November 2019 Artist in Residency: Ai Iwane
Ai Iwane, from Tokyo, Japan, is a photographer who has drawn inspiration from observing and documenting niche communities around the world. She studied in the United States at Petrolia High School (1991), an alternative school located in Northern California, where she was encouraged to learn self-sufficiency and practice an eco-conscious lifestyle. She began her career as a photographer in 1996, and is published in Japan in GQ, Rolling Stone, and Forbes.
Selected exhibitions include: KIPUKA, 2018, solo show at Nikon Salon Ginza and Osaka; FUKUSHIMA ONDO, solo show at Kanzan Gallery Tokyo; Island in My Mind, Fukushima, 2018, solo show at Maui Arts & Cultural Center; Fukushima Now and Future 2018, group show at Fukushima Museum; Biocracy 2017 group show at Hajimari Art Center in Fukushima; WARAKOH think and feel Tohoku vol.3 2017 at Museum of Art Warakoh in Kochi; Transit Republic 2017, group show at Arena 1 Gallery in Santa Monica, California; and Fukushima, Now and Future 2017, group show at Tsunagi Museum in Kumamoto and Fukushima Museum.
She has received Pola Art Foundation Grant 2018, Asahi Shimbun Foundation Grant 2018, and GB FUND, Association for Corporate Support of the Arts, 2016. She was in-resident Artist at University of Hawaii Hilo, 2014.
Her photo book “KIPUKA” was published by Seigensha Art Publishing in November 2018.
Q & A
How does your work comment on the working conditions that immigrants face while working in plantations?
Immigrants came to Hawaii for a better life, but it was harsh labor that was waiting for them. Cutting and carrying heavy sugarcanes for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, with long sleeves to avoid centipedes in the hot weather. Their labor was indispensable for the industry of mass production.
When dealing with challenging topics, an artist’s practice can sometime have positive or negative effects on one’s personal life. Has your work affected you personally? Can you share the ways that it has?
I spent 12 years on this project [Fukushima Ondo], but instead of making a long plan, I always encountered interesting facts that kept me thrilled, when I noticed it was all this time.
Until now, I always thought that photography is to face the present, and I always looked at it, only the moments in front of me.
However, I continued to produce on the theme of the song, Fukushima Ondo, that was transmitted to Hawaii from Fukushima brought by the immigrants over 100 years ago. Meeting the people who passed the songs through the generations, I learned how deeply I understand the past that leads to is thinking about the future of the same length. It gave me a different point of view in to look at myself in the longterm.
Fukushima Ondo, Shosuke Nihei, Kailua Camp, 18.5” x 24”, Digital C Print, 2016 - Shosuke Nihei, who taught fue (Japanese flute) for Fukushima Ondo, and his family
Fukushima Ondo, Asa Abe, Puunene Camp, 18.5” x 24”, Digital C Print, 2016 - Asa Abe, who taught the dance of Fukushima Ondo, and her family
You used a large format camera that captures images on film that is 2 meters long. That reads as quite cinematic. Can you talk about this material choice? Does your work ever cross over into video or do you ever work with different mediums?
The camera I use is called Kodak Cirkut, which rotates 360 degrees mechanically by the mainspring, was mainly used to take funeral group photos in Hawaii from the 1910s to the 1970s. When I found the photo for the first time, I was surprised at its resolution, but I didn't know what kind of camera it was used for. Eventually, I met with the camera that was used in a Japanese photo studio in Maui. I started working with it because it came to me. I continued thinking of what I should work with it while repairing the camera. I came up with the idea of two subjects; the inside of the evacuation zone of Fukushima, the hometown of the song, and the abandon cemeteries of the Issei, the first generations immigrants.
It takes time when the camera rotates, it takes time when you look at the photos. Working with the Cirkut brought me a new impression to photography.
As I complete this project into a book, I also produced a film called “Bon-Uta, A Song from Home”. The film connects Hawaii and Fukushima, and stories of Japanese immigrant through songs and music. I worked with Yuji Nakae, a reliable director to work together. Although the film is not my artwork, it was started from my photography project. It was released in February 2018, shown in 48 movie theaters nationwide in Japan.
Futaba, Fukushima, 10” x 5’9”, Pigment Print, 2014 - This is a corner in the shopping district of Nagatsuka, Futaba. This shows the old major thoroughfare, which connected Tokyo to Sendai, and Route 6, a local road.
Futaba, Fukushima, 10” x 6’3.5”, Pigment Print, 2014
“At the age of 26, I founded Yokoyama Electric here next to my house. I had 12 employees. We did electrical work, mainly replacing the lighting of the building of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. Every day for 25 years my employees went to nuclear power plants for work. Right after the accident, I was requested to do restoration work. At first, I didn’t think I should bring the employees, so I entered for a few days alone, installing filter ventilation fans. It was not a matter of money, but a desire to help the company that supported us a long time. I did not have any fear of the unseen radioactivity. Even now I still go to the plant to do my job, driving for an hour and a half from where I evacuated to.” - Hisakatsu Yokoyama standing in front of his destroyed home and company
Tomioka, Fukushima, 10” x 5’4”, Pigment Print, 2013
“Tomioka was engaged in agriculture. We lived with our son and his family and raised Special Futaba Rice in the nine- acre field I owned. After the disaster, the family became very discouraged with evacuation life, and my wife stopped walking around, as she used to do, when living in temporary housing. My farmland became useless, but the land was purchased as the site of the research institute of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency Sector of Fukushima Research and Development. It will be a research base for the waste furnace.” - Farmers Taisuke and Itsuko Saito standing in their rice field
In your work you document immigrants and their passage from Fukushima to Hawaii. Have you found a loss in cultural traditions during their transition and/or how are these traditions adapted?
Current Japanese Americans in Hawaii are the 4th and 5th generations. Many of them don't speak Japanese. Even they don’t know what they are singing about, they pray for ancestors as they sing. I began to understand that it is more likely to chanting the sutra.
For those who are no longer directly connected to Japan, the only clue can be what they have been told to do by their great grandfather on traditional occasions. It can be a recipe for the festival meals of great Grandma wrote. Since those thoughts and notes passed through generations are the only key to their identity, they try to keep it as they were told, not making any changes. it is very interesting to see more authentic Japanese culture and customs remained in Hawaii than in Japan today.
One of LATITUDE’s core values is easy access to education. What are you most excited to learn more about during your residency at LATITUDE?
I'd like to learn the skill of producing very large format prints from my panoramic negatives, like 9-meters long. I am very excited!
What do you most hope to share with the LATITUDE community about the people/environments that you photograph?
By experiencing the Great East Japan Earthquake, our generation in Japan realized that individual lives were irreplaceable. In the coming era, natural disasters will probably occur more often, and we will live in repeated disappearances and losses.
There is a nuclear power plant in the suburbs of Chicago, so I don't want to think about it, but the possibility of an accident like Fukushima someday is not zero. I believe it is very important to feel by replacing the various things that are happening in the world with yourself. I would like to share with you the current Fukushima, and have conversations about the past and the future tied to it.
What are you currently reading, listening to, and / or watching?
I usually read literary magazines when I take a bath, in the tub. Now that Japan's era has changed from the Heisei period to the era of Heiwa, I am reading a special feature issue of looking back on Heisei's great novels.