EXHIBITION

Let’s hold your urge to ask the curator the question of “Why Okinawa?” Instead, shall we allow ourselves the curiosity to directly cut into asking much needed important crucial question of “What is Okinawa?”

So, No. The curator does not appreciate you sharing your wonderful vacation, and how you love the beaches, or that you thoroughly enjoyed whatever trendy, touristy food you found there. And also, No, ‘Tracing Silence’ is not an artwork exhibition; it is a research exhibition. A transitional presentation of an ongoing, long-term research on contemporary Okinawa.

This is a self-initiated, site-responsive archival and research journey born from an accidental encounter with the island back in...actually, that’s TMI for an exhibition intro, just read the catalog, or ask the researcher himself. However, please keep this vital context in mind: this entire research is viewed strictly through the lens of a Southeast Asian, a West Malaysian, a Penang-lang performance-maker/researcher/writer—Ngo Tjer Hong—who possesses absolutely no national qualifications, historical obligations, nor any ancestral connections to this archipelago sitting so far south of mainland Japan, and so north of Taiwan.

In Okinawa, public memory is paradoxically omnipresent and deeply hidden. Why? How? Read the catalog. Anyways, instead of staring at officially constructed, grand monuments, the researcher chose to look for the hidden fractures embedded within the island's most unremarkable, ignored, and habitual daily objects.

Guided by Walter Benjamin’s concept of a Flâneur (the slow, urban wanderer) who reads history through the "refused," the researcher restricted his movement to foot or bicycle to encounter the scenery at human speed. And inspired by artist Okamoto Mitsuhiro’s “Red Carpet Project” (2006), the researcher simply armed with pencil and paper, wander through different scenery, manually tracing—making frottage—on the quiet, unvocalized friction of Okinawa’s contemporary history hidden beneath these ordinary surfaces.