TOMIKO JONES / Hatsubon

February 9 – May 6, 2022

Hatsubon is a memorial exhibition for the artists’ father and explores the dynamic tension between tradition and performance – the diaphanous space between life and death. The materiality of the work suggests the dualities of the ephemeral and the corporeal, and the pendulous state between longing and release.

Header image: Fall, Tomiko Jones

The ceremony of hatsubon marks the first anniversary of a loved one’s death, held during the yearly ritual of Obon, a Japanese Buddhist custom honoring ancestors. A ritual for the deceased is the sending of a small vessel – shoryobune – to sea. Jones created her own version by splitting, steaming, and bending bamboo into a boat form and skinning it with waxed kōzo paper. She sewed yukatta, simple cotton kimonos, and on the dawn of her father’s hatsubon, sent the boat to sea from the shores of Hawai’i in his honor.

Hatsubon visits three geographic sites of significance: her father’s birthplace, along a river he grew up on; her mother’s birthplace where they set the boat to sea, and where he is buried; and the place where her parents met, and she was born.  

Throughout time communities and cultures have sent many of their young ones off to sea to find a better life on the other shore; at the other end of a lifetime, the ocean is home to our many rituals of death, both a vehicle and destination for the final journey of our loved ones. With this exhibition we travel to Jones’ unnamed coast – where the river meets the sea – to ritually set free the spirit and body of her father.  

About the Artist

Tomiko Jones' work is linked to place, exploring transitions in the landscape through social, cultural and geographical terms. Her work considers the twin crises of too much and too little in the age of climate change. Water is ever present, as site of cultural practice, economic imperative, and locus of spiritual belief. A loose mapping that echoes the internal terrain is imaged through photographic works and site-responsive multidisciplinary installations. Her recent project “Hatsubon” is a memorial exhibition in photography and video installation.

Jones is an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for Photographic Education. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography with a Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is the recipient of awards including the Center for Photography at Woodstock AIR Program, En Foco New Works Fellowship (New York), 4Culture and CityArtists (Seattle), and Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes (France). Tomiko was an invited Resident Artist at Museé Niépce in Chalon-Sur-Saône, and a Fellow at The Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France. www.tomikojonesphoto.com