
DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997                TAG: 9703290051

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  107 lines

PHOTOGRAPHERS CAPTURE THE CONTRADICTIONS OF JAPANESE LIFE<

CURATOR Noriko Fuku stood in the photography galleries of The Chrysler Museum of Art, picking out paradoxes in the images around her.

She organized the recently opened exhibit ``Land of Paradox,'' which includes work by four contemporary Japanese photographers.

``The artworks themselves are not paradoxical,'' Fuku explained. ``But when we view these works in context with what's going on in Japan, they capture a paradox.''

That is, seemingly contradictory elements.

On display are photos of pre-fab homes going up on leveled land, and of aquariums being built on landfills in Tokyo Bay. There are pictures of Japanese lime hills, source for the cement being poured with a vengeance all over the island nation.

But she began by analyzing a collection of haunting, black-and-white photographs of an abandoned island off the southwest coast of Japan. An island called Hashima that was inhabited from 1870 until 1974.

A paradox: Here is a perfectly habitable island. And the Japanese, though ever mindful of their limited land area, abandoned it.

Photographer Yuji Saiga made his first visit to the island in January 1974, the same month the population of 5,000 or so vanished; they left household items where they were, making the deserted island look as though citizens suddenly vaporized.

The island became peopled after coal mining was begun there, and as quickly emptied when the mining operation pulled out.

Saiga photographed Hashima for two decades.

Like the ghost of Hamlet's father, Saiga stalked the lonely island on moonlit nights. He has taken long-exposure shots from atop the high concrete sea wall that encases the island, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a battleship.

The long exposures blur the water - blur anything moving, in fact. ``Whatever has life, or movement, you cannot capture it,'' said Fuku, pausing for emphasis.

The image reflects the Japanese philosophy that life is transitory, ever in flux.

Saiga titled some prints ``Tsuki no Michi - Borderland.'' ``Tsuki no michi'' translates ``path of the moon,'' Fuku said.

``We cannot capture life. But we can capture death,'' she said. ``And the moon represents death in some ways. Yuji told me that when he was walking here, he was thinking about his deceased parents. Thinking about mother and father.''

``Borderland'' suggests numerous borders - between sea and island, manmade and natural. If the sea is the origin of life, then death must be within the walls.

``This island - is it alive or dead?''

And these items photographed by Saiga - the left-behind bottles, wrenches and theater seats - are they indeed abandoned?

She indicated a section in her catalog essay: ``These objects still bear faint traces of the physicality they once possessed; but now that they have been freed from their human-ordained functions, they have lost the names of `bottle' or `chair.'

``Saiga intimates that in the empty niches of the buildings, where `the human smell has long gone,' the abandoned objects live on, surviving the obsolescence of their functions.''

These photographs impart messages about life in Japan, but in a subtle, indirect manner: That is the Japanese way.

``Western world all black and white - we have lots of gray areas,'' said Fuku, a freelance curator who organizes exhibits of Japanese photography for American museums, and of American photography for Japanese museums. Her Robert Mapplethorpe show is now touring Japan.

``Land of Paradox'' was organized via the Southeast Museum of Photography, in Daytona Beach, Fla., and is on its final stop after a five-museum national tour. Art in America magazine covered the exhibit in its March issue, writing that ``the harsh facts of these photographs are presented with a moving delicacy and grace.''

In Japan, ``so many things can be expressed subtly,'' said the curator. `` `Umm-hmmm, sounds good' means `no' or `could be.' ''

Viewed through that filter, Norio Kobayashi's pictures of tract houses under construction begin to make sense alongside his closeup photos of the ground. Both series comprised very large, sharply focused color prints.

The natural contours of the land on the outskirts of big cities are being leveled, with lawn-friendly soil trucked in to create Western-style suburban neighborhoods.

Kobayashi lives in such an area, Fuku said.

In his house pictures, a sculptural network of scaffolding, power lines and utility poles surrounds the just-sprouted dwellings. Man's mark is evident.

A paradox emerges in looking then at the dirt pictures, created in pairs. Kobayashi is delicately suggestive: He will take a photo of an untouched plot, then turn over a patch of dirt and photograph it again.

``And he enlarged these photos as if to say `These pebbles are as important as a house,' '' Fuku said.

By turning over the pebble, Kobayashi is saying, ``I want to see myself as a part of nature.'' Yet the soil he photographs was trucked in, and is no more natural to the locale than is the house.

If the artist is a part of nature, why isn't his manipulation of the soil, his building of the house, also natural?

It is all so ambiguous. So paradoxical. ILLUSTRATION: Photos

This photograph by Yugi Saiga was taken on the abandoned Japanese

island of Hashima.

This image from ``River Series'' (1993) by Naoya Hatakeyama is part

of the ``Land of Paradox'' photography exhibit.

Graphic

WANT TO GO?

[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]