Kazumi Miyai | Where Gazes Overlap—Eiji Ohashi "Your eyes are our eyes—Prisoner Road"
Eiji Ohashi's exhibition features photographs contrasting the memory of Hokkaido's 'Prisoner Road' construction with the current landscape overgrown with bamboo grass.Summary
This article reviews Eiji Ohashi's solo exhibition, "Your eyes are our eyes—Prisoner Road," held at Moerenuma Park. Ohashi presented new works focusing on the sites of the "Prisoner Road," built by forced labor during Hokkaido's development, now overgrown with bamboo grass (Sasa). The exhibition comprised four series, centered on "The 13," which depicts the locations of 13 temporary prisons established for the laborers. These large-scale, highly detailed photographs initially appear as simple landscapes, but viewers are subtly led to confront the terrifying reality of the nature the prisoners witnessed, without dramatic staging of the tragedy. Ohashi states that while nature subsumes the traces of human violence, the persistent bamboo grass signifies that despair continues in a transformed state. The exhibition also included historical materials, such as photographs and information about a memorial stone where a local resident replaced the convicts' listed crimes with the inscription "Mountain God." The final series, "Transition," uses AI-generated images based on local residents' voices, projected onto the road remnants and photographed, symbolizing the layering of contemporary perspectives onto historical trauma. The title emphasizes that the act of seeing transcends time, connecting the prisoners' view, the memory held by current residents, and the modern viewer's gaze.
(Source：artscape)