Noto’s Damaged Landscape Is Reconstructed Through Art in Kanazawa

The orange column had stairs. Above it, a green structure could be read as cloud, ship or a branch trained by the Sea of Japan wind. Hitoshi Ushijima’s Matsukumo, Umikaze, Hashikekumo was never meant to be contemplated from a safe distance. Children could climb it; visitors could play on it. Their bodies completed the work and turned a school ground in Suzu into a public square.

Then the ground moved. A landslide caused by the January 1, 2024, Noto Peninsula earthquake brought the outdoor sculpture down. Rebuilding it on site became impossible and dismantling was decided. Ushijima could not accept that a work which had retained its shape even after collapse should simply be discarded. He took possession of the pieces without knowing where a work of that scale could next be shown.

That uncertain afterlife is now the subject of an exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. “Tomo ni aru fūkei”—a title that can be approached as “a landscape in which we are together”—opened September 8. Ushijima has transported and reconfigured the damaged sculpture, deliberately not rebuilding its 2023 form. In the adjoining presentation, Hiraki Sawa unveils a new moving-image installation made from research and conversations in Suzu, where his grandparents and father lived and where he has maintained a deep personal connection.

The pairing offers two very different records of damage: a material body that has survived deformation, and images assembled from memory, landscape and inherited time. Neither artist promises restoration. Instead, the exhibition asks how people may rebuild a relationship to a place that cannot be returned to its prior state.

Saving a work is not the same as restoring it

Matsukumo, Umikaze, Hashikekumo was commissioned for the 2023 Oku-Noto Triennale. It stood in the Otani district on the grounds of the former Seibu Elementary School, now part of the Suzu Theater Museum. The festival’s description emphasized a form that appeared rooted against strong sea winds while resembling windblown branches, clouds or a ship. Its planned future extended beyond the exhibition: it was to help make the grounds a place where children could play.

The title itself resists compression. The festival supplied the English “Matsukumo, Umikaze, Hashikekumo (Pine trees, clouds, sea breeze and buoyant barge clouds).” The Japanese word hashike refers to a barge or lighter—a vessel connecting shore and ship. After the earthquake, an object built around rootedness and connection was physically severed from its site.

Conventional conservation might seek a return to an authorized original. Ushijima’s approach exposes why that is impossible here. The sculpture was made for one ground, one weather system and one community of users. Even if every structural member could be returned to its old angle in Kanazawa, the social conditions that made the work would not travel with it. Its change of form acknowledges the missing site rather than producing a replica of continuity.

This is not merely an emergency strategy imposed on Ushijima by disaster. Born in Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture, in 1963, he trained under the dancer Min Tanaka in the 1980s and performed in Europe and the United States. Back in Japan, he worked in his family’s playground-equipment company and developed what he calls sculptures of playground equipment. His works are activated through participation and are often moved or altered by those who encounter them. Function and meaning change from place to place.

The rebuilt sculpture is not a substitute for the lost square in Suzu. It is a test of whether a new relationship can be formed while the impossibility of return remains visible.

A mythology for Hiki

Sawa approaches the same rupture through another medium and another kind of belonging. The museum has released an image made for a work identified as Kuro to shiro, or “Black and White,” but its curatorial account begins not with a settled plot. It begins with research in Suzu and dialogue with residents.

Sawa’s grandparents and father lived in Oku-Noto; his father lives in Hiki, a coastal community in Suzu. The artist describes deciding that when a reality exceeding imagination suddenly appears, mythology is needed in order to receive it. His mythology for Hiki includes a grey heron standing alone beside a moonlit river, a land that had long been moving almost imperceptibly, a hole it somehow knew about, and an imagined lens through which to look at what might remain rooted there a century from now.

This is not myth as an escape from fact. It creates a time scale longer than the news cycle and more elastic than the language of project completion. The sea and mountains, accumulated ways of living, community memory and values carried between generations become parts of a story that no single witness owns.

Sawa was born in Ishikawa in 1977 and completed an MFA in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2003. Working between London and Kanazawa, he combines moving images, sculptural objects and flat works into installations where private and shared memory overlap. He participated in the Oku-Noto Triennale in 2017, 2021 and 2023. The new project therefore comes from family history and repeated artistic engagement, not a brief visit to a disaster zone.

Seven years of art at the “farthest edge”

The relationship behind both projects was developed through the Oku-Noto Triennale. Its first edition opened across Suzu in 2017. A second, delayed from 2020, was held as Oku-Noto Triennale 2020+ in 2021. The third ran from September 23 to November 12, 2023, with sites distributed across all 247.20 square kilometers of the city.

The festival’s slogan, “Art festival at the furthest edge, leading edge of art,” turned geographic disadvantage into an argument. Suzu sits at the tip of the Noto Peninsula, surrounded by the sea on three sides and distant from Japan’s major transport corridors. Yet the same position once placed it on an outward-facing Japan Sea route. Black-tiled houses, salt-making, Suzu ware, agricultural rites and festival culture preserve a record of livelihoods shaped by satoyama and satoumi—the interdependent landscapes of village, forest and coast.

Artists were asked to engage those places with residents and volunteer supporters. A work could therefore become infrastructure for meeting, memory and play, not merely an object displayed for a fixed run. Ushijima’s sculpture embodied that ambition. Sawa’s repeated returns to Suzu embodied the long relationship on which it depended.

Fifty days after the 2023 festival closed, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake struck at 4:10 p.m. on New Year’s Day. The Japan Meteorological Agency recorded the maximum seismic intensity of 7. The agency places the disaster within an episode of heightened activity that began in December 2020, including a magnitude-5.4 quake in 2022 and magnitude 6.5 in 2023. Seismic activity continued after the main shock, and extreme rain in September 2024 compounded the region’s losses.

The damaged artwork is one small part of a catastrophe that destroyed homes, transport links, livelihoods and lives. That scale must remain clear. Yet the fate of cultural works is not trivial. Decisions about what can be carried forward, what must change and who controls the story are also decisions about the shape of recovery.

The museum’s productive distance—and its risk

The museum presents the show within a series called “Noto to.” The Japanese particle to means “with,” a small grammatical choice with ethical force. Noto is not simply an object to rescue, describe or exhibit. The title imagines an institution thinking and acting with Noto, continuing a dialogue begun before the earthquake.

Kanazawa’s distance from Suzu is both the project’s opportunity and its danger. Moving the sculpture south saved it from disposal and allows a large public to encounter the consequences of the quake through a specific object. The museum can provide space, conservation attention and time that the damaged site cannot. But placing the material of disaster inside a prestigious gallery can also turn unresolved hardship into a satisfying cultural story.

The test is therefore not whether the exhibition makes damage beautiful. It is whether it keeps the sculpture’s absent users and location present; whether Sawa’s mythology remains connected to the people with whom he spoke; and whether the museum’s relationship with Noto continues beyond one exhibition calendar.

Ushijima’s work can no longer be the square where children played in Otani. Sawa’s moving images cannot contain or speak for every resident’s memory. Their strength begins with that limit. They do not erase the scar, own another person’s experience or declare recovery complete. They offer damaged matter and provisional images as ways to meet again.

Visitor information

The exhibition is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with Friday and Saturday hours extended to 8 p.m. It is generally closed on Mondays, although holiday openings, following-day closures and the New Year period create multiple exceptions; visitors should check the museum’s official schedule. The organizer is the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, operated by the Kanazawa Art Promotion and Development Foundation. The Oku-Noto Triennale Executive Committee and other local partners are among the cooperating organizations.