One Woman, One Life
One Woman, One Life, 2024, Selected Solo Exhibition, BUoY Arts Center Tokyo
Installation view from the solo exhibition One woman One life, 2023
For this exhibition, the artist curated the paintings of Nozomi Hamaguchi, a painter and university friend who lost her life to a drunk driving incident. Alongside these paintings, the artist presented two interview-based video works in which Hamaguchi's surviving parents each speak about their suffering as bereaved family members.
In the video work Know This Intense Pain (Pre-edited version, 2024), the artist enacts the role of the drunk driving perpetrator, engaging in a dialogue with Hamaguchi's mother while filming her. The mother weeps and condemns the artist (acting as the perpetrator). Because the artist, who is filming, does not appear on screen, the mother’s gaze transcends the artist’s presence and presses directly upon the viewer. This creates the illusion that the viewer themselves is the perpetrator. The video is silent, an effect that immerses the viewer in every subtle expression of the mother’s rage.
In the other video work, Good Manners Drinking, the artist again plays the perpetrator in a dialogue with Hamaguchi's father. The film captures the father’s raw anger toward the suspect—an anger that transcends the framework of social ethics—just as it is. Midway through the video, the artist shifts from the role of the perpetrator back to "herself," interviewing the father about the various realities of drunk driving in Japanese society. The resulting dialogue is rich with implications, approaching the essence of the hardships faced by those directly affected.
The specific brightness and vivacity inherent in Nozomi Hamaguchi's curated paintings speak to the viewer with a radiance that seems to defy the cruel fate that befell her. To contemplate her life through this exhibition is to think about the life of one woman, and by extension, to consider a form of feminism.
This exhibition asks visitors to question anew the weight of living.
