
Photo Via Hawthorn Contemporary - hawthorncontemporary.com
'Pallet Bench' by Kevin Miyazaki
Kevin Miyazaki’s current exhibition, “December 7, 1941–February 22, 2025,” at Hawthorn Contemporary on view until, you guessed it, February 22, 2025, features a series of texts and relational works that surround a neatly manicured 400-square foot bed of loose gravel. That strange earthwork is attended only by a small bench and hand broom, subtle indications that the work is more anthropological than formal or geological. The works that grace the walls around 400 Square Feet #3 also surround it conceptually, as the tidy parcel of peastones represents a less tidy patch of American history, and, as it turns out, personal history for its maker.
400-feet (20 x 20) were the dimensions of the “apartments” given to Japanese Americans who were interned after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Miyazaki’s grandparents and parents were incarcerated at various naturalization stations and camps from 1941 to 1945, only fully reuniting after the war. A relational work entitled Night Sky, Tacoma, Washington encourages viewers to draw a star with a paint marker on a black wall that represents Miyazaki’s grandfather’s pre-internment home as well as the unpolluted skies above the various remotely located camps. Alongside this relational piece, are a number of supplemental texts including a touching poem by Brandon Shimoda describing the strange and hopeless ritual of sweeping and raking beds of pebbles.
A refrain from the poem: “Sweeping the ashes is raking the sand; Sweeping the ashes Raking the sand” sent me deep into a totally different sandy enclosure that had been living in the back of my mind for 30 years. In Kobo Abe’s 1962 novel Woman in the Dunes, a homemaker and a lost entomologist are doomed to the Sisyphean existence of shoveling a never-ending inflow of sand from her home. The novel’s odd mix of surrealist imagery and emotional verité deepened my appreciation for the 400-foot bed of gravel next to me. Recalling the chills I got when reading Abe’s book on a park bench in 1994, the formal curiosity of Miyazaki’s gravel bed transformed from raw material into a Kafkaesque symbol of ritualized futility. Somehow the whole knot of thought and symbolic stuff made me lay on the ground next to 400-feet and imagine the implications of what it means to lose one’s dignity and hope. It seemed that to even ponder these things as I was doing marked the luxury of a certain set of historical conditions.
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Infamous Internment
From my back, I scanned the words on the adjacent wall and muttered them out loud: “INTERNMENT LIVES IN INFAMY.” The work, titled “Infamy,” is based on a sign that read “I AM AN AMERICAN,” posted on a Japanese American-owned business on December 8, 1941. The scene was then photographed by the famous social realist photographer Dorothea Lange and from there became a part of the scattered record of this shameful chapter of American history. The font used by Miyazaki in “Infamy” is called “Tatsuro” and was designed by Tre Seals who created the typeface in honor of Tatsuro Matsuda, the owner of that business.
Digging up American hypocrisy and abandoned ideals over the centuries doesn’t require a whole lot of excavation. Examples sit right on the surface. And in the art-world, with its adversarial spirit and mistrust of power and institutions, accusations of U.S. moral failure have come to be expected. They’d seem much more radical coming from a water park, a rodeo or a knife and gun expo. However, this exhibition is to be experienced more as a personal reflection than a wholesale indictment of a sovereign state. It’s about how trespasses on civil rights travel through communities and across time. Still, for a country who would love to believe its greatest cultural export has been hope, independence, and freedom, it’s especially sad to see it lose its way so often. But maybe we can find redemption in the notion that, at least for the moment, this country still provides platforms for stories like Miyazaki’s and, just maybe, the chance to learn from them.