One conceptual underpinning of "play" emphasizes process over product, and so it goes for Katsushige Nakahashi's "ZEROs -- Interacting Memories," previously in Shiga, soon in Tottori. The processual quality is best articulated by Nakahashi himself: "The ZERO project involves the creation of photographic art works, real-size reproductions created by assembling enlarged photographs of toy-scaled plastic models (Zero fighter planes). The full-size replica is constructed with the help of local residents at a location and time significant for their relation to war, and then incinerated. The project began in 2000 and will continue for ten years, through the end of 2009 (the 00's decade)."
The germination of the ZERO project seems to have come from Nakahashi's relation to war -- too late to experience it directly (b.1955), and then only in the ambivalent childhood play of piecing together toy models of the Zero -- the notorious long-range fighter used in suicide missions during the Pacific War.
Another characteristic of play is that it is oriented toward other players, who play along with the rules of the game as constitutive elements, and even as the point of the activity. In this particular exhibition, a Zero fighter stationed at Shiga's Mount Hiei was assembled for the "OHKA-43b/Hieizan" project in the Shiga gallery by volunteers, and gallery-goers were encouraged to help stick the several thousand photographs together. Another photo-relief work, the "Newspaper Project," was created in collaboration with students from Hieizan High School. In an earlier project in Cowra, Australia, Nakahashi engaged art students, teachers and community members in order to realize his photographic installations. The significance of this latter event relates to the breakout on August 5, 1944 at the Cowra POW camp, where 231 Japanese soldiers lost their lives. One soldier in particular, Hajime Toyoshima, had been forced to make an emergency landing in his Zero fighter near Darwin, Australia. He became the first prisoner interned at Cowra, and one of the many to take his own life when the later breakout failed. Where Hajime was believed to have died, Nakahashi scattered gum tree leaves on which were inscribed the registration numbers of the prisoners who died that day. The subsequent patchy documentation became the "On the Day Project, 5th August/Cowra" (2002).
The ZERO projects are an epoch-crossing affair. The Zero represents the image of his father's generation, says Nakahashi, "who blindly fought a war without questioning the meaning of it. It also brings the nostalgia of my childhood to light, and moreover, my anger towards the younger generation who fail to appreciate the lessons of history." In that sense, his ten-year project might out certain concealments (the paramount one, at any rate, being Nakahashi's father's admission to his son that he worked in a Zero maintenance crew at Omura Naval Base, Nagasaki), perhaps restituting moments of cultural memory.
The "Interacting Memories" of the exhibition title makes it clear that part of the challenge for viewers of a project such as this is not to rely on the single products of individual projects as the "end" of Nakahashi's artistic thinking. Rather, they are pictures in the process. Other accumulated products include interviews with war veterans who were expected to pilot the plane used for the "OHKA-43b/Hieizan" (2006) model, video footage of Nakahashi's models being set on fire, and the remains of another work, "#601-1XX/Kyoto-Lake Biwa" (2003), that did not entirely combust because of rain.
The photo-collages that form the "On the Day" projects sometimes extend beyond relations to World War II, such as the "Runit Dome" (2004) project. Runit Island was the site for the burial of thousands of cubic meters of radioactive material from nuclear testing. The work also relates to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, a fishing vessel that was irradiated in 1954 by fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test. Some of the tuna from that catch made its way to markets in Osaka and Tokyo, and the ship's radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died from radiation-related illness. Further interactions, and one of the central features of the Shiga showing, include the reconstruction from negatives of the plane for the Cowra project in Darwin, Australia (2000-2002); the original had customarily been burned.
How all of these accretions will show themselves in their overall significance is too early to tell, as the series of projects has yet to enter its final years. The expectation, however, is that they will form a seductive and solemn politics relating to the communities that have come together to re-establish connections with past events, memories and historical narratives. All of these Zeros appear to add up to something more substantial.
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