Gaku Tsutaja

Gaku Tsutaja is known for her painting, drawing, performance, video, and multimedia installation works that focus on the effects of hidden or invisible historical trauma. She received a BFA in painting from Tokyo Zokei University of Art and Design in 1998 and her MFA from SUNY Purchase College in New York in 2018. In 1995, during the artist’s formative years, two devastating events took place in Japan—the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack by the cult Aum Shinrikyō (Supreme Truth). These influenced Tsutaja’s approach to art as a means to investigate the dark underbelly of society, often brought to the surface by traumatic events and their aftermath. While in-depth research involving various communities and specialists is at the core of her work, Tsutaja reaches a broad public by weaving a forceful narrative from the information she accumulates. Her use of anthropomorphized animals as characters in her visual storytelling—a practice that began with her 2016 project Village of Oblivion, about abandoned farm animals in a post-2011 Fukushima—is a result of this desire to communicate without a rigid racial or national specificity and also finds a lineage in folktales from around the world such as The Ant and the Cricket by the Brothers Grimm of Germany and Saru Kani Gassen (The Monkey and the Crab) from Japan.

After moving to New York in 2006, she developed an interest in World War II and the trauma that continues to be intricately embedded in socio-political and economic relations between Japan and the United States. In the video installation Beautiful Sky Golf Course (2019), the experiences of Issei Japanese immigrants during World War II, from the time of Pearl Harbor to their internment, are highlighted. Animated through a laborious stop-motion method using numerous hand-drawn ink paintings, the work combines speculative fiction with the real history of the Fort Missoula Alien Detention Camp. An Orwellian atmosphere of confinement in a barren landscape occupied by humans with animal heads is contrasted with an image of a golf course built by the ‘alien’ internees while they waited for a judgement on their loyalty to their adoptive country.

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and following nuclear disaster in Fukushima further complicated Tsutaja’s series of investigative art projects and their narratives, which foreground United States-Japan relations through immigrant experience and the politics of cultural and economic rebuilding in the latter half of the twentieth century.

For HT22 Tsutaja’s large-scale video installation ENOLA’S HEAD (2021) is exhibited at Castle Building in Bishop Museum, Honolulu, and attempts to create an alternative view of the history of Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. The artist conducted research on the Manhattan Project and the atomic-bomb legacies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, visiting various sites in the United States associated with the development of the nuclear bomb, including Hanford Site and Spokane in Washington and Los Alamos in New Mexico. Populated with her animal-headed characters, the video component of the work presents a cross section of affected communities—local inhabitants of historical and present nuclear hotspots in both Japan and the United States, the military, and the scientific community—and their entanglement in the ongoing effects of the nuclear industry.