Okinawa Mandala

Okinawa Mandala╱Shomei Tomatsu

Published for the 2002 exhibition at Urasoe Art Museum, Okinawa Mandala gathers Shomei Tomatsu’s long engagement with Okinawa into a dense, restless constellation. Tomatsu first entered Okinawa in 1969, when the islands were still under U.S. administration; over the following decades, his gaze moved through military bases, streets, rituals, remote islands, plants, light, and the afterlife of occupation.

Across monochrome and color images, the book folds together documentary urgency and a sensuous attraction to the islands’ atmosphere. The “mandala” form gives Okinawa many centers at once: history, landscape, bodies, symbols, weather, and memory circling one another.

A major catalogue for understanding Tomatsu’s Okinawa: political, lyrical, fractured, luminous.

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