Ishikawa Mao, Bad Ass and Beauty - One Love (T&M projects, 2021)石川真生 「醜くも美しい人の一生、私は人間が好きだ」

This is a catalogue from the Okinawa Prefectural Museum that traces Ishikawa Mao’s body of work. It opens with Ishikawa’s photographs from the 1970s of the friends and colleagues she met working in bars frequented by American GIs stationed on Okinawa, and surveys her subsequent series up to 2021.

The last body of work published in the catalogue is “The Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll”, an ongoing project started in 2013, which Ishikawa presents annually at the Citizens’ Gallery in Naha. Instalments of the scroll have featured scenes from Okinawan history and folklore, as well as coverage of current affairs and scenes from daily life in the islands, with texts hung beneath each picture. While I was studying in Tokyo, I would fly out over the summer holidays to join a group of volunteers who gather annually to install the work and listen to Ishikawa’s accounts of the year past. You could buy postcard packs with pictures from earlier scrolls (unfurling at more than 30 metres, there’s no room in the gallery to hang more than one). I wanted this catalogue as a record of the interviews and quotes she uses to give each picture a separate voice.

Yamashiro Chikako, Reframing the land / mind / body-scape (Tokyo photographic art museum, 2021)山城知佳子 「リフレーミング」

This is a catalogue from the first museum retrospective of Yamashiro Chikako, an Okinawan artist working in film and photography since the early 2000s. Okinawa is the source of much of Yamashiro’s visual imagery, but confronting issues surrounding the island’s history and ongoing political situation are also recurring concerns. Mud Man (2017) was shot across Henoko Bay (the site of heated local opposition to the relocation of a large US military base), neighbouring Iejima, and the South Korean island Jeju. This still is taken from the end of the film, when hands rise from amongst lilies in the soil to applaud demonstrators at a sit-in occurring across the water outside Henoko’s Camp Schwab.

Ogata Yu, Ogata Ono Ichirō, Okinawa Sculpture City (Hatori Shoten, 2015)尾形 一郎、 尾形優 沖 「縄彫刻都市」

This book was compiled by a pair of architects who travelled to Okinawa to photograph vernacular architecture and examples of abstract sculpture, both of which reflect a local propensity for working with concrete. Standard-issue concrete blocks arrived in Okinawa as military supply items, responding to the US occupying forces’ demands for new housing capable of withstanding typhoons. Okinawan architects and artists, building on extant traditions of stone-working and the coral reef limestone composition of the islands’ terrain, incorporated the material in radically creative ways. The authors term this “Okinawan Constructivism”, identifying it as a tendency that emerged from an earlier construction culture rather than springing from a modernist rejection of earlier styles.

I travelled to Okinawa for the first time ten years ago with Hirose Tsutomu, a photographer who has spent the last three decades documenting different designs of “flower block” (patterned concrete screen blocks) across mainland Japan. He introduced me to the work of Nosé Kojirō, whose sculpture features heavily in this book, and also made me aware of how examples of Okinawa’s distinctive concrete architecture is vanishing in the face of redevelopment.

Yahagi Toshihiko and Yokogi Arao, The Firespitting Woman (shinchosha co., 1995)矢作俊彦、横木安良夫 「火を吹く女」

This book tells the story of a girl who starts breathing fire three days shy of her 17th birthday. It’s written by a relatively well-known author of “hard-boiled” short stories and manga, Toshihiko Yahagi, with photographs by Yokogi Arao of the underground actress Takano Miyuki. The pictures show the nameless protagonist blowing flames at junkyards, on military bases, in subway entrances and suburban parks. I got this book from Kobayashi Takayuki, who runs my favourite bookstore in Tokyo, Flotsam Books.

Hi-Red Center, The Path of “Direct Action” (Nagoya City Museum / Shoto Museum of Art, 2013)ハイレッド・センター： 「直接行動」の軌跡

When I first moved to Tokyo, I found myself living next to the Kitakore Building, a conspicuously improvised warren of bars and shops with a public pathway running through the middle. I found out that the upper reaches of the structure and a concealed subterranean floor accessed through a manhole were being used by the art group Chim↑Pom. Speaking to an elderly neighbour about the group’s activities, which often took the form of dramatic stunts carried out in busy spots across the city, I learned about Hi-Red Center, which pioneered similarly interventionist methods (described as “direct action”) during the 1960s. My neighbour recalled getting caught up as a bystander on a Yamanote line train in 1962, describing HRC’s approach as a kind of spiritual antecedent to Chim↑Pom.

I worked on an exhibition about HRC, collecting photographs of their performances, publications, and posters, which carried their messages to wider audiences in Japan. The show was cancelled due to the pandemic, but the process of getting to know people bidding for their works at book auctions and discovering the living legacy of Akasegawa Genpei’s Thomasson Observation walks justified the wasted time.

Yamamoto Kansuke, Conveyor of the Impossible (Tokyo Station Gallery, 2001)山本悍右 「-不可能の伝達者-」

This book brings together all of Yamamoto Kansuke’s artworks, and it was my starting point for researching an exhibition and short catalogue about him last year. Yamamoto was one of Japan’s most important Surrealist artists, who started making collages and translating key texts from French during the 1930s. Yamamoto had flown largely under the radar throughout the 20th century. The independent scholar John Solt discovered Yamamoto’s work and made this exhibition possible at Tokyo Station Gallery in 2001. I met Kansuke’s son Toshio about six years ago, and later we were neighbours in Suginami-ku. Over the years, he has been very generous about letting me explore his father’s archive which houses prints, cut-outs, books and journals among many other treasures that thickened my understanding of Kansuke’s practice and worldview.

Utsu Yumiko, giant isopod (self-published, 2024)うつ・ゆみこ 「giant isopod」

This zine came about when Utsu Yumiko discovered the giant isopod Bathynomus doederleinii at the fish counter of Yoshiike supermarket in Ueno. Her compositions often make use of food and animals (and animals purchased as food for other animals), including the 13 woodlouse-like giant isopods she bought home that day.

I met Yumiko for the first time at Studio 35 Minutes, a former photolab turned gallery and bar in Araiyakushi, Tokyo, during her exhibition in 2022. Every surface of the gallery was covered with her pictures, and she had also set up a portrait studio for visitors with astral backdrops and furry props. She gave me this oversized zine towards the end of last summer, at the closing party for a show of Siân Davey’s garden portraits that I’d curated. I discovered when I got home that mine is the 20th copy, indicated on the tail of a many-legged cat she’d drawn in blue on the back cover. .