Kawada Kikuji's Hiroshima Photos Free at Japan House
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- Kawada Kikuji, now 93, exhibits photographs taken with a 4x5 plate camera and reprinted on washi paper, depicting vestiges of American culture — Lucky Strike boxes, Coca-Cola bottles — found in the wreckage of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb.
- Kikuji was 12 when the bomb hit Hiroshima; his photobook Chizu (The Map), collecting Hiroshima impressions made in his 20s, has sold for up to £25,000 per copy, the review notes.
- A series of Kikuji's seemingly abstract images depicts stains on the walls of the Genbaku (A-Bomb) Dome — all that remained of bodies — using a detached, fragmented approach the reviewer says "veers away from truth" because the reality is incomprehensible.
- Kikuji's Vortex, a three-channel projection of digital images from his recent Instagram posts, creates fleeting sequences of silhouettes, shadows, smoke, clouds and reflections that the reviewer describes as "swimming against the current."
- Iwane Ai's panoramic UV print Kīpuka: Paia Mantokuji Soto Mission (2015) depicts the Japanese community in Hawaii performing traditional Bon dances — a Buddhist ritual originating in Fukushima to honor ancestors — with the title referencing a Hawaiian term for an oasis in new lava.
- Ai creates spectral portraits by projecting archival pictures onto sugarcane fields and photographing them, and her Tohoku cherry blossom images embed oni figures from Japanese folklore as guardians of nature.
- Ai's final two-channel slideshow reveals that 20 years ago, under a cherry tree in spring, she learned her sister had taken her own life — seared with deep sadness, the reviewer writes.
Why it matters: The exhibition makes Kikuji's rare Hiroshima photographs — originals of *Chizu* valued at up to £25,000 — freely accessible to a London audience for the first time, pairing them with Ai's contemporary ancestral and environmental meditations to create what the reviewer calls a quietly devastating continuity between two islands shaped by catastrophe.
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