's Phnom Penh, was produced between 2012 and 2013. In this piece, Kangawa invited individuals with no prior information about Fukushima and its surroundings to visit Fukushima from overseas and commissioned them to write imaginative narratives and record landscapes, asking, "What happened here, and when?" Based on these accounts, the work attempts a quasi-visualization of a "future" that could easily occur, a future that has been forgotten by the memory of Fukushima.

While re-examining these imaginative narratives, the artist focused on the phrase, "This place resembles Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge." He then revisited and filmed the ruins of Phnom Penh, now a tourist destination, and Fukushima, which he had visited before. The exhibition at Yuka Tsuruno Gallery presents this work as a three-channel installation.

This work, while deconstructing the unrelated contexts of Fukushima and Phnom Penh, connects them through diverse commonalities, beautifully evoking elements such as artifice, nature, life and death, and cycles. It addresses issues of fragmentation and connection, and the erosion of memory, not through direct methods, but with a powerfully critical stance, calling our attention to the existence of crucial themes that are fading from memory.

Eugene Kangawa "from the future"
Dates│July 26 (Sat) – August 30 (Sat) *Closed Sundays, Mondays, and national holidays. Summer break: August 12 (Tue) – 16 (Sat)
Hours│11:00 – 19:00
Venue│Yuka Tsuruno Gallery
2F, 2-9-13 Shinonome, Koto-ku, Tokyo
Tel. 03-3520-1700