MAKIKO

Biography

MAKIKO is an international visual artist. Since 2006, her work has been exhibited in Japan, North America and Europe. A diverse image-maker who understands the power of the medium in its various forms, she is best known for her black and white photography. She has published 3 books: Beautifully Different (2014); its Japanese version (2016); and BATTLESHIP ISLAND (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2018), which was shortlisted for Best Published Photobook, Singapore International Photography Festival 2020. They're in the Tate (Martin Parr Collection). She won the BJP International Photography Award 2020. She has recently been mentored by Magnum Photos.

The project

"This project looks at the mass hysteria that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor and its impact on people of Japanese descent residing mainly on the Pacific coast, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Over 120,000 people were sent to 10 internment camps across the U.S., and I recently discovered that my great-great-uncle was one of them.

The work primarily focuses on what happened in the Tule Lake camp, the first camp in which he was interned. The research is based on archival documents, interviews and visits, as well as on the internees' strengths based on solidarity and how they thrived between 1942 and 1945 and in the post-war period.

The concepts and themes at the heart of this project are highly relevant to what's happening in the world today: emigrating to find a dream in a foreign land, coping with a change in society due to conflict/war, struggling to establish one's identity, to find a community, belief or religion, and so on.

 History repeats itself.

I created the cross-media visuals, combining photography, archive images, collage, painting and stills clips from moving films. As part of the project, I produced an artist's book about my great-great-uncle, reproducing his hymn book."