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Description

Large photograph of mizuaoi flowers in a Jōmon pottery vase, on a black background. Flowers are purple, and have thick stems and large green leaves; vase is brown with a light yellow lip that flares outward. Portions of lip that are visible have a scalloped edge; lip is mostly covered by overhanging blossoms and leaves. Body of vase has horizontal channels carved around sides, forming columns. Raised swirls and incised circles throughout columns; negative space filled with imprinted dots.

Iconographic Meaning

Label by artist: "Flower: Mizuaoi (Monochoria korsakowii). Collected location: The estuary of Mano river, Kashima, Minamisōma City. Vase: Jōmon pottery, mid Jōmon period, from Urajiri Shell Mound, Odaka ward, Minamisōma City, Collection of Minamisōma City Museum. It was the summer of 2013 when flowers called mizuaoi bloomed all at once along the Minamisōma coast in Fukushima Prefecture. The mizuaoi is an aquatic plant native to this region that grows in lagoons, and that is now designated as an endangered species. The coastal area of Minamisōma was originally an intricate lagoon made up of wetlands and sea, but land reclamation efforts were introduced to cultivate more land for agriculture, transforming a lagoon into standard paddy fields about 100 years ago. Aquatic plants such as mizuaoi lost the wetlands they needed to grow and vanished. On March 11, 2011, a tsunami engulfed everything in its path, submerging the reclaimed land down to the seabed. When the waves receded, the lagoon re-emerged. Mizuaoi that had remained still and silent in the ground as seeds were awoken by the tsunami, and they waited for the right moment to bloom all together."

Narrative

Artist statement for series: "Sacrifice. I lived in Haramachi in the city of Minamisōma in Fukushima Prefecture from December 2013 to August 2014. At that time, Haramachi was the closest livable town to the nuclear power plant where the accident had occurred. With the visible traces of the tsunami still around, the city was filled with a sense of emptiness as people evacuated; at the same time, as if contradicting the emptiness, the city also came to be dominated by a sense of life filled with lush, green plants. Overwhelmed by the environment, I arranged flowers as if burying that which had been lost, and photographed them. Ten years have passed since the disaster. The landscape I saw at that time has vanished and the city has been reborn. At first glance, it appears as if its pain has been healed. However, just ten years after the unprecedented natural disaster and nuclear accident, we cannot pretend as if nothing happened. The flowers that rose from the muddy, contaminated ground at that time still bloom at the border between nature and humans. Where is the boundary between us and these ever-fragile flowers that cannot survive if humans exceed nature, or vice versa? Have we begun to find answers?" The flowers in the photo were collected from the estuary of Mano river, Kashima, Minamisōma City. The vase is from the mid-Jōmon period, from the Urajiri Shell Mound, Odaka ward, Minamisōma City, and is a part of the collection of the Minamisōma City Museum. (Place and date made refer to artist's original photograph. Copies 3542/1-3 were printed in Vancouver in late 2021 for donation to MOA.)