Two Views of Amami Oshima

In 1958 the painter Isson Tanaka (°22 July 1908 – *11 September 1977) moved to Amami Oshima, an island in the Ryukyus. There, in self-chosen isolation, he committed himself exclusively to his art until his sudden passing in 1977
In 2018 Seiha Kurosawa, Kanako Azuma and Hideki Umezawa visited Amami Oshima to create a video installation about Tanaka’s insular life. The work, entitled “Dokkyaku” (tr. The Lone Visitor), shifts between the texture and materiality of Tanaka’s paintings in relation to the natural world of Amami Oshima and its people. The video invites viewers to understand—poetically—the artist’s sensitivity to nature and the expressivity of his works
During his stay on Amami Oshima, Hideki Umezawa recorded a lot of natural sounds to recreate a sort of simulated ecology of Tanaka’s mind – or: of the painter’s mind. On this long playing record these recordings are blended with electronically generated sounds. Next, Andrew Pekler, who has never actually visited Amami Oshima, upon hearing Umezawa’s field recordings creates – in the spirit of Isson Tanaka – a complementary dreamscape of the island’s phenomena. Of what could be. This is a work that doubts between site specific and creative imagination. With sounds echoing between the anecdotic and the imaginary. It is a sensitive and highly stylized interpretation of a world that Isson Tanaka had also carefully studied. A painter at work; a way of seeing