Tomoyo Ihaya’s Powerful Iconography of Compassion

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Tomoyo Ihaya, who was born in Japan but is now based in Vancouver, has visited India 15 times. Through her travels, she’s been sensitized to cultural upheaval and disadvantaged peoples. Much of her art speaks to deprivation, oppression, lost homelands, escapes and exile. She has developed her own iconography to convey compassion for this misery. Frequent symbols are legs – often truncated at the knee – eyes, fires, tear drops and empty bowls. At times, she even burns small holes in her paper with incense sticks. Her latest exhibition, Eyes Water Fire, at Art Beatus in Vancouver until Nov. 25, is another paean to compassion.

Delicately drawn icons, sometimes painted in gentle tones, elicit a visceral response. Blue legs, for instance, “cross the borders on snow-covered mountains or swim across the ocean,” says Ihaya. Or flames awash in red declare “resistance and dignity or lights of prayers.”

Ihaya has taken her work to new heights in this show, incorporating her lyrical drawings and mixed-media pieces into complex videos and installations. The video work is particularly striking as it animates her symbolic language and enlivens it with the use of minimalist audio such as rushing water, the whoosh of wind across barren terrain and bare feet shuffling along the ground. Visitors would be forgiven for missing a small piece of paper tacked to the wall with this poem:

Thousands of Eyes

Shedding tears

Vessels floating

on rough water

Legs crossing glaciers

half frozen

In the snow mountains

Keep flames burning to live

To reach the light

Tears of light     

Art Beatus

610-808 Nelson St, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H2

604-688-2633

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