Group Show - David Balhuizen et Miki Nitadori
Japan, the Ambigous and Myself.
Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself.
The exhibition draws its title from a collection of texts by Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe.
Oe addressed the extremely difficult task for Japan of reconstructing itself on its cultural and historical roots while Western influence was more and more deeply felt.
This group show presents this ambiguity through photographs and one video, interweaving the perspectives of a Western man and a Japanese woman on a country that has undergone a radical transformation over the past several years. Whether in the rigorist framework of David Blahuizen’s refined, earth-toned photographs or in the more “pop” flourishes of Miki Nitadori’s autobiographical video, these perspectives exude a palpable malaise: what is left of a people once they have abandoned their culture?
Far from the typical images of a high-tech or, on the other hand, bucolic Japan, David Balhuizen’s photographs exacerbate the loss of an identifying trait. Color collapses the space between isolated individuals in anonymous universes.
They are like “absences” in Western clothing; nothing in these photographs allows us to locate the index of a cultural anchor. Japan, as captured by the photographer, is a country that has chosen to radically adopt a culture that is not its own, engendering individuals lost in a tug-of-war over their identity. Soulless puppets with evasive gazes, modern
architecture rising on the remnants of a hesitant country, the shadows that mark these
photographs seem to have emerged ex nihilo.
In her video, Miki Nitadori addresses her dual culture. She grew up in Hawaii among the first of two generations of Japanese-Americans. Her cultural references are Western. Returning to Japan, she was surprised to discover young women with platinum blond hair: she, who had once thought her experience singular, learned that her country had shaken up its bygone aesthetic criteria.
In “Blond Ambition,” by combining family memories and interviews, she attempts to understand why her country has ceded to the American aesthetic, so distant from those qualities prized for centuries in Japan. What can “being Japanese” continue to mean when we seek to eradicate black hair with a dash of peroxide? The prolonged laughter at the end of the video only further reveals the trauma and the guilt of Japanese society.
Archival images and pop culture figures emphasize the ambiguity of such a position.
The fragility of national identity seems to be seized here with particular acuity.
“My life is a pea lost among millions of other peas,” declared Yayoi Kusama. The work of David Balhuizen, with its tranquil and conscientious solitude, and that of Miki Nitadori, constructed from identity crises, provides keys to understanding these Japanese paradoxes.