Haruko Sasakawa "Recollection: the Plywood Fish"

Yoshimi Arts is pleased to present “Recollection: the Plywood Fish,” a solo exhibition by Haruko Sasakawa.
Haruko Sasakawa has been working with social issues in her work from an interest in how people are influenced by the media. Through her doctoral disseration, “War as seen in media—From War Painting To Video Games,” (2016) and the group exhibition “SENSOU-GA STUDIES (War Painting Studies)” that she organized in December 2015 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, she has closely examined how art and design were utilized as media during war times.
For this exhibition, we will be exhibiting the work she presented for her doctoral assessment at Tokyo Univerisity of the Arts in 2015. Based on her grandfather’s experience and testimony when he was assinged to be part of the suicide squad for the army, she visited the actual spot where her grandfather would have belonged, and consulted various documents to investigate the weapons he had seen. The human torpedo, according to her grandfather, was made of plywood, not iron plates.
The work will be reconstructed for the exhibition.
Yoshimi Arts

I recreated the torpedo with plywood, based on the documents I collected, and my grandfather’s testimony. The torpedo had a periscope attached, through which you can see the photos I collected throughout my journies around the islands . The faint images seen through the periscope might have been what my grandfather himself saw back then. However, all the photos are scenes of the present. It is impossible to fully capture the sights that he had actually seen.
Haruko Sasakawa

exhibition page (Yoshimi Arts website) | http://www.yoshimiarts.com/en/exhibition/20170825_Haruko_Sasakawa-Recollection.html

image | representation for the exhibition (not artwork) | installation view of solo exhibition "Recollection - Human Torpedo" 2015 (The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts)