Two Moons on the Shore, a Wind-Up Bird in Norwegian

Wood: Haruki Murakami and Contemporary Art

Group Exhibition, Contemporary by Golconda Art Gallery, Tel Aviv 20 Feb-31 May 2014

Curator: Ayelet Zohar

Artists: Asim Abu Shakra, Farid Abu Shakra, Tasuku Amada (Japan),
Yoonsaing Baik (Korea/ Japan), Dror Ben-Ami, Sanford Biggers (USA),
Pesi Girsch, Natsumi Hayashi (Japan), Andrea Hazan, Penny
Klepuszewska (UK), Meiro Koizumi (Japan), Nashun Nashunbatu
(Mongolia/ Germany), Ayelet Zohar

Figure 1, Two Moons on the Shore, a Wind-Up Bird in Norwegian Wood: Haruki Murakami and
Contemporary Art, Installation View, Contemporary by Golconda, Tel Aviv
Figure 2, Two Moons on the Shore, a Wind-Up Bird in Norwegian Wood: Haruki Murakami and
Contemporary Art, Installation View, Contemporary by Golconda, Tel Aviv
Haruki Murakami, possibly Japan’s most
notable contemporary author, is known
for his juxtaposing style, mixing elements
from the mundane, real and fantastic
worlds. Like weaving fabric, Murakami’s
way of employing varying sources into
one continuous plot has a strong
cinematic quality, hence attracting visual
attention. This exhibition does not
necessarily refer to specific Murakami
imagery, but is more concerned with his
literary strategies: dissecting, cutting and
pasting, integrating features that
otherwise seemingly reside in worlds apart.
My own encounter with Murakami was
relatively late. A couple of years ago at
an academic conference, I heard a well-
informed discussion on Murakami’s
Jerusalem Prize speech and was deeply
impressed: a Japanese author willing to
get his hands muddy in the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict must be my kind of
author, I thought to myself. After quickly
reading Norwegian Wood (which lay on
my shelf for too many years), I picked up
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where I truly
fell in love. Murakami, I realised, is not just
a person willing to express his views on a
remote conflict, he is also prepared to
look into Japan’s notorious colonial past,
and offer a meticulous reading of some of
its events and details in a manner that
gained my admiration. Murakami,
however, is not a ‘war-writer’. His novels
stretch far beyond the images of
colonialism and war. Nonetheless, the
memories of this painful past, the
suppressed events of the twentieth
century continue to torment Japanese
society even when unspoken or repressed.
Murakami’s greatness is in his willingness to
delve into this constrained past and the
unconscious energy that drives Japan. In
this sense, Murakami’s later literature is first
and foremost directed to his Japanese
readers, in a manner that allows specific
memories to be raised and discussed
beyond current social and political taboos.
* spelled through descriptions of supressed
The current exhibition suggests an
innovative mode of spectatorsip: it
presents, simultaneously, visual images
side by side with literary texts, while the
viewer is faces with viewing and reading
entwined together; the exhibition is not
concerning Japanese culture as an
isolated matter, but rather suggests the
presence of Japanese values, objects
and concepts in global context: from sushi
to Zen, from Toyota to Murakami.
Another subject haunting Murakami’s
novels is the presence of characters
described as detached, lonely, unhappy,
isolated and living aimless lives, which
represent many of Japan’s younger
generations. Murakami expresses deep
Figure 3, Natsu i Hayashi, Today’s Levitatio , Chromographic print, 2011
remorse as well as criticism toward
Japan’s recent consumer capitalism. His
books are filled with descriptions of victims
of this assumed successful-order, exposed
as a tragic personal and societal failure.
While its victims are less obvious than the
victims of war, they are enslaved by a
system of financial success, blind to any
other personal or social aspect. Japan’s
economic miracle of the 1960s-1980s is
family life, depressed personal desires,
unhappy co-workers, confined minds, all
geared up to the great machine of
economic success. But despite this
rigorous, well-greased mechanism of fiscal
success, no one can control the inner
minds, imaginings and personal desires of
the suppressed characters that lie among
Murakami’s novels. Therefore, the main
conflicts facing Murakami’s characters lie
within the tension between the demand
for success in social and financial terms,
and the personal desire for creativity and
love, and the failure to express either; the
manipulative power of enchanting female
characters and their dubious aims; the
cultural trap between personal aspirations
and collective success.
Figure 4, Meiro Koizumi , Your Voice Coud Not Reach Me, 2009 Single-Channel Video Screening, 15 Min.

Figure 5, Amada Tasuku, Disaste and Silence, Digital Photography, 2013

 Figure 6-7, Penny Klepuszewska, Living Arrangements, 2009 Digital Photography
Several artists in the show refer to these
dilemmas: Natsumi Hayashi’s (b. 1982,
Saitama, Japan) images of lonesome,
weak, floating young women, in the city
or within personal dwellings (Fig. 1), reflect
the portrayals of numerous young women
described in Murakami’s novels: charming,
susceptible, quirky, at times fashionable
and chic young women, yet also lonely,
isolated and detached. Hayashi’s women
bring to mind Fuka-Eri (1Q84), Naoko
(Norwegian Wood), Kiki (A Wild Sheep
Chase), Creta Kano (The Wind-up Bird
Chronicle), or the girl Colonel Sanders
provides for Hoshino (Kafka on the Shore),
all may be variations on his elaborate
imaginings of women. To some extent
these descriptions of precious, vulnerable,
yet strong and destructive female power,
can be compared to the concept of moé
which defines female images in the
manga/anime culture.1 A similar
experience is raised in Meiro Koizumi’s (b.
1976, Yokohama, Japan) second project –
My Voice Cannot Reach You (2009) (Fig. 2)
– where a young man, isolated within his
own imaginary capsule, holds a long-
distance call with a fictional partner (his
mother?) while actually speaking to
customer service representatives who
politely answer his desperate quest for
closeness and intimacy in an absurd play
of misrecognition; Tasuku Amada (b. 1981,
Niigata, Japan) (Fig. 3) creates an empty
city of concrete buildings and huge
bunnies who stroll around, echoing a
sense of loneliness and estrangement, of
animals leading lives free from human
control, as in Murakami’s 1Q84 Town of
Cats. Adding to this is Penny
Klepuszewska’s (Leeds, UK) (Fig. 4) images
of a single object laying in complete
darkness, that might reflect Tengo’s
father’s seclusion in the sanatorium, on the
eve of his final departure (1Q84), or Kafka-
kun’s isolation in the mountain hut (Kafka
on the Shore).
Figure 8, Yoonsaing Baik, Narrow Road in the Forest, 2001 ink on Xuan paper 136X136 cm.

Figure 9, Sanford Biggers, Danpatsu, 2007 Single channel video projection, 8 min.
Figure 10, Pesi Girsch, Untitled 1987, Silver Gelatin Print 40X60cm.
Emptied locations, remote farms,
secluded cabins, dense forests, desert
islands and inaccessible towns occupy
Murakami’s fiction. These stand as
metonymies of his characters’ loneliness
and isolation, of their misery and
aloneness. Many of the scenes in A Wild
Sheep Chase and Kafka on the Shore
take place between dense concrete
cities, and remote forests, as in Yoonsaing
Baik (b. 1955, Busan, Korea) mysterious
forest scene, watched from a bird’s eye
view, painted in traditional (Northern) (Fig.
5) ink-painting style. Sanford Biggers (b.
1970 Los Angeles, CA) (Fig. 6), fully dressed
in formal Japanese garb, sits quietly in the
midst of a dense forest, waiting for an
equally formally dressed young woman,
who comes to shave his years long
dreadlocks. The tension between the
young African American, the rhythm and
content of a traditional Japanese
ceremony of retirement (for Sumo
wrestlers), or entry into monkhood in the
Buddhist tradition, form a Murakamiesque
scene of surreal juxtaposition. Pesi Girsch
(b. 1955, Munich, Germany) (Fig. 7) relates
to the “forest” in her backyard - in a
typical Murakami-like move, she inserts
objects and people to complete a
dreamlike scene: a bed with a plump
sweet-looking baby and a white kitten; a
male torso, hanging upside-down; then,
the naked man holding the baby upright,
or sitting on his lap. The entire scene is cut
and interrupted by dark shadows and the
plethora of leaves, branches and
silhouettes that make the image a vivid
tableau of an uncanny environment.
Figure 11, Meiro Koizumi, Voice of a Dead Hero, 2009 Performance Video, 15 min.

Figure 12, Asim Abu Shakra, Die Maske des Bösen, date Watercolor and pencil on paper, 28x21 cm
Figure 13, Nashun Nashunbatu, Untitled 2009 Oil on Canvas, 149X180cm.
Several projects in the current exhibition
bring to light Murakami’s courage in
making his Japanese readers confront
their past and see its affects on their
present lives. Several projects in the show
directly bring this aspect to the fore:
Koizumi’s performances and
embodiments of the Kamikaze
figure/image: in A Voice of a Dead Hero
(2009) (Fig. 8) Koizumi is dressed as a
wounded Kamikaze pilot, crawling along
the streets from Kudanshita Subway
station to Yasukuni Jinja in Tokyo. Yasukuni
is the shrine that houses the souls of WW2
dead, and infamously serves as a point of
reference in disputes concerning the
memory of war, Japan’s readiness to take
responsibility for wartime atrocities, and re-
evaluating the anger and hate still felt by
its Asian and Pacific neighbours. Another
interesting reference to this novel comes
from Asim Abu-Shakra’s (1960-1989,
Palestinian-Israeli) (Fig. 9) image of a
severed rhinoceros head lying on a chair,
a painful reminder of Murakami’s story
about the zoo massacre. In the book,
Murakami brings the nightmarish story of
the fictional Lieutenant Mamiya, who
served Japan’s colonial system during its
most blemished years. The Lieutenant
recounts the terrifying story of his personal
experiences between the rivers of
Manchuria, the steppes of Mongolia, the
depth of an empty well, concentration
camps in Siberia and a miserable journey
back to Tokyo. In the same book,
Murakami continues with another horror
episode, telling of the killing of animals in
the Hsinching (now, Changchun ) city zoo,
during the last days of the war and
Japan’s withdrawal from mainland Asia.
This layer of readiness to engage directly
with Japan’s recent and painful past, self-
criticism, the presence of the suppressed
memories of war within the texture of
contemporary Japanese life, is where I
met and felt admiration for Murakami.
Nashun Nashunbatu’s (b. 1969, Ordos,
Figure 14, Farid Abu Shakra, White (Cat) on White, 2013 Pierced paper, 70X70 cm.
Inner Mongolia, China) work complete this
world image of the 1930s and 40s, while
depicting the barren landscapes of the
immense steppes of Mongolia and north-
east Asia (Fig. 10). Nashunbatu's images
expose the great expansions of the
steppes, and within the paintings, there
are minor events of disaster and
disturbance – like a fire in the distance,
clouds rising from the bottom of the earth,
deep digging at the front of the space,
exposed and bunt trees, strange men
float, elevate, represented within the
unresolved space.
Figure 15, Andrea Hazan, Chau Dolce, 2013 Installation View
Last, but not least, are the real heroes of
Murakami: creatures of relentless passion
and comfort, silence and cruelty - cats.
These come in every shade and spirit –
man-eating cats, a cat-slaughtering man,
a person speaking in cat-language,
sneaky cats, invisible cats, secretive and
lazy cats. Cats are present in nearly all of
Murakami’s stories and novels. They are
present in this exhibition as well: Farid Abu
Shakra (b. 1963, Um al Fahem, Israel) (Fig.
11) shows a white-on-white invisible cat,
made like a delicate lace of pierced
holes, where light softly penetrates
through the merged image. In another
painting a cat sneaks over a background
of diving fighter aircrafts, where the
enigmatic creature serves as near-Avatar
of the author/painter in the scene (like in
Natsume Sôseki’s novel I am a Cat). Asim
Abu Shakra’s cat, on the other hand, is a
reminder of Noboru Wataya, Toru’s lazy
cat that disappears mysteriously after
years of behaving like a cuddly creature,
always laying on the porch and watching
outside (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).
Andrea Hazan’s (b. 1970, Buenos Aires,
Argentina) (Fig. 12) installation is a space
of vanishing memoirs, of objects and
recollections sinking into the room’s walls,
leaving only traces of a past presence.
Like Toru Okada, the hero of The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle who dives into the well’s
walls and passes into the hotel building,
destructing any sense of time and reality,
past and present, so does Hazan’s display
of furniture, cutlery, teapot and samovar,
wall-decorations and tableware dissolve
into the cemented background that
serves as a signifier of a lost past and
transcending materiality.
Figure 16, Dror Ben-Ami, Butterfly #2, Charcoal on paper, 90X100 cm.

Figure 17, Ayelet Zohar, Night time scape with two moons and a concrete Bridge, 2011-4, Oil on
Canvass, 38X176 cm.

Dror Ben-Ami (b. 1956, Israel) (Fig. 13) body. Ben-Ami’s work carries a distressing
presents dark images of butterfly wings sense of death and beauty; cut-out
dissected and separated from the insect’s elements, delicate, fragile particles that lie
on the paper’s surface as eternal, decay-
defying objects that keep their beauty
intact, despite the obvious image of
death and dissection. These paintings
serve as a reference to a certain spirit in
Murakami’s novels – of elements that
show and glitter, then disappears and
remain unexplainable - like the Air
Chrysalis in 1Q84, the well in The Wind-Up
Chronicle or the absent traces of
disappearing objects in the short stories of
the Vanishing Elephant.
Finally, I have added several images of
my own work (Fig. 14), a visual reference
to my attraction to Murakami’s style of
writing, and the worlds he creates and
presents. Some of these works were
created as early as 2005, others were
completed recently. Several make
specific references to Murakami’s images,
especially the double moon in the sky, an
image set in binoculars format, or the
imprint of Charlie parker’s Ornithology
record.
To be able to combine these visual
references with Murakami’s literature, the
exhibition presents its main wall as a site of
a new syntax, juxtaposing visual works with
textual references scanned from
Murakami’s books. This wall of cross
references is the main curatorial
statement of the exhibition, where the
syntax and assortment of art and text
become the pivotal place of reference,
as it creates a new perception, and a
visual layer of interpretation of the work.
This wall-installation also challenges
conventional norms of display – linking text
and image, under the notion that context
and association create a new project
which is able to embark into an innovative
state of relations and meaning created
among the interwoven references arising
among the works.
Ayelet Zohar, Tel Aviv, Feb 2014

Figure 18, Two Moons on the Shore, a Wind-Up Bird in Norwegian Wood: Haruki Murakami and
Contemporary Art, Installation View, Contemporary by Golconda, Tel Aviv

1
See for example the discussion of moé a d phalli girls Ta aki Saito 200 s te t: The As etr of
Masculine/Feminine otaku Sexuality: moé, yaoi a d Phalli girls , Ch. i : A elet )ohar ed . PostGender: Gender,
Sexuality and Performativity in Japanese Culture, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publication, 155-70.