THE GROENE AMSTERDAMMER 1.5.2025
Meiro Koizumi

Catching Evil in the Act

In the work of Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi, the major questions of history, good and evil, fact and memory, human and technology take center stage.

Fabienne Rachmadiev

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In 1918, in a Russian provincial town, orphanages were full of war orphans, and groups of neglected children roamed the streets. Upon witnessing their trauma, the young Latvian actress and theater director Asja Lacis decided to develop a theater pedagogy specifically for these children. Through improvisation in a defined space, the children were given the opportunity to playfully relate to the world that had hurt them. Lacis hoped that, together, they would become deeply aware of what moral goodness is. This vision would later be recorded by Walter Benjamin in his text Proletarian Program for Children's Theater. More than a century later, these principles are also recognizable in the work of Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi (1976), whose major exhibition is currently on view at De Pont in Tilburg.

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Theaters of Life, the work on which the exhibition’s title is based, is a recording of a two-day theater workshop Koizumi conducted with Korean youth. It is a large installation consisting of six projectors that together form a panoramic spectacle. The images, which cover two entire walls of the large hall and at times spill onto the ceiling, are projected over each other like a palimpsest. Some footage is in color: recordings of the workshop with the young people. Scenes in which archival photos are reenacted are shown in black and white or sepia tones. In the middle stands a small monitor with English subtitles, but the text does not match what the actors appear to be saying. A voice-over delivers the lines, sometimes whispering, creating a sense of estrangement. Who is this narrator, who says, “I am afraid of sleep,” or, “that’s all in the past”?

The text is not only asynchronous with the image, giving the visuals an eerie, ghostly presence, but also implies the weight of history these young people carry. They are part of the so-called Koryo community: Koreans who were deported en masse in 1937—the year Stalin unleashed relentless terror on millions—to Soviet-occupied Central Asia, from where many later ended up in the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

This third or fourth generation often no longer speaks Korean, but Russian. Accelerated by the war in Ukraine, part of this diaspora has returned to Korea. Koizumi asked the youth to study archival material from the (Soviet-)Koryo Theater in Almaty, Kazakhstan—a theater by and for the Korean diaspora there. The youth, dressed in contemporary clothing, appear relaxed. Some theatrical scenes, however, are intense; actors wear nooses around their necks or press a gun to someone’s temple. The overlapping images show both the performance of the play and its preparation, blending beginning and end, finished and unfinished, reality and play.

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This layered merging recurs in several works, sometimes taking on hybrid, monstrous forms, as in Altars, three sculptures in an otherwise empty room. The sculptures are a kind of human-machines. Casts of various limbs protrude from motors; one lower body wears casual pants, a torso a linen shirt. This fusion is literal in the film Soluble Meat, shown in the next room—images generated by AI in which men in historical uniforms are deformed into liquid grotesques in a bleak, oppressive dreamscape.

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The ongoing series Fog is a collection of charcoal drawings that Koizumi meticulously recreated from film scenes by Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. According to the exhibition text, Ozu kept a diary about the horrors he experienced during the Second Sino-Japanese War as a commanding officer. Yet his postwar films show not horror, but the pleasant, everyday. Koizumi investigates this discrepancy by erasing the images—as if a spirit haunts them.

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Not light fare, but Koizumi’s work is centered on the big questions of history, good and evil, fact and memory, human and technology. The colors in his work are subdued—never bright or exuberant, often black and white. It is, in approaching such heavy themes, very tidy and understated.

The exhibition itself is thoughtfully designed to match the gravity of the work. Each individual piece is given ample space, and there is a thematic progression that guides the visitor through the complex, sometimes unfamiliar themes: from humans and modern technology to humans and other technological and historical mechanisms. In a clarifying introductory film, Koizumi explains that he sees it as art’s task to capture these “mechanisms” of history in all their complexity. He focuses particularly on his home country, Japan, which has scarcely reckoned with its colonial and imperial past—bearing the unique status of both World War II perpetrator and victim of the atomic bomb.

Will there be many visitors whose Indo-Dutch families, for instance, suffered from Japanese war crimes? My own grandfather was tortured by Japanese soldiers at sixteen before being imprisoned in an internment camp. Keeping this personal history in mind, I found it both valuable to gain insight into how that shared history resonates in a different context—and at times simply very hard to watch. Koizumi’s perspective is that of the second or third postwar generation, which of course comes with different questions and considerations than those of the direct perpetrators or victims. It is clear that Koizumi sees the careful engagement with existential questions—such as the capacity for human evil—as essential.

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The most difficult work to watch is undeniably The Angels of Testimony, placed at the very end, after the viewer has been fully immersed in Koizumi’s visual language and themes. This video work centers on the testimony of Hajime Kondo, who broke a taboo by publishing a book containing witness accounts of war crimes—crimes in which he himself had participated.

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In the large, dark room, a small monitor shows the 99-year-old Kondo, interviewed by Koizumi (off-screen). The focus is on the man’s face and the traces memory has left there. Behind him, two large projections show a group of actors in various settings—in stark, black rehearsal spaces or out in the busy streets of modern-day Japan. While Koizumi asks about Kondo’s testimonies, it is the young actors who deliver the answers. Sometimes as a group, in a loosely staged memory; sometimes alone, they recite horrifying recollections from Kondo’s war years in China.

The contrast is shocking. The old man barely speaks, stammers, whispers, utters half a sentence, half a word. His face contorts, he weeps. It is masterful how Koizumi portrays this perpetrator as a human being without excusing his actions for even a moment. The actors repeat phrases like, “I can’t remember,” “I just watched,” “we’ll teach you how it feels to stab a person.” A young woman stands on the street, passersby glancing briefly at what is happening, and recounts, under Koizumi’s direction—from whisper to scream—a horrifying crime committed by Kondo and his battalion. Again, Koizumi overlays images, so no single image ever aligns with a single phrase. Evil, in other words, is not something confined to individuals, which is precisely why its mechanisms must be caught in the act, grasped.

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The film is edited in a seamless loop—this Möbius strip is a recurring device in Koizumi’s work—making it nearly impossible to distinguish beginning from end, and offering no catharsis. Where in one moment Kondo gives a grateful nod to the invisible interviewer, in the next his face is again tormented or nearly blank—it doesn’t matter whether the man personally finds redemption. More important than judgment is the will to understand how evil works, how memory works—not as spectacle, but, in Koizumi’s words, to comprehend its “mechanisms.” Of course, Koizumi harbors no illusion that there is an answer to unde malum? But just as justice lies in the striving for it, Koizumi delivers a highly original, deeply thoughtful contribution.

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Before exiting the exhibition, Koizumi offers—perhaps as a gesture to the visitor—a VR installation in which technology is used for good. That, after all, is no less present in the world, no less real, than evil.

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Meiro Koizumi: Theaters of Life, De Pont, Tilburg, through August 31. depont.nl

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