2023

Ceramics

20 x 15 x 14 inches

This ceramics clay sculpture addresses my Japanese racial heritage and my Brazilian cultural heritage. It references this curious and unique historical period of Japanese-Brazilian history, when Japanese immigrants who lived in isolated farming settlements in the countryside and were very attached to their homeland started to believe that Japan losing WW2 was an Allies’ Hoax. Extremist nationalist groups were formed which started to perform terrorist acts of violence against whoever believed in Japan’s defeat. The biggest one was called Shindo Renmei.

I applied this concept to my studio practice by initially creating a representational ceramics clay torso depicting the overwhelming feeling of shame those Japanese-Brazilian immigrants felt when Japan lost WW2. This bust is posed as grief and shame from losing the war, but also anger and their shame of their failure for being away from their homeland. I added visual cues in the sculpture related to those extremist Japanese-Brazilian groups. For example, the Japanese imperial flag, and Shindo Renmei’s banner. But also, my own family’s symbols to draw attention to how non-terrorist normal immigrants were affected by this.

Unfortunately, the original representational torso sculpture cracked and melted together into large pieces in the kiln. I decided to reference the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi and kintsugi, the acceptance and embracement of flaws and imperfections, and glue the pieces back together and add gold paint to where the symbols were originally carved, to bring the viewers’ attention to the most important part of the sculpture.

By exploding in the kiln this sculpture got completely destroyed and disfigured from its past self. Just like those Japanese immigrants felt after witnessing the traumatic event of losing WW2. Even before the kiln incident I thought about breaking the sculpture and putting it back together, but I wouldn't be able to deform it as much, so it was a good outcome in the end.