Meiro Koizumi

In the ongoing series of Fog drawings, Meiro Koizumi works with stills from various movies by renowned Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (1903 - 1963). This work is based on a still from Ozu's best known film 'Tokyo Story' (1953). Ozu never moved the camera. He set the camera on tripod, and moved around the props by inches to create the perfect picture before shooting. Pursuing his investigation into Japan’s ritualistic culture and its past events, the fog becomes an element for revealing, rather than concealing. Koizumi uncovers the painful reality hidden behind the serene facades, searching for new ways of resolving the past in a way that speaks to our current reality. During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the film director, Yasujiro Ozu, was sent to China to fight in the war. According to his diary, at the beginning of the war, he was making plans to make war films once he goes back to his homeland Japan. His diary was filled with ideas of scenes which depict the daily lives of the soldiers in a foreign country. But at some point during the war he stopped making such notes. As a soldier, he was the unit leader for a unit which spread chemical gas against the Chinese army. He saw and experienced the worst of the war. After Ozu came back to Japan, he never made a single war film nor a single scene involving war battles. All the scars of the war are erased, and repressed under the surface of beautiful daily lives of the people on screen. Meiro Koizumi (1976, Gunma, JP) tries to bring this repressed dimension back to the surface, by the gesture of erasing.