Meiro Koizumi

The guilt, shame and taboos surrounding Japan’s violent wartime past are a recurring theme in Koizumi’s work. For his Fog series, he drew new interpretations of scenes from films by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu was a Japanese filmmaker who fought in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and kept a diary of his time in combat in 1937. At first, Ozu used his diary to record ideas for war films – but then he stopped. It is possible that, as the commander of a unit that deployed gas as a chemical weapon, he could no longer justify the atrocities of the war. Back home in Japan, Ozu went on to create serene films that depict everyday life in the country. Just below the surface, however, wartime traumas lie hidden. By erasing portions of his drawings, Koizumi draws attention to what is being suppressed. This symbolises the gaps in an emotionally charged and wilfully obscured past.