Tomiko Jones: Hatsubon

Desai | Matta Gallery

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The body, the corporeal remains of a life lived, contained in one small, beautifully crafted wooden box. The soul, embodied in a kozo paper vessel, ritually set to sail eastward, out from Hawaii on the vast Pacific Ocean.

For the first year after my mother died I found myself looking up to the daytime sky, achingly searching the cloudy expanse for an anchor on which to hang my grief. Maybe this desire to comprehend the unfathomable became a place in the heavens where the souls that animate our dreams reside, much as they did on Earth. A home for the ineffable mystery of our existence…the what that comes after the this.

Tomiko Jones looks here to the sea, an equally vast but aqueous metaphor for the passage from this tangible world to the far shore. At the horizon line, where sea and sky meet and merge, it can be hard to distinguish the one from the other, both expansive, luminous, elemental. It is a site that recurs in these images, in the distance, unknown and unknowable.

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 vehicle and destination for the final journey of those we love. With this body of work we travel to Jones’ coast—where the river meets the sea—to ritually set free the spirit and body of her father, who passed away just days before she arrived in San Francisco to take on this role as Visiting Artist/ Curator-in-Residence.

One year later we mark Hatsubon with her. A ritual celebration of the first anniversary of the death of a loved one, Hatsubon occurs during O-bon, the time of year in the Buddhist calendar—much like Samhain, Hallowmas, or Dia de los Muertos—when the thin veil between the living and the dead is rendered permeable, when our loved ones return to visit us. We welcome them with gifts of food, illuminate the darkening hours with paper lanterns, and give thanks for the ancestors whose lives made our own possible.

Hatsubon closes another year-long cycle. Tomiko Jones came to CIIS with the invitation to curate a sequence of exhibitions dovetailing with her own creative interests; at the same time she was invited as Visiting Artist to make new work. The exhibition sequence, collectively entitled Cumulus, explored environmental concerns through the lens of water. With exhibits taking on the twin crises of too much and too little water in the age of climate change, and water as site of cultural practice and economic imperative, Jones comes full circle to explore water as the locus of spiritual belief.