Where did the peacocks go?

Beautiful peacocks strolling through the empty streets of Fukushima. From this vision comes Miho Kajioka’s photographic project, on view at the T14 gallery in Milan.

 Miho Kajioka, <i>And, where did the peacocks go?</i>
T14 Gallery opens in Milan its new artistic season with Miho Kajioka’s new project, where grace and ruin coexist indissolubly.
This series tells about Japan after the disaster of Fukushima, but whispering a message of rebirth as well.
 Miho Kajioka, <i>And, where did the peacocks go?</i>
Miho Kajioka, And, where did the peacocks go?

“It was Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami that reconnected me to photography. Two months after the disaster, while reporting in the coastal city of Kamaishi, where over 800 people died, I found roses blooming beside a blasted building.

That mixture of grace and ruin made me think of a Japanese poem: In the spring, cherry blossoms,
 in the summer the cuckoo,
 in autumn the moon, and in
 winter the snow, clear, cold. Written by the Zen monk Dogen, the poem describes the fleeting, fragile beauty of the changing seasons. The roses I saw in Kamaishi bloomed simply because it was spring. That beautiful and uncomplicated statement, made by roses in the midst of ruin, impressed me, and returned me to photography.” The Japanese artist explains.

“Right after the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, I found a blog about peacocks that were left in the evacuation zone, within the 20 km limit. I started imagining those peacocks, walking around the empty town with their beautiful wings spread. The image I had in my mind seemed so far away from what was going on in Fukushima. It was as if two different layers of images – the disaster scene and beautiful peacocks – were overlapping with each other without being unified. I started to see different layers in almost everything after the disaster in 2011.”


until November 14, 2015
Miho Kajioka
And, where did the peacocks go?

Twenty14 contemporary
piazza Mentana 7, Milano

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