eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific

2020–2021 · Series of eight digital collage prints on paper

eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Castle Ruins, 2020
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Castle Ruins, 2020

eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific is a series of eight digital collage prints composed as hanging scrolls. The title borrows the “eight views” (hakkei) tradition of Japanese landscape art, in which a set of celebrated scenes fixes a place in collective memory. Here the scenes are sites of the 1942 South Pacific campaign: Rabaul, Bougainville, and the waters around the Coral Sea.

Warships and aircraft are set into landscapes drawn from the Japanese landscape print tradition, so the idealized view and the battlefield share one frame. The series grew from the Battle of the Coral Sea, where my maternal grandfather served aboard the carrier Shōhō, and it forms a companion to the oil spill paintings.

eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Five Story Pagoda, 2020
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Five Story Pagoda, 2020
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / IJN Shōhō, 2020
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / IJN Shōhō, 2020
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Operation MO, 2021
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Operation MO, 2021
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Rabaul, 2021
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Rabaul, 2021
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Bougainville, 2021
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Bougainville, 2021
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / The Bridge, 2021
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / The Bridge, 2021
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Whirlpool Passage, 2021
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific / Whirlpool Passage, 2021

eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific
2020–2021
Series of eight digital collage prints on paper
Dimensions variable (printed at 30 × 24 in.)

Publication
Published in Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, vol. 9, no. 1 (2021), University of Pittsburgh. DOI: 10.5195/contemp/2021.323

Related: oil spill, a series of paintings from the Coral Sea series, shown in Surface Noise, COHJU, Kyoto, 2024.

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