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  • 2023
  • Nakagawa's Witness Trees in Tokyo Gallery

Nakagawa's photographs stand witness to painful history

Thursday, May 04, 2023

Osamu James Nakagawa, Tule Lake 01, Newell, California courtesy of the artist

Source: Photo Gallery International

In 2022, Eskenazi School Professor Osamu James Nakagawa made a 15,200-mile pilgrimage around the US to photograph the sites where Japanese and Japanese-American people were incarcerated during World War 2. On view at Tokyo's Photo Gallery International May 17-July 1, 2023, the work is a reckoning with the artist's own national identity.

Artist's statement:

The turmoil of the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and the increased anti-Asian hate crimes during the Trump presidency were a painful reminder to me of America’s deeply engrained systemic racism. Amidst all this, as I turned 60, I had to part with my parent’s home in Japan. Together these things forced a personal reconning:  I was symbolically severing my connection to the place my family has always called home, while questioning, yet again, my value in the eyes of my adopted country. 

 Am I American? Or Japanese? Japanese-American?

 This led me to wonder about the experiences of Japanese-Americans whose ancestors immigrated prior to World War II.  Unlike my family, who came to the US during the post-war economic boom, these older generations of immigrants and their descendants seemed guarded, as if they were carrying a burden of an American experience that was too much to speak of – a dark experience deeply rooted yet just under the surface, inherent in the structures of their adopted nation. 

 Two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcibly incarcerating approximately 125,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans, mainly in camps in the arid American West.  Many families suffered the dual trauma of losing their land, homes, and businesses while being isolated in the camps’ harsh desolate environments at the hand of their own government.

In 2022 I made a 15,200-mile pilgrimage to the sites where these camps had been, in an attempt to understand how the racism inherent in my American experience had carried a former generation of immigrants to places of such desolation.  These trees emerged from the thousands of photographs I took at the sites. I felt them staring at me with the weight of their unspeakable memories.  As I inhaled the light, air, dust, wind, and smells of the former camps, I took their portraits, connecting past and present, positive, and negative, analog and digital to draw out their aura.

Now that I no longer have a home to return to, I have no other choice but to call this country my home.  

                                                                                          Osamu James Nakagawa

Osamu James Nakagawa, Poston 03, Parker, Arizona courtesy of the artist

Bio:

Born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Tokyo, Osamu James Nakagawa returned to the United States, moving to Houston, Texas, at the age of 15. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1993. Currently, Mr. Nakagawa is the Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor of Photography at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Integrative Photographic Studies. He lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana. 

His career as an artist began in the 1990s. Since then he has worked on numerous projects exploring identity and the effects of moving between countries.

Selected his solo exhibitions include Eclipse, PGI, Tokyo (2018), Kai, Poetic Scape, Tokyo (2018), Kai, sepia EYE gallery, NY (2018), GAMA Caves, PGI, Tokyo (2014), Okinawa–Gama/Banta/Remains, Shadai Gallery, Tokyo (2014), Okinawa Trilogy, Kyoto University of Art & Design, Kyoto (2013), Banta: Stained Memory, Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa (2009), Mado, Houston Center for Photography, Texas (2000).

Selected group shows include Underfoot, gallery Main, Kyoto (2023), Currency: Photography Beyond Capture, Deichtorhallen Hamburg (The 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg, 2022), Photography To End All Photography, Brandts Museum, Denmark (2018), A Shared Elegy, Grunwald Gallery of Art, Indiana University (2017), Point of Departure, Kenshichi Heshiki Photo Room, Okinawa (2017), After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2012), War/Photography, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2012).

Nakagawa is a recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), Higashikawa New Photographer of the Year (2010) and Sagamihara Photographer of the Year (2015).

His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; George Eastman Museum; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa; The Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and others.

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