“how do you capture something that is not in front of you?” AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST KEI ITO
Kei Ito looks over “Sungazing Scroll” in this installation photograph of his current exhibition on view at the Georgia Museum of Art. Image provided by the artist.
For Kei Ito, the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 is just as palpable and present now, nearly 80 years later, as it was the day his grandfather survived it. He carries the weight of the trauma with him as though he experienced it himself. He remembers his grandfather’s description of the bombing vividly. “It was like a hundred suns lighting up the sky,” he recalls his grandfather saying.
In his exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, “Staring at the Face of the Sun,” Ito’s “irradiated histories” examine the detrimental effects of nuclear weapons and the possibility of healing and reconciliation. Ito’s works span five galleries and collectively serve as an early career survey while honoring his grandfather’s legacy as a survivor. Following the bombing of Hiroshima, Ito’s grandfather became an outspoken anti-nuclear activist who gave “talks at the UN, in Russia and the United States, both official and unofficial, at protests, conferences, all sorts of these things,” Ito said. Sadly, radiation, the weapon’s unseen destruction, led to his grandfather’s untimely death from cancer when Ito was just nine years old. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Ito moved by himself to New Zealand when he was in high school. There, he found the initial spark for his passion for art and photography. After high school, he followed his interest in art to the United States and earned his undergraduate degree in art from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He then moved to Baltimore, where he obtained his master of fine arts degree at the Maryland Institute of Art.
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