Whitestone Gallery Karuizawa is pleased to announce Erika Kobayashi’s exhibition: Trinity. “Trinity” refers to the three aspects of God in Christianity; however, for this exhibition, the artist also intends to indicate the name of the place where the first experiment with atomic bombs took place—the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, the United States in 1945.
Kobayashi has been attracted toward radiation due to its invisibility, and she has been attempting to represent it through literature and art. Radium, which is a chemical element often used for producing nuclear products, has a half-life of 1601 years. It means that the radium discovered by Marie Curie and her husband in 1902 will disintegrate in the year 3503. For the artist, evaluating the positive and negative implications of radiation and its history is not the purpose of her study. Rather, she is interested in imagining how people in the future will think about us, who have decided to use radiation in several fields while we continue to suffer from the dangers it poses to human health and be threatened by atomic weapons at the present time.
By representing radiation through various media, the artist enables us to think about life and death. If people in the past had taken another decision, how would we live now? Why was the atomic bomb dropped to kill people, and why do we need to worry about the influence of radiation on our health today? We cannot change history, but what can we do to change our future?
We cordially invite you to experience Erika Kobayashi’s thought-provoking exhibition in Karuizawa.