Lieko Shiga

Lieko Shiga was born in Okazaki, Aichi, in 1980 and lives in Miyagi. Her major project Rasen Kaigan was made in Kitakama, a coastal community near Sendai, and unfolded before and after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. She participated in MoMA’s Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015, and MoMA holds several works from the Rasen Kaigan series.^*1

Shiga’s themes include communal memory, disaster, oral history, local ritual, unstable photographic time, mourning, myth, and the relation between archive and lived place. Her images combine staging, collaboration, and flash-lit surreal or theatrical scenes rooted in specific people, places, and events in Kitakama.^*2 Beginning in 2008 she lived in Kitakama and worked with residents and local photographers. After the tsunami destroyed her home and studio and killed many residents, she continued the project and also helped clean and digitize anonymous photographs recovered from debris. Shiga’s own explanation that Rasen Kaigan means a vortex of time without past, present, or future is central to the project.^*3 In post-2011 Japanese photography, the work is historically important because it refuses reduction to disaster reportage and instead joins staging, performance, archive recovery, and mythic imagery to respond to a ruptured local history.^*2

SFMOMA describes Rasen Kaigan as deeply personal and collaborative, while noting Shiga’s wish that the work not be defined only by disaster. Getty Iris presents her as a community archivist after the tsunami, in relation to the recorder311 project at Sendai Mediatheque. The strongest critical axis is the way photographs move from debris to objects of mourning, prayer, and historical testimony.^*3