Through Darkness, Water Remembers Tomoyo Ihaya
This exhibition is the second phase of what was shown at Hsinchu Railway Warehouse in the beginning of 2022. I could not enter Taiwan so after a discussion with the director of ACCTON Arts Foundation, Yu-hsuan Lee, we decided to present the works in progress without my presence, and later to exhibit more developed works when I could enter Taiwan and produce additional art works on site.
The initial inspiration to start on this project came during and after my visits to
Taiwan and Korea between 2017 and 2019. In 2019, I was given the opportunities to create and exhibit works on both countries’ tragic history and struggle for human rights and democratic freedom, such as the 228 Incident and White Terror in Taiwan from 1947 to 1987 and the democratic uprising in Gwangju, Korea in 1980. These opportunities resulted from a similar series of works ‘Drawings from Dharamsala’ that I have produced, since 2012, on Tibetan human rights issues.
During my visits, I met many women friends who devoted their lives to social activism. A few of them experienced the deaths of loved ones during struggles for democracy and freedom in both countries.
Another significant encounter was with a statue of a girl, which I passed by daily on the way to the Gallery during my residency and exhibition in Gwangju, Republic of Korea. It was built as a memorial for ‘comfort women’ victims during the Japanese colonization. I gazed at her face many times and felt heavy about what complex sufferings the military government then of my country caused.
These meetings inspired me to make a body of works about ‘women’. I hoped to make something that was not politically biased but that expressed forms of ‘feeling pain and wishing for reconciliation’ as a fellow woman.
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In addition, since the beginning of this year, my thoughts have extended to other parts of the world and histories, because, at the present moment, wars, violent oppression, human trafficking, revealed cultural genocides, refugee crisis, protests against injustice, and natural catastrophes are happening simultaneously.
I see many faces in the news, which are shedding tears and distressed.
I read stories of killing and deaths.
I imagine fellow women who were swallowed by the power, greed, and discrimination in the past and overlap their faces with those faces who are suffering at this moment.
The past, which is not fully resolved and in which many have died without getting justice and reconciliation, is not the past.
What we witness now in the world is continuum of the past.
We are members, Not Numbers
When you for-get, I am lost in the dark.
When you for-give, I am free like water.
Member,member, member, we are together when we re-member.
Number, number, number, we are divided when we dis-remember.
(Excerpt from For-giving, for-getting by Wen-Shu Wendy Lai, Vol 6 of Paths, 2021)
Remembering and carrying them in our hearts through different means of expressions arewhat we can do for them and for all of us living on this earth.
Although this exhibition is the final presentation of what I have been working on for two years, it is far from complete. The field trips and reading that I have done are just a little scoop of water from the pool. However, if many other people including myself can keep acknowledging, expressing, and reaching hands further to the wounds of the world, water gets full in the vessel called hope for the future.
