Sachiko Kazama creates unique woodcut prints to produce finely executed, graphically loaded works of social and political commentary. These range from concise satirical vignettes produced in thematically linked series to immense tableaux of dramatic scenes abounding in cultural references and visual puns. Kazama is inspired by the traditional graphic techniques of ukiyo-e and manga, and draws on German expressionist printmaking and the sosaku hanga (creative prints) movement of the early twentieth century. Her works are also imbued with the highly engaged social content and dizzying composition of postwar Japanese reportage painting.¹

The choice of the traditional medium of woodcut is an uncommon one for an artist dealing with such contemporary subject matter. Even more singular is Kazama’s preference for printing in unique editions. A labour-intensive process, woodblock printing has a longstanding association with social activism and, in the Japanese context, connotes popular — as opposed to elite — cultural production. Kazama has also noted the attraction that the mechanical character of printmaking holds as a way of distancing herself from her subject matter, a means of calibrating emotional affect, detailed observation and satirical humour. On the other hand, her preference for unique prints is a negation of reproducibility, an attempt at locating a certain intimacy and equivalence in the individual experience of artist and viewer.

Kazama’s Nonhuman crossing 2013 stages a scenario of nightmarish intensity at the iconic Hachiko Crossing, outside Shibuya Station on Tokyo’s west side, one of the most recognisable locations in the city. Observing that the locale also possesses the highest concentration of security cameras in Tokyo, Kazama festoons the space’s celebrated electronic billboards with stern cautions against prohibited behaviour. In the wake of the NSA surveillance revelations,² the web addresses of popular social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter and Japan’s overtly conservative 2-Channel, are arranged in a satanic circle at the centre of the crossing, from which hellish flames emerge. Hachiko, the statue of the loyal akita dog that gives the famous pedestrian crossing its name, is transformed into a three-headed Cerberus,³ which is corralling anthropomorphic megaphones blasting xenophobic hate speech, robot ghosts of the repressive prewar Special Police, and smartphone-obsessed teens so oblivious to the horror that they literally walk right through each other. Above the chaos hovers the ominous form of a Blackbird stealth bomber.

The presence of the plane enables Kazama to explore a series of visual and linguistic references, including the vast murder of crows (black birds) that the artist collective Chim↑Pom attracted to Shibuya for their Black of Death performance in 2008; Chim↑Pom’s Super Rat also makes an appearance in full military regalia.⁴ The crows are depicted being burned to death in hellfire and plucked off the ground by a team dressed in radiation suits in a post-Fukushima revival of avant-garde artist group Hi Red Center’s parodic Cleaning Action of 1964.⁵ To the right of the scene, a censored text by the Proletarian Arts Movement of the early Showa period (1926–89) is reproduced at a massive scale on the side of the Tokyu Building. 

Thus, while the image dramatises a vision of Tokyo beset by surveillance, censorship and radiation, it also operates as a veritable history of critical art in Japan, a history in which Sachiko Kazama’s work unreservedly participates.

Endnotes

1. Japanese reportage painting refers to left-wing protest art from the 1950s.
2. In 2013, Edward Snowden, former intelligence contractor, exposed the United States’ National Security Agency’s (NSA) secret surveillance of international telephone and internet communications.
3. Cerberus, from classical mythology, refers to a dog, usually three-headed, which guarded the entrance to the underworld.
4. Black of Death 2008 and Super Rat 2006 were early Chim↑Pom interventions satirising government attempts to rid Tokyo of pests attracted by consumer detritus. With the former, they used recorded mating calls to attract large flocks of crows to Tokyo landmarks, including the Shibuya 109 store at Hachiko Crossing; for the latter, they painted taxidermy rats to resemble Pokémon characters.
5. Cleaning Action 1964 involved the artists, clad in white lab coats, meticulously cleaning paving stones laid in Ginza during the Tokyo Olympics, satirising government urban renewal and civic pride campaigns.