【Current Exhibition】KAZAMA Sachiko: Clairvoyance in a 9㎡ room

The exhibition premieres a new body of oil paintings, featuring various swans that have appeared in literature and music. Kazama’s interest in the motif of the swan began in 2015, when she came across a copy of Tribulat Bonhomet by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam at a secondhand bookstore in Hirosaki during a residency at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (ACAC). This fantasy novel depicts how the protagonist, Dr. Bonhomet, repeatedly becomes entangled in strange and absurd situations despite his attempts to understand the world through science and reason. For instance, in one of the stories included in the book, The Swan-Killer, the protagonist learns that the cry of a swan at the moment of its death is the most beautiful sound in the world. Determined to verify this, he dresses as a medieval knight and heads to the water’s edge to kill a swan. Here, the swan functions as a symbol of irrational beauty — encompassing personal emotions, imagination, and aesthetic sensibility beyond scientific reason — and this story will take form in Kazama’s new work The Swan-Killer.
Additionally, Kazama’s work My thanks to you, dear swan! (2026) draws on Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, in which a knight arrives in a boat pulled by a swan to rescue a princess in distress. The scene is transposed onto the landscape of Asadokoro Coast in Hiranai Town, on the Natsudomari Peninsula, layered with local legends associated with swans. By combining familiar modern settings found across Japan with imagery drawn from opera, literature, and legends, Kazama seeks to depict a romantic, imaginative world that exists alongside our everyday reality.

Focusing on the museum’s distinctive exhibition hall with an open atrium, the exhibition also features large-scale woodcut prints that represent Kazama’s recent practice. Alas! Heisoku-kan (Raging Battle-ship the Dead-end) (2012), created in response to the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident, depicts the relationship between nuclear power and historical catastrophes within human society. In Dyslympics 2680 (2018), Kazama superimposes the Tokyo Olympics scheduled for 2020 with the “phantom” Tokyo Olympics of 1940, which was canceled due to the war. Great Dazzle War (2017) portrays Jiraiya, a fictional hero and sorcerer from Edo-period literature, engaged in battle with a salaryman constrained by contemporary social norms. This exhibition showcases how Kazama constructs allegorical images that explore the conflicts between the structures of modern and contemporary society and the individual in her works.