企画展: Utoro Art Festival 2025 Exhibition (Part 2)

This exhibition project is inspired by the struggles of people who left their
homeland and created a community in Utoro, Kyoto Prefecture, to build a
new life there. Artworks that renew our gaze are gathered here to give hope
to countless others who are part of the great migration that is continuing
around the globe.

Eight billion people live on the planet Earth. Of these, 89 million have been
forced to leave their original home or country and live in other lands. Of the
89 million, 27 million are refugees, 4.6 million are asylum seekers and 53
million are internally displaced persons (UNHCR, statistics 2021-2022). The
causes of forced displacement vary including wars, civil conflict and natural
disasters, or major accidents such as factory explosions, and chemical
contamination of water sources; ethnic exclusion, failed economic policies,
and maladministration cause further impoverishment and the widening of the
North-South economic gap, leading to more waves of migration. In addition
to the clearly discernible and arbitrary migration shown in these statistics, we
know that there has been a great deal of voluntary migration in search of a
‘better life’ in the modern era, from the late 19th century to the present day.

In other words, moving to and living in other lands have become shared
experiences for many people for well over 100 years. This experience of
migration creates gaps between life in the destination, the deracination from
the place of origin, and the ‘rooting’ of the next generation born in the new
land. The people new to the land might see possibilities there to pave the
way for new communities, but they might face obstacles that prevent them
from doing so. Migration is a source of hope and suffering.

Through this forum and exhibition, we will ask how the global phenomenon of
migration—both forced or unavoidable and voluntary, to build new lives in
distant lands—has changed and will continue to change in the future of this
planet of eight billion people.

The Well of Utoro: From High to Low

temporary tent fabric, acrylic lacquer spray, paper, tape

Variable installation (wall and floor) | 2025

Artist’s Note

Artist CHOI Jimok’s <The Well of Utoro: From High to Low> visualizes the severe human rights issues experienced by the Utoro community through the powerful metaphor of water. For a long time, residents endured daily life in poor sanitary conditions, facing constant threats of flooding during heavy rains and relying on pumping groundwater for basic household use. Public water supply infrastructure was eventually installed following successful human rights and living conditions improvement campaigns led by Japanese civil society. However, the land—which had been purchased from Nissan Shatai(日産車体)—was immediately claimed by Nishinihon JR Sansen(西日本殖産), an action that led to the Utoro people being branded as “illegal occupiers” by the Japanese judicial system. For them, clean ‘water’ symbolizes the struggle for survival and a history of discrimination and oppression. The piece is realized on the surface of a tent fabric where I inscribed traces of forms—repeatedly cut, rejoined, and transformed—echoing the ceaseless flow of water. The formal principle extends from my ongoing practice of the “frame as content.” In the process of cutting and recombining, existing frameworks are dismantled, but simultaneously, inverted rules and structures emerge. This is not a mere alteration but the generation of new frameworks that fundamentally reverse interior and exterior, looking-in and looking-out. The paper bears the vestiges of many histories: the sea crossing of Koreans mobilized for wartime labor; the harsh construction of military airfields; the miserable hanba quarters; the Rising Sun flag; the village burned amid anti-Korean sentiment; the Korean Peninsula as the identity of Zainichi Koreans; and the tenacious resistance of those who declared, “We will live and die in Utoro Village.” These scenes, like rippling water, flow downward to converge in the well. This well is not simply a site for drawing water, but an allegory of collective memory and the right to survival, preserved through sweat and resistance even under dire conditions. The cutting, gathering, and flow of the paper is not a mere formal exercise—it is a visual evocation of the Utoro people’s history and resistance. The work recalls not only the events of the past but poses a question that remains germane to us today: In what frameworks do we live, and how might we resist and reconfigure them?