Oni [demon] crawls on all fours, in a grove of cherry trees after everyone has gone.
This spring, we are pleased to welcome a solo exhibition by Ai Iwane (1975, Japan). Exploring the invisible connections that span time, space, and worlds—that of the dead and the living, of nature and humankind—Ai Iwane engages in a profound exploration of collective trauma and resilience through Japanese folklore.
In 2011, the earthquake that triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster shook him deeply. The result was the KIPUKA series, which explores, through bon odori (a Japanese Buddhist dance celebrating the spirits of ancestors), the links between Fukushima and Hawaii, two territories marked by stories of heartbreak and reconstruction. This body of work has been recognized with several major awards—the Kimura Ihei Prize, the Ina Nobuo Prize in 2018, and the Prix Pictet Japon in 2022.
It was during this time that she met a group of taiko (Japanese drummers) players from Futaba, a town in the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant. Iwane discovered one of their pieces, created in exile, which describes the vision of an oni (demon) crawling on all fours among the abandoned cherry blossoms of Fukushima.
This striking image, a tale of an impossible return to a deserted and irradiated village, resonates even more powerfully in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic imposes isolation and suspends all travel. It is these words that inspire the series A New River , for which Iwane collaborates with local artists to give substance to the oni and create a poignant photographic corpus, which expresses the full force of creation as an act of reconstruction.
This process of reparation affects the inhabitants of Fukushima as much as the photographer herself, since in the shade of the deserted cherry tree avenues, her own memory emerges: family photos, in which her missing sister appears, mingle with the silent landscapes. The images in My Cherry thus establish a parallel between the collective experience of disasters and the personal experience of mourning. These superpositions, where fiction and reality, where past, present and future intermingle, give Iwane's work a singular depth, woven with pain, beauty and resilience.