Shimon Minamikawa

Painting (Painting)

The painting Index (Tokyo) includes an image of a protest march in Japan. There is some humor in this image and also cultural contextual confusion and displacement, embodied in the painting. The protest we can see on the clipping is against two things : 1)recently the Japanese government revised the constitution (some say illegally) so that the right to collective self-defense is possible; this basically re-militarizes Japan ending decades of pacifism and this sparked the largest public protests in recent years and 2) the protestors are also marching against re-starting nuclear power plants in Japan post-Fukushima.