top of page
Peace Learning Tour:
Love and Guns
Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels
Part of the "SCREENINGS: Throw the Perfect Donut Far Away" Series
April 27 – May 6, 2019
Peace Learning Tour: Love and Guns: Text
Still from Making a Perfect Donut, 2017, Video, Courtesy of the artist © 2020 Kyun-Chome
Peace Learning Tour: Love and Guns: Image
The ‘Okinawa Problem’ is, of course, the problem of US military bases.
More than 70 years have passed since Japan's defeat, and more than half a century has passed since Okinawa returned to Japan, but the continuation of US military bases and the construction of new bases continues to be questioned in Okinawa. In an era of unchanging tragedy and oblivion, Kyun-Chome transformed the Okinawa Problem into humorous questions and elicited answers in every possible way. The language and positions visualized through the work can be seen as the possibility of imagining an answer to the actual problem of Okinawa. The artistic value of this work lies in this visualization. [...]
But at this stage, I cannot find it in myself to accept merely “seeing” as a concrete method to force you to answer to the problem of Okinawa, to take action and stop a situation of politics and power. [...] Even if I accept their artwork, try to understand all the different positions and claims, and try to engage in conversations, I cannot keep up with the actual speed of demanding an answer to this problem. The construction of the Henoko military base is mercilessly underway. [...]
Rather than considering its effect on reality, there is a way to consider the power of art in permanent history. I want to test art’s utility here and now to resist the speed of society…how can an ‘answer’ to the Okinawa Problem be drawn out—and not just in the artwork? I think the answer is in the distance…in seeing the Okinawa Problem in a location ‘far’ away from Okinawa to clearly convey its complexity and difficulty.”
- Iharada Haruka, Curator of "Love & Guns" & Director of "SCREENINGS"
—
“Peace Learning Tour: Love and Guns,” was a special week-long exhibition organized at the Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels by Okinawan curator Iharada Haruka and mainland Japanese artist duo Kyun-Chome, made up of Honma Eri and Nabuchi. They worked together to exhibit Kyun-Chome’s documentary art film, “Making a Perfect Donut” at the Gallery in an intriguing example of relational curating that weaved together the geopolitical dynamics of mainland Japan, Okinawa, and US militarism. In addition to screening Kyun-Chome’s film, the exhibition included the gallery’s permanent installation of the Hiroshima Panels by Iri and Toshi Maruki, as well as a participatory ‘survival game’ that took place at an airsoft site nearby the Gallery. Iharada and Kyun-Chome’s collaborative exhibition served to create unexpected parallels and associations between Okinawa’s long-ignored colonial position and the mainland’s more dominant histories to demonstrate how the legacy of war continues in Okinawa to this day.
Okinawa, the Ryūkūan island group to the south of Japan, has been subjected to a triangular “transpacific colonialism” between the US-Japan-Okinawa, from its annexation to Imperial Japan in 1879 to its present day position as the main hub of US military bases in Japan, despite making up only 1% of Japan's population. This exhibition was an instalment of a series of screening Iharada has been directing called "SCREENINGS: Throw the Perfect Donut Far Away," which showcases Kyun-Chome's film in various venues and film festivals as a way to create dialogue about Okinawa's geo-political situation—a narrative largely ignored on mainland Japan and virtually ignored elsewhere in the world.
Peace Learning Tour: Love and Guns: Text
[click through for gallery view]
 |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
Peace Learning Tour: Love and Guns: Portfolio
Between 2017 and 2018, Kyun-Chome engaged with the Okinawan community to compile a series of interviews that piece together the complexity and dissonance of local perspectives regarding their own position within the ‘Okinawa Problem,’ creating a quippy documentary art film called “Making a Perfect Donut.” For the film, Kyun-Chome documented their conversations with ten Okinawan residents of different backgrounds and livelihoods, before introducing their art project to make a “perfect hole-less donut” by combining an American donut with a traditional Okinawan donut, sata andagi. Although the artists insist that their aim was to facilitate the creation of this perfect donut, what makes up the majority of the film’s content are each resident’s unique reaction and insights to their bizarre proposal. Without making distinctly clear their own opinion of the situation, Kyun-Chome rendered visible the duality of Okinawa’s situation in which the local community is socio-politically subjugated by the US military presence that occupies their land but has also simultaneously become economically dependent on that same presence—a dichotomy that makes the topic both omnipresent and one to be avoided.
We included “Love and Guns” into our curatorial project because of the relations created inside and outside of the exhibition space that work to dismantle whitewashed and dismissive understandings of the so-called Okinawa Problem and its historical context, as accepted on the Japanese mainland. “Making a Perfect Donut” was screened alongside the Maruki Gallery’s permanent collection of 15 monumental “Hiroshima Panels,” the collaborative masterpieces of the late avant-garde artist couple Iri and Toshi Maruki, who witnessed the aftermath of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. The Maruki’s, painted over a 32 year period, unflinchingly depict the horrors and violence of the bombing’s aftermath, showcasing their eyewitness accounts of what the couple had witnessed—realities that they strived to share with audiences as US censorship during the occupation period caused fear that Japanese people would never learn what had taken place. These paintings as a backdrop to Kyun-Chome’s film allowed viewers to link the violence and censorship of the Pacific War to Okinawa’s ongoing marginalization, dismantling the notion that the conflict is only between the US and Okinawa, revealing instead that it is largely an issue due to the complicity of the Japanese mainland.
Peace Learning Tour: Love and Guns: Text
 |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
Peace Learning Tour: Love and Guns: Portfolio
The notion of “Peace Learning” (平和学習), used in the exhibition title, is quite common in Japan, offered by Peace Museums that were constructed back in the more progressive years of the early 1990s to teach about wartime and violence as a way to prevent future atrocities and human-caused suffering. Dissatisfied without a participatory element to their exhibition, Kyun-Chome introduced a special participation-based program as a way to expand the Gallery’s objective of ‘peace learning’ into an audience experience. In addition to simply placing these narratives in proximity to each other with film screenings available to the public each day, on the special program days they led teams of up to 15 participants in a 2-hour “survival game” (サバゲー), a popular pseudo war game that originated in Japan in the 1980s in which opposing teams ‘wage war’ with airsoft guns, in one of the many game sites that the artists discovered were common in the forests surrounding the museum. The war game was followed by a lecture at the Maruki Gallery about the Marukis and the Hiroshima Panels as well as their activism and paintings about the war crimes faced by Okinawan people throughout the Pacific War and especially during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. This was followed by the screening of “Making a Perfect Donut,” and the program ended with a lecture by Iharada and Kyun-Chome. With this added participatory programming, "Love and Guns" became a way to think about the experience of war and peace at the same time—to consider the current situation in Okinawa in a space for viewers to form new associations as active participants in the construction of meaning and re-emergence of forgotten histories. The constellation of relations between the war games, Maruki panels, and Kyun-Chome’s film, mimicked the triangular relationship between the US, Japan, and Okinawa—bringing focus Okinawa’s position as simultaneously peripheralized and exploited by the rest of the nation.
“This is an era when easy-to-understand answers are often required. We are choosing a detour rather than searching for a shortcut. […] SCREENINGS is a way to throw donuts into distant countries and places through holes like warp-holes in Tokyo. So by all means, I want you to go through the hole with the donuts as they are thrown. And I want you to be thrown far away. You may be nervous, but that can’t be avoided. There is tension in donuts.”
- Kyun-Chome, Concepual Statement for SCREENINGS
Hyperallergic Review
Bijutsu Techō Review (JP)
Peace Learning Tour: Love and Guns: Text
Peace Learning Tour: Love and Guns: HTML Embed
bottom of page