Tomiyama Taeko (富山妙子, 6 November 1921 – 18 August 2021) was a Japanese visual artist and writer whose work addressed the moral, emotional, and social issues related to nationalist, patriarchal, colonial, and post-colonial power structures in East Asia. Tomiyama used popular media such as oil painting, lithographic prints, collages, multimedia slideshows, books, and installations to explore marginalized figures. From the 1980s on, much of her work drew on indigenous Asian mythology, symbols, and aesthetics as a critique and rejection of the violent, exploitative, Euro-American-centric values embedded in modernist thinking. She was a devoted feminist, leftist, and anti-nationalist whose work told the stories of miners, ethnic minorities, comfort women, Minjung activists, and other marginalized groups to advocate for a reckoning with the nuances of colonial and imperial histories of Japan in Asia. Tomiyama died in August 2021, at the age of 99.
Life
Early life Tomiyama was born in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, in November 1921. She spent her youth in Dairen and Harbin in Manchukuo. After graduating from the Harbin Girls' School in 1938, Tomiyama entered the Joshibi Women's School of Art and Design (now Joshibi University of Art and Design) in Tokyo in 1939. While at Joshibi, however, she became interested in proletarian art and ended up being expelled because of the incompatibility of her interests with the institution as the Pacific War heated up. Still, she ends up attending the Arts and Crafts Institute (Bijutsu Kōgei Gakuin) headed by critic Usaburō Toyama where she learned about Dada, the Bauhaus, and Surrealism under painter Ichirō Fukuzawa, among others.
1950s By the early 1950s, Tomiyama was a single mother to two children born to different fathers during the war. To support them, she worked as a freelance illustrator and journalist, often illustrating picture books. As a journalist, she traveled throughout Japan and internationally starting in the 1950s, and during her travels she came to use her art to express the social and political problems in the areas she visited, giving a voice to marginalized groups. Her first formal artistic production after dropping out of Joshibi was inspired by the mining landscapes of the Chikuho mining region in Kyushu where she was sent to cover the lives and labor organizing of miners in the early 1950s. Her first solo exhibition, held at Shiseido Gallery in Ginza in 1954, featured oil paintings of these mining landscapes. From the mid-1950s, however, her work shifted to lithographic prints that featured miners rather than landscapes. She later returned to the topic of mines in the 1980s in a series of lithographs treating the theme of Korean forced to work in hard labor conditions—mines, construction, and factories—during WWII.
1960s During the 1960s, Tomiyama had the opportunity to travel widely outside Japan, visiting Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Over the following decades she eventually traveled through Western and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, the United States, Taiwan, and in the 1990s, to return to Chinese Manchuria where she had lived until the end of her teenage years. During these early 1960s travels, however, she already began to establish a transnational network of activists involved in labor union organizing, peace advocacy, and social justice movements for herself, confirming her leftist commitments. In 1961 she followed Japanese miners who relocated to Brazil, but became curious about other walks of life in the regions, so she continued traveling throughout Latin America over the next year. During this trip she came to recognize the ongoing effects of Western colonial histories on contemporary politics and social problems. She gradually came to see how Japan's allyship with the United States replicated regional power relations during Japan's colonial era, with benefiting economically from pro-Japan US trade policies in East and Southeast Asia. This awareness led Tomiyama to leave the Japanese Communist Party, which she had joined after WWII, in protest of the party's acceptance of the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea (Nikkan Kihon Jōyaku) in 1965. In 1967, inspired by the populist aesthetics and indigenous references she saw in the works of Mexican muralist—Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco—during her Latin American trip, Tomiyama set off for Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and India. Although she sought a people's art and developed an Asian-inspired artistic language distinct from the formal Japanese academic training she received in Tokyo, she found herself increasingly doubting the values of modern civilization. Returning to Japan in 1968 amidst the height of the student protests, she temporarily shifted away from painting to focus on activism.
1970s Just as Japan was taking the international spotlight through Osaka's Expo '70, Tomiyama headed off to Seoul in 1970. There she found South Korea still scarred by Korean War, and after visiting political prisoner Suh Sung in 1971, she was again inspired to take up black-and-white printmaking, now in service of the Korean pro-democracy movement. She began reading the poems of Kim Chi-ha, and when he and student activists from Seoul University were rounded up and sentenced to death in 1974, she produced lithographs to serve as backdrops for a Japanese television documentary on Kim's plight. When the documentary was censored, however, Tomiyama established Hidane Kōbō (Kindling Atelier) in 1976 to embark on independent production of multi-media slide works. Through these slide works, which combine images with music and poetry, she has produced works featuring Japanese translations of poems by Kim Chi-ha and Chit Phumisak, and collaborated with such figures as musician Yūji Takahashi, photographer and director Seiichi Motohashi, and actor Soichi Itō. In May 1980 her slide show Prayer in Memory: Gwangju, May, 1980, featuring music by Takahashi, addressed the violent crackdown by dictator Chung Doo-Hwan's military on the pro-democracy Gwangju uprising and won her international recognition. In more recent years, select slide shows have become DVDs as well,
Tomiyama also became involved in the feminist movement in the 1970s. Inspired by the writings of Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millet, and other Japanese feminists, she edited a volume of feminist essays by thirteen women writers in 1973. Also in 1973, Tomiyama joined the anti-kisaeng sex tour movement, which sought to both raise awareness of and curb the growing sex tourism industry that saw newly-affluent Japanese men of the post-economic-miracle 1970s going on sex tours in South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. A group of women including Tomiyama, journalist Yayori Matsui, Akiko Yamaguchi, and others involved in the anti-kisaeng sex tour movement went on to establish the Asian Women's Association (Aija no Onnatachi no kai) in 1977. Through activist actions and the journal Asian Women's Liberation (Ajia to josei kaihō), the AWA sought to respond "to the voices of Korean and other Asian women," and in "'learning' from them, these Japanese women activists also formed a solidarity movement dealing with such issues as human rights, labor rights, and the colonial past, all of which were pertinent to East and Southeast Asian women."
Tomiyama extended these interests in postcolonialist activism to the art world through her activities with the Japan Afro-Asian Latin American Artists' Association (JAALA). She was a founding member of the group in 1977, and served as one of the two first vice-chairmen. JAALA, which continues today, focuses on building solidarity between Japan and "the Third World" through artistic exchange in order destroy "the limits of the modern art," inspire a "cultural revolution," and thus "create new human [sic], new art based on the new sense of values." The group thus aligns with Tomiyama's concern with finding a way out of the modernist paradigm and its privileging of Western cultural values as universal while recognizing Japan's historical complicity in reinforcing modernist social, cultural, and political structures.
1980s~90s Historian Laura Hein argues that it is Tomiyama's encounter with feminism that inspired her to incorporate experiences from her past growing up in Dairen and Harbin into her work in the 1980s, exploring the links between personal identity, nation state, racial and gender hierarchies, and colonial power structures. This personal exploration coincided with increasing focus by the AWA on the issue of comfort women, a topic that combined Tomiyama's feminist interests with her desire to confront Japan's colonial legacies in Asia. Borrowing a term from art historian and critic Hiroki Yamamoto, cultural anthropologist Yuko Manabe describes this field of investigation as the "intersection of post-colonialism and feminism." It is in this context that Tomiyama reintroduced color into her work and began to draw more explicitly on imagery and aesthetics drawn from Asian folk religions, including motifs of the shaman, the fox, Southeast Asian and Pacific Island masks and puppets, dragons, and celestial symbols from the 1980s on.
Tomiyama's most prominent works of the 1980s and 90s, A Memory of the Sea, Harbin: Requiem for the Twentieth Century, and The Fox Story, were dedicated to the victims of Japanese imperialism, in particular Koreans, including women sexually exploited by the Japanese military known as comfort women. As a result, her work has been sidelined by most art institutions in Japan and ignored by the Japanese media. In spite of these institutional challenges, however, Tomiyama found success in a fine arts context in 1995 with her traveling solo exhibition Silenced by History: Tomiyama Taeko, 50 Years after the War at the Tama Art University Museum in Tokyo and Donga Gallery in Seoul and the invitation to show her work in the Art as Witness project for the first Gwangju Biennale. Still, the majority of her exhibitions over the last four decades of her life were held in university art galleries, municipal galleries and lobbies, and human rights organizations.
2000–2021