Advanced Search
Requires Photography
Rasen kaigan (Spiral Shore) 46 from the series Rasen kaigan (Spiral Shore)
Shiga Lieko (Japanese, born in 1980)
2011
Medium/Technique
Photograph, chromogenic print
Dimensions
Sheet: 120 x 180 cm (47 1/4 x 70 7/8 in.)
Credit Line
Museum purchase with funds donated by Jerry Fielder and Daniel Campbell
Accession Number2015.2950
NOT ON VIEW
CollectionsAsia, Contemporary Art, Photography
ClassificationsPhotographs
DescriptionJapanese, born in 1980
In the winter of 2008, I discovered a beautiful pine grove on the sea, and I felt like I just wanted to stay there indefinitely. In front of the camera, the residents “performed” for me an otherwise unseen act, a role, as they do in the rituals enacted in the village. Capturing that performance was my own attempt to gain access to the connection among us that sleeps in the innermost depths of the earth and air of Kitakama, and to experience the faintest shadow of it. I wonder if the act of taking photographs isn’t itself a kind of ritual for creating space that is unbound by past, present, and future.
When Lieko Shiga first settled in the tiny town of Kitakama, near Sendai, local officials asked her to be the town photographer, and she became engrossed in the history of the village and the residents’ personal stories. Shiga happened to be in the offices of Kitakama’s newspaper on the day of the disaster. She immediately got into her car and drove away from the wave, narrowly escaping. The images in her series Rasen kaigan (“Spiral Shore”)—many of which predate the tsunami—are primarily concerned with her internalization of the stories of the community she had adopted as her home. Shiga often makes her phantasmagoric works in darkness, with the aid of color filters, and occasionally layers negatives for surreal effects. Intensely expressive and apocalyptic in tone, her images underscore that what was lost on 3/11 was not only physical structures, but also a rich web of societal relationships that can be found only in a particular place.
Rasen kaigan 46, 2011
from the series Rasen kaigan (Spiral Shore), 2008–13
Chromogenic print
Shiga made concentric circles in the sand by the shore with a large local tree root that she dug up from the earth. She equates the making of such tracks with the act of making photographs, and thus named her project Spiral Shore.
Courtesy of Lieko Shiga
In the winter of 2008, I discovered a beautiful pine grove on the sea, and I felt like I just wanted to stay there indefinitely. In front of the camera, the residents “performed” for me an otherwise unseen act, a role, as they do in the rituals enacted in the village. Capturing that performance was my own attempt to gain access to the connection among us that sleeps in the innermost depths of the earth and air of Kitakama, and to experience the faintest shadow of it. I wonder if the act of taking photographs isn’t itself a kind of ritual for creating space that is unbound by past, present, and future.
When Lieko Shiga first settled in the tiny town of Kitakama, near Sendai, local officials asked her to be the town photographer, and she became engrossed in the history of the village and the residents’ personal stories. Shiga happened to be in the offices of Kitakama’s newspaper on the day of the disaster. She immediately got into her car and drove away from the wave, narrowly escaping. The images in her series Rasen kaigan (“Spiral Shore”)—many of which predate the tsunami—are primarily concerned with her internalization of the stories of the community she had adopted as her home. Shiga often makes her phantasmagoric works in darkness, with the aid of color filters, and occasionally layers negatives for surreal effects. Intensely expressive and apocalyptic in tone, her images underscore that what was lost on 3/11 was not only physical structures, but also a rich web of societal relationships that can be found only in a particular place.
Rasen kaigan 46, 2011
from the series Rasen kaigan (Spiral Shore), 2008–13
Chromogenic print
Shiga made concentric circles in the sand by the shore with a large local tree root that she dug up from the earth. She equates the making of such tracks with the act of making photographs, and thus named her project Spiral Shore.
Courtesy of Lieko Shiga
Provenance2015, sold by the artist to the MFA. (Accession Date: September 24, 2015)