Tomoyo Ihaya is a dedicated traveller. During the past decade and a half, she has made
extended journeys to India from her home base in Vancouver. She has also installed
exhibitions, attended workshops, or taken up residencies in Mexico, Thailand, France, and
Japan, and has spent a couple of summers making art in a small studio in Norfolk, England.
Her semi-nomadic existence is driven not by the touristic craving to consume the exotic but
by the social and spiritual impulse to connect, identify, and understand, and the creative
need to register these experiences in a meaningful way. Many of her drawings, mixed-media
installations, and video works are her responses to peoples, cultures, and events to which
she feels deeply bound. They are also a form of political protest, registering her dismay at
the plight of persecuted minorities and her sympathy for refugees fleeing war, terror, and
ethnic violence.
Ihaya’s most powerful connection has been to India, which she has visited some
sixteen times since 2005. She is a committed practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, also known
as compassionate Buddhism, and her first trip to South Asia was made with her Vancouver-based meditation group. Initially she was drawn to Ladakh, a remote and sparsely populated
region in the north of India, often referred to as “Little Tibet” because of its ethnic, cultural,
and religious ties to that disputed place.1 Ihaya has also spent long periods of time in
Tibetan settlements in the Himalayan region.
The series, “Drawings from Dharamsala,” was initiated in Puri, an Indian city on
the Bay of Bengal, where Ihaya had taken up an artist’s residency in early 2012. She was
alone in a cyber café there when she saw a report with a photo of a Tibetan monk who had
self-immolated in protest of the Chinese government’s occupation of his country and its
oppression of Tibetan culture and religion.2 The only way Ihaya could process the pain and
the horror of this individual’s drastic protest was to return to her room and draw a figure
enveloped in red and white, the red symbolizing fire and the white, the desire for peace and
purification. Following this event, Ihaya felt compelled to travel to Dharamsala, the home
of the Dalai Lama and the seat of the Tibetan government in exile. During the six months
in total she spent there, she produced more than 70 drawings, each again in response to
another self-immolation. At the same time, she researched the lives of the Tibetan martyrs
and took part in community vigils and memorials. Whether exhibited in galleries or posted
on her website, the drawings are a way of expressing her personal grief and anguish over
the horrific deaths of her co-religionists as well as a means of memorializing them and
communicating their cause and their sacrifice to the wider world.
Ihaya’s mixed-media installation expands her art-making beyond the fixed
dimensions of the prints and drawings with which she has long been identified. Eyes, Water,
Fire utilizes layering and repetition to suggest the complexity of the narratives she is trying to
convey while also allowing the possibility of folding new ideas and experiences into each site-
specific iteration. Although originating with the situation of Tibetans refugees, the symbolism
of this work may be universalized to depict millions of refugees worldwide, including Syrians
escaping war in their homeland and minority Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution and
violence by the Buddhist majority in Myanmar. Blue legs suggest forced migrations and
long journeys, over snowy mountains and across wide seas. Red flames declare resistance
and dignity. Eyes, large and small, are multivalent, signifying, among other things, the act
of witness, windows to the mind, and vessels filled with and shedding tears. Using incense
sticks, Ihaya burns tiny holes in her drawings of eyes as an act of prayer or meditation; the
light that shines through these holes symbolizes hope.
Similar images and symbols appear in Ihaya’s video, also titled Eyes, Water, Fire.
Here, the simplicity of her hand-drawn forms and stop-motion techniques – the spectral
opposite of high-tech, digitally rendered animation -- accords with the simplicity of prayer,
and the repetition of symbols again suggests meditation. The work alludes to the occupation
of Tibet, the erasure of traditional life ways, the pollution of important river systems, and,
again, self-immolation protests. The wonder of Ihaya’s simple forms and apparently guileless
repetition is that they communicate emotional power, social complexity, and spiritual depth.
Robin Laurence © 2017
