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Culmination of Multiyear Collaboration with Hiroshima City University

The Benton Museum of Art at 91���� is pleased to announce the opening of Each Day Begins with the Sun Rising: Four Artists from Hiroshima, the first US exhibition for four Japanese contemporary artists: Megumi Fukuda, Taro Furukata, Genki Isayama, and Kana Kou. These artists present work that explores the ongoing environmental, cultural, and social impact of the United States’s fatal bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, particularly in light of Japan’s postwar industrialization and investment in nuclear power. Hailing from Hiroshima and its neighboring Seto Inland Sea region, the artists use multiple approaches and media—drawing, painting, site-specific installation, video, social activism, and historical research—as tools to address politics and resilience in the region. The exhibition, on view February 10–June 25, 2022, is the result of a unique partnership between Hiroshima City University and 91����.

Fukuda, Furukata, and Isamaya will join 91���� as artists-in-residence in early February, offering talks, workshops with students, and performances. The exhibition is also accompanied by a full slate of programs, including film screenings and lectures. Subject to health and safety protocols of 91����, an opening celebration with the artists is scheduled for February 12, 2022; please visit the Benton’s website for the most up-to-date information on the event.

This exhibition grew out of a multi-year collaboration between 91���� and Hiroshima City University (HCU). The program, Birds, Bombs, and Beauty: An Interdisciplinary Study of Nature, Politics, and Culture Linking the Seto Inland Sea Region of Japan with Southern California focused on climate justice, politics, and the visual arts with scholarly engagement between students, faculty, and staff from 91���� and HCU. All the artists are alumni of HCU, and Furukata is also a professor there. They were selected for the Benton’s exhibition through an in-depth review process conducted by the Benton curatorial team. 

“Two years ago, an interdisciplinary contingent of faculty members, students, and curator Rebecca McGrew from the Benton were preparing to travel to Japan to visit the Seto Inland Sea region,” said Kyoko Kurita, professor of Japanese literature at 91����. “We were all interested in exploring the relationship among nature, industrialization, and art in this incredibly rich area. Though we ultimately had to cancel our trip because of the pandemic, we were able to move ahead with this exhibition. Over 5.5 million people have now died of COVID-19 so far. Human lives are so fragile, and yet works of art remind us that each day deserves our attention.”

“The Benton is honored to be able to present the work of these Japanese artists for the first time in the United States,” said Benton senior curator McGrew. “Their work reflects a complex set of circumstances, filled with both history and hope. All of us here at 91���� have learned a great deal from our collaboration with our colleagues at HCU, not least of which are the stark parallels between our countries related to land use, environmental degradation, and climate change and how the visual arts can engage with these issues.”

Through careful engagements with Japan’s history and landscapes, the four artists in the exhibition examine their nation’s tenuous post-WWII relationships with nuclear power and industrialization. Contemplating temporal ideas of decay, preservation, and im/permanence, their works anchor the fraught present era of climate crisis within an embattled past.

In the installation by Megumi Fukuda, Each Day Begins with the Sun Rising and Ends with the Sun Setting (2012/2022), solar panels activate and illuminate the ephemera and electronica of modern industrial life—discarded chairs, lamps, and television sets. Taro Furukata’s installation, Faith (2017), includes a photograph of Paul Tibbets (the pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima); a vinyl disc of the song “Enola Gay” (by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark); and fabric hand-dyed with food-based pigments and silkscreened with stars.

�ұ�԰쾱&�Բ�����;�������ⲹ����’s artworks explore natural and dynamic processes such as decay and chemical reactions. Shot in real time, Isayama’s videos screen (2017) and Objects (2017) present objects disintegrating in an operatic arc of creation and destruction. Kana Kou’s richly detailed and massive multi-panel landscape drawings and installations depict mountain ranges in Japan and California. Kou’s renderings in Beautiful Limit (2010) reflect her close observations and her intense engagement with the landscape.

Charles Worthen, a professor in the Faculty of Arts at HCU, notes that “We may regard the made things of Megumi Fukuda, Taro Furukata, Genki Isayama, and Kana Kou in the context of one of the most tragically ‘unmade’ places in history, but the legacy of Hiroshima is only one filter through which to see their work. Their drawings, videos, and installations go beyond this history to reveal the equanimity of worlds coming together and disappearing. That they will be seen in the new Benton Museum of Art across the sea is cause for celebration.”

The exhibition title, Each Day Begins with the Sun Rising, is drawn from the name of Fukuda’s installation, and it links the work offered here with the mundane yet awe-inspiring occurrence that unites people during a period of ongoing global political conflict, humanitarian catastrophes, and climate emergency. 

 

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About the Artists

Megumi Fukuda’s immersive and interactive installations comment on ephemeral elements that are often outside of human control—for example, nature, weather, and our bodies—and the transitory beauty of Japan’s natural environment. At the same time, Fukuda turns a critical eye on Japanese environmental policies and culture—specifically, Japan’s complicated relationship with women and motherhood. Fukuda was born in 1976 in Hiroshima and received an MFA from Hiroshima City University Faculty of Art in 2001. She has had residencies at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Tokyo Wonder Site Exchange Residency Program [Berlin–Tokyo], Berlin, 2013), Künstlerhaus Salzwedel (Salzwedel, Germany, 2012), and Künstlerhaus Eckernförde (Eckernförde, Germany, 2011). In 2006, she received one of the Grants for Young Artists from the Pola Art Foundation, Tokyo, Japan. Fukuda lives in Hiroshima.

Focusing on identity and social participation, Taro Furukata describes his artworks and experiences as “invisible transformations.” His installations examine complex theories surrounding political events and historical archives, and highlight moments in history that deserve greater scrutiny. Furukata also explores Japanese culture through the performance of Japanese rituals, such as making the traditional plum wine his grandmother made in Hiroshima during his youth and then using the wine to dye flags that hint at the country’s imperial past. Furukata was born in Okayama, Japan, in 1975, and received a BFA (1999) and MFA (2001) at Hiroshima City University. He currently lives and works in Hiroshima.

In Genki Isayama’s videos, themes of destruction, entropy, and decomposition are metaphors for sociopolitical erasure and the obliteration of cultural memories. His screen video presented here and other video works unfold gradually, granting the viewer time to discover details that are initially hidden from view. Isayama was born in 1987, in Oita, Japan, and lives in Hiroshima. In 2009, he received a BFA from Kyoto University of Arts and Design, and in 2011 he received an MFA from the Graduate School of Art Hiroshima City University.

For Kana Kou, drawing was an extension of the lived experience of a body in space, and the act allowed her to explore the body’s limitations and investigate how movement and gesture are inherently creative acts. Kou’s experiential two- and three-dimensional panoramic landscape drawings play with perspective and scale. To produce her work, she inhabited each landscape and memorized the sensations of her physical exploration, augmenting her visual recollections with bodily memories. Kou was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1975. She received a BFA (2002) from Hiroshima City University and completed residency programs in the United States, Finland, and Japan. After living on Shodoshima (an island in the Seto Inland Sea), Kou moved to Kamakura, Japan, where she lived and worked until her death in 2020.

 

About the Exhibition

The exhibition is curated by Rebecca McGrew, senior curator, with assistant curator of collections Salim Moore, Sam Yi Ying Chan ’22, Vivian Kuo ’23, Madeleine Mount-Cors ’23, Max Podell ’24, and Max Uehara ’25.

The 91���� research team for the collaboration Birds, Bombs, and Beauty includes Phillip Choi (Physics), Nina Karnovsky (Biology), Kyoko Kurita (Japanese Literature), Tom Le (International Relations/Politics), and Rebecca McGrew (Art History, Benton). The Hiroshima City University team includes Yoshiaki Furuzawa (Conflict Resolution/Peacebuilding), Michael Gorman (American Literature & Culture), Robert Jacobs (Nuclear History), Ulrike Woehr (Gender Studies), Charles Worthen (Art), and Masae Yuasa (Sociology).

Major support for this exhibition is provided by the Estate of Judith Ann Cion ’65. The research was supported by EnviroLab Asia and the Henry Luce Foundation.

 

About the Benton Museum of Art at 91����

Now housed in the new Benton Museum of Art designed by Machado Silvetti and Gensler, 91����’s collection of art numbers 16,000 objects, including Italian Renaissance paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; works on paper, including a first edition print series by Francisco Goya given by Norton Simon; and works in various media produced in Southern California in the twentieth century. In keeping with 91����’s reputation as a leading center of the visual arts, the collection also includes works by such esteemed alumni as Chris Burden ’69, Marcia Hafif ’51, Helen Pashgian ’56, Peter Shelton ’73, and James Turrell ’65. Recognized globally for its commitment to contemporary art, the museum is the home of The Project Series, which has featured more than 50 contemporary Southern California artists since it began in 1999. Through its collaboration with students and faculty, the museum encourages active learning and creative exploration across all disciplines of study within the liberal arts context.