Thoughts & More

In the summer of 2022, during a research trip to the Japanese National Diet Library, a black-and-white photo illustration of an ethnic minority woman from Burma caught my eyes. I showed it to my friends, some immediately said the photo was about colonial gaze. The photo was rather intrusive. The sitter stands in the center of the frame, looking straight into the lens, posing as if it was for a mug shot. Although the photographer’s identity remained unknown and the circumstances stayed ambiguous, this composition and the fact the photo was published in Nishimura Shinji’s book Great East Asia Co-prosperity Circle are sufficient to bring out a sense of shame. Worse, the printing technology compromised the photo quality. It not only fails to convey the real lived experience of Burmese people at the time, but also has no artistic value.

Exhibition view: Retrieving and Revitalizing: From Yurakucho to Yangon. Courtesy of the From Yurakucho to Yangon Study Group. Photo: Hana Yamamoto.

What I couldn’t get over was the sitter’s eyes—she was looking right back at the camera. What might be the sitter’s subjectivity at the time? Was she amazed by the camera technology or was she scared of it?

Our exhibition began with an abandonment of the pursuit of any “true lived experience” from wartime journalistic photographs or documentaries. For Japanese cameramen who were dispatched to the South or Southeast Asian people who were captured in the photos or videos, both parties faced a complex reality. Looking beyond the tinted glass of “colonial gaze,” incidental details in these images might shed light on how this period of history changed our ways of seeing.

In this exhibition, we want to situate something humane and something spiritual in the Japanese colonial era in Southeast Asia.

“Archival Gaze,” the first part of the exhibition, zooms in on incidental details in photographs and documentaries.These details make the not-so-fine images from wartime, partly due to the camera and printing technologies at the time and paper-eating bugs, worth looking into. Due to the abundance of surviving archives in Indonesia and the inconsistent Japanese colonial policies towards Indonesia and Myanmar, we chose to explore photographs about Indonesia and Myanmar for this first project. However, the study group only scratched the surface of the photograph archive. For example, the Asahi History Photography archive contains about 50,000 photographs, but only a few thousands were digitized and became accessible for the public.

In the time we had, we found in history photography archives both documentary and posed photographs. The display of photographs had to take into consideration the nature of photo shooting, whether staged or not. For the ones staged, it is necessary to indicate the propaganda medium of which the photograph was published clearly through displaying the original graphic magazine or preserving as much design elements as possible in reprints. For the ones that seemed unstaged, for example, the photograph Javanese Merchants from the Waseda University Library. The exhibition copy blows up the size of the original photo to highlight the intricate details and expressions captured in the moment.

Street vendors are interesting characters. Since they want to sell to everyone, they speak to everyone, bringing the city together by offering a neutral place of exchange and encounter, possibly quite different from the class dynamics of a department store or physical shops in a commercial district. This appears to be an unstaged interaction solely among Indonesians, both men and women, albeit no doubt of different backgrounds.

If we look through these archives, they do contain images of spiritual rituals, however, photographs were moments frozen in history. They do not represent the psychological framework–being concepts and theories that underpin the world values of a culture from a certain time in history–necessary to understand spirituality. To complement the archival silence, in the “Archival Future” section, we looked to research-based art, which uses scientific research to reconstruct a historical context and employs artistic methods to imagine what is unrecorded in archives.

We asked artists, “In creating research-based artworks, you sometimes have to think as anthropologists, historians, sociologists, or other academics, under a general scientific paradigm. However, artworks create an artistic set up that resists the conventional way of knowledge production. During your artistic creation process, how do you deal with the contrast of emotions?”

Emotion is an inherent aspect of human nature. However, when art is research-based, the focus shifts more towards data and facts, so I think that emotions may be less of a part of it. In this edition I created for the YAU exhibition, I focused on the characteristics of original photographs when I was both thinking and making the work. This approach may not be the same as that of anthropologists or historians, as I considered the atmosphere and facial expressions of the person in the original photographs. Although it was a kind of analysis of the person's emotional state captured in the photo of them. By the concept of my art project, I hope to measure the memories and spiritual reflections captured by the photographic archives, exploring the connections between these ethnic groups and our ancestors in relation to geophysical connections. I think this is a kind of artistic research for me and it strikes a balance between knowledge production and emotional engagement. – Aung Myat Htay

One of the themes of this exhibition was to explore the spiritualities of Southeast Asia during the Japanese colonial occupation. What approaches or care were taken in responding to this topic while engaging in your research and artistic practice?

This art project represents my personal exploration of my ethnic heritage and the people of my homeland. I hope to understand how natural phenomena influenced their behaviors and shaped their lives. My parents were born in the mid-1940s in the center of the country, and their early years were overshadowed by World War II. Although they don't recall all the details, we have learned about our history from our ancestors, seniors, and school lessons. Southeast Asia has a rich and intertwined past dating back centuries. Colonial rule significantly impacted people's perspectives and behaviors during that time in Burma/Myanmar. The British held power for the longest duration, while Japan also had a shorter occupation, leaving behind untold stories, some of which may be exaggerated or obscured by time. Through my artistic approach, I seek to depict the reality and emotions of these people, capturing their spiritual essence through visual expressions. I believe that our present existence is deeply connected to our ancestors, allowing us to sense and connect with their spiritual presence. This art piece stands as my sole account and expression of this exploration. – Aung Myat Htay

Both Riar Rizaldi’s Tellurian Drama (2020) and Kai-Chung Lee’s The Retrieval, Restoration, and Predictament (2018) are about 20 minute long. The works walk in between the lines of documentary and fictional. The self-reflective narrative tone and the docu-fiction style recall the category essay film, a term that Hans Richter coined in the 1940s. Essay film has a long history entangled with anticolonial resistance on the world cinema stage.

During our first exhibition, a few visitors commented that they knew very little about the history of Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia. Perhaps, excavating history photographs and documentaries would shed new light on the complicated reality that photographers and videographers tried to capture.

Retrieving and Revitalizing: From Yurakucho to Yangon

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Thoughts & More