"Shiga Lieko: Nanu mo Kanu mo" Exhibition (Aomori Museum of Art) Opening Report: The Accumulation of 20 Years of Gazing at Tohoku
Shiga Lieko's largest-ever solo exhibition opens at Aomori Museum of Art, reconsidering 20 years in Tohoku and the years since the 2011 disaster through photography and video.Summary
Marking the 20th anniversary of the Aomori Museum of Art and serving as a place to reconsider the 15 years since the Great East Japan Earthquake through artistic expression, "Shiga Lieko: Nanu mo Kanu mo" has opened. It runs until March 14, 2027, curated by the museum's curator Okuwaki Takahiro. Born in Aichi in 1980, Shiga moved to Miyagi in 2008 and has produced photography and video rooted in bodily sensation while recording the land and its people. This is her second solo exhibition in Tohoku since "Spiral Coast" and her largest to date. Centered on her gaze toward the climates, histories, and landscapes she encountered across Miyagi, Fukushima, Yamagata, Akita, Iwate, and Aomori since before the disaster, the exhibition brings together new and old works including photography, video, text, and installation. After roughly a month of installation work, the six galleries are organically connected without clear boundaries. The exhibition's core is the fictional figure "Enao," inspired by a Sanriku coastal custom of naming children born with an umbilical cord around their necks "Enao." The introductory work, "Chuson-ji Rakkei Kuyo Ganmon (Excerpt)" (2025–26), features a passage from the prayer text read by Fujiwara no Kiyohira at the founding of Chuson-ji—a prayer for peace and universal memorial—copied in ink by Shiga onto the back of a giant tarpaulin curtain. Beyond it, "The Place Connecting That Night" (2023–26) captures a site in Fukushima where an individual gathered tsunami-washed belongings before their removal as debris, marked them with red "x" signs to indicate ownership, and stored them as "precious things"; Shiga reconstructs these images into a single photograph using montage technique.
(Source：美術手帖)