Paper short abstract:

Tomiyama Taeko's collaborative art incorporates ecological themes in response to 3.11. They evoke "the uncanny" to convey unease, with ghostly fish, fossils, and the marine environment, moving from a "sea of memory" to "toxic seas," and reversing the common perception of Japan as an island country.

Paper long abstract:

Tomiyama Taeko (1921-) is best known for her work on remembrance of Japanese war and colonialism in mainland Asia, and for the fact that she creates art in collaboration with a musical composer and a series of photographers. Typically her imagery includes humans, anthropomorphic animals, and gods and poses large ethical questions. Her later work has also incorporated ecological themes, most notably in response to the 3.11 disaster. Tomiyama and her collaborators are particularly good at evoking the uncanny to convey a sense of unease. We will focus in this presentation on their use of ghostly fish, fossils, and the marine environment, which introduce commentary on nature and science. The phantom fish, not quite healthy and not quite alive, has become a recurring image in Tomiyama's work, but was first introduced by film director and photographer Hara Kazuo in the slide montage he created of some of Tomiyama's paintings and collages in 1986. These ghostly fish are also reminiscent of Lee Bonticue (b. 1931), an American artist who has also produced work that ranges across genres (painting, sculpture, printmaking), comments on science & technology, and is a long-considered response to the devastation of war. She too uses ghostly fish and fossils to evoke the uncanny space between the natural and not-quite-natural worlds. Tomiyama's recurrent engagement with the ocean has long framed it as a "sea of memory" but now more darkly as "toxic seas." In a variety of ways, her projects reverse the historical perception of Japan as "an island country" to show the ways that the ocean and its animal life—both contemporary and Cretaceous—connects us all.