TAB Event - Hiroshi Watanabe "Ideology in Paradise"

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At Ginza Nikon Salon
Media: Photography

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Watching a program dealing with the problem of hostages and abductions in North Korean on TV three years ago, the artist saw some photograph projected onto the screen. This was part of a series of photographs being introduced on the program, taken by one of the hostages, a woman named Kaori Hasuike. The photos showed her family bathing in seawater, but in fact, the original reason for showing these photographs on TV was to give visual proof of something else - the fact that Megumi Yokota, as well as her husband Kim Chon Ju, had been abducted in North Korea, and were a couple who had been bathing in the same seawater as Hasuike's family.
The enlarged image of this portion of the picture on TV however was so blurred as to allow no conclusive judgment on whether this was true or not, and this ambiguity was a source of much interest for the artist.
More than anything, Watanabe was shocked by the associations with abduction and hunger associated with seawater bathing. The scenery reflected in the photo of the seawater bathing scene, as well as the expressions on the faces of the people in it, seemed to him to be perfectly ordinary, something that could have been taken anywhere else in the world.
Surprised at the unassuming normalcy of this photo, Watanabe wondered what was "real" about this scene, and whether all the impressions he had thus far had of North Korea were in fact mistaken. He then thought that he would go to North Korea to see for himself.
This was prompted neither by a sense of political awareness, nor of a desire to communicate the truth about this territory. This was a simple sense of utter disbelief, similar to a scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-up", in which the main character, a photographer, enlarges part of a photograph, discovers an inexplicable detail in a corner of it, and is suddenly gripped with the desire to return to the scene in a hurry to confirm this. The impetus for Watanabe's travel was precisely this sense of disorientation and confusion, but also a sense of excitement when seeing something that one can't quite recall for oneself.

60 color photos.

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