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Towards the last two months of my last visit to India in the spring of 2012, I encountered the Tibetan community in exile in India experiencing painful news of their people self-immolating in fire one after another in China-occupied Tibet. My experiences in the past visits in India (drawing a cremation site in Varanasi, documenting fire pits, cremation alters, and contemplating on life and death around fire) synchronized with this particular movement, an extreme way of ‘offering’ their bodies to ‘fire’ for asking freedom and peace.I could not help drawing large and small drawings as emotional response and with a sense of mourning.

After coming back to Vancouver, the self-immolation kept happening and I felt that my personal and professional task is not finished.

I have come back to India to continue to document and draw under the same theme. tomoyoihaya@hotmail.com

15 April 2015

Two Waterfalls from My Eyes

Eyes, burning "lights" among eyes
burning incense with a candle light
all of sudden there came the sense of presence
of people near and far who passed away from this world,
in flame, in the shaken and collapsed land, in water and in immeasurable pain

Uncle came, dear friend came and many came around the candle light
Many whom I never met, I know only their last stories in their troubled lands.
They came, even though it were in my illusion.

Eyes were shedding tears like waterfalls.
Eyes became surfaces of lakes, connected from a heart
For thousands of eyes, thousands of waterfalls

On one night after a memorial day of Yushu earthquake 2010