Hikaru Fujii engages with Japanese history and trauma, often through collective exercises, performative workshops, and videos. He has methodically approached different historical subjects and eras, coming close to constructing a parallel and less comfortable narrative of the past two centuries in Japan, from the Meiji Era’s imperialist and racist underpinnings of a burgeoning national identity to a study of Japan’s catastrophic militarist period. In this exhibition, visitors encounter three screens, one behind the other, showing individuals of different backgrounds in obvious distress yet maintaining a solemn composure. Their cries and bows are punctured by the shout ‘Owattenai darō!’ (‘This isn’t over!’). The individuals in the work, including a Vietnamese woman and a US-American man who fought in the American-Vietnamese war, all hail from Saiki, where an episode of collective grief was recorded on 15 August 1945, the day the emperor publicly announced Japan’s surrender in the Second World War. Fujii considers this clear-cut ‘end of the war’ moment in 1945, typically understood as both an end of an era and the beginning of an entirely different one, to be a national fiction for post-war Japan, which otherwise had many continuities, entangle- ments, and complicities with its wartime incarnation. War Is Over (2024) also attests to how personal and collective guilt, remorse, and cultures of remembrance are being negotiated in the context of Japan, National Socialist Germany’s ally in the Axis powers.

Work in the exhibition: War Is Over (2024), 3-channel-video, 12’. Courtesy of the artist