Interview with Hanae Utamura

With Christine Cheung

I was lucky to spend time with Hanae and her then partner and American composer Robert Phillips in Berlin (2014-2018) before they moved to the USA and had a son. Rob passed away suddenly in 2023. Courageously, Hanae has shared this experience in her work. Below are her thoughts about her powerful video about loss, the continuation of life and love through death, and expansion of time in the wake of the loss of her partner.

Hanae Utamura, Fate of Love, Video, 18:17 minutes, 2024

CC: I know this work was very difficult to make. The eclipse of the moon really sparked you into making something and it is so integral to the work. The video starts with the footage of the eclipse. Can you talk a little bit about the process of making the work?

HU: Witnessing the Eclipse was a transformational experience, the experience of the inevitable force of time. Without this, I might not have been able to make this work. With video work, we need to have an overview or objectives right at one point. It's different from painting. I started a practice of painting since Rob’s passing, and I think it’s because, in the painting, you can be in the process of not knowing where it leads to, and it just ends on its own terms. Whereas in video, you sort of need a structure, especially in the editing. It almost requires you to have an overview of what your materials are and how you construct them.

The Eclipse gave me the whole leap of understanding. We all share this whole human condition of usually not knowing when our life will end. And actually, every day, every second is like that. But when we become aware of this condition, we feel that we are just a tiny existence and we appreciate the beauty of this world. The experience of the eclipse was also collective.

And that exact moment of inevitability of death is so brief, like the totality of an eclipse. And then after that, it re-opens. When the sun appears again, it is like a rebirth.

Hanae Utamura, Fate of Love, Video, 18:17 minutes, 2024

CC: The transition of light and darkness, or the absence of a light source is a key feature of an eclipse. Light is a strong element in the work. In one dream-like section of the video, you are in darkness and in another section you play with reflections of light with a mirror. What does light and darkness mean to you in your work?

HU: Light is like energy, the essence of our beings. In our lifetime, we have this body to experience the conditions of love, pain, and separation. But light travels through time and space. It is also a bit like our dreams, and how we travel during our sleep, our unconsciousness.

I remember a specific moment when Rob told me he saw a significant dream where the “moonlight licked his eyeball”, and how he knew this was a very important dream. A few years later, after his passing, I found his note about this dream.  I felt like he tapped me on my shoulder, to assure me that he went to a good place after passing.

Earth's Breath - Seafloor Core Glass (detail),2022
Glass, sediment cores from the Deep Sea, Brass, Mirror, Schalstein
Supported by Core Repository, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
19 x 33 x 23 inches

CC: In your video, you have English and Japanese. The title of your work refers to the “Fate of Love” and in the video, there is the following line “language that connects us”.  How did you come up with that title? Language and translation beyond the body seems to be a large part of your work. In the video, you speak in your native language, Japanese, though you now live in the US. What is your take on language in relation to the collective?

HU: The phrase came after reflecting on our collective pain and suffering in our current political situation - I wanted to approach this from a personal, individual loss and the significance of losing one unique being on earth, and weaving language. When I refer to language, I mean language in a multiple number of ways.

One is this ultimate language that we share as living beings, the moment of leaving this world, and the experience of losing one’s significant loved ones and its separation, the death. Also language or any form of creation becomes the only catalyst that connects us with the deceased loved ones. This experience brings us the ultimate sense of collectivity and empathy regardless of race, gender, or ideological difference. I think that art can provide a re-imagined approach to language.

In this video work, I am consciously trying to weave cultural memory, cultural heritage, and native language. I think working with English in the past, unconsciously, I was not engaging with Japanese part of myself and my cultural sensibility. Working with my native language activates and channels a different part of my sensibility. (I felt the need for a ritual honoring his departure, and in the process, I became aware of how much cultural memory and inheritances are important within me). This could be also connected with the de-colonial method that is currently practiced worldwide.

CC: In the video, there is a scene in which you talk about a Japanese goddess, and you bury Rob’s hair in your placenta, underneath a tree.  What was the symbolism behind that choice?

HU: Partly, the reason why I chose to bury my placenta with his hair in it was to defy the notion of death as the end. Instead, this gesture creates the symbol of a continuation of life, since the placenta is a temporal organ that nourishes the fetus and then dies when the baby is born. So the placenta represents both the symbol of death and birth. For me, this attitude also overlaps with the Japanese myth that I quote in the work, where the origin of foods was born from a goddess' corpse.

There was also a lot of cultural symbolism behind the Larch Tree, which has a long history of use as a medicinal plant in Native American cultures. Also, I learned that in many cultures, the Larch Tree symbolizes death and rebirth, as it is one of the few coniferous trees that loses its needles in winter before growing new ones in the spring. It has been used as a symbol of protection, strength, endurance, and resilience for centuries, as it can withstand harsh climates and often grows in mountainous regions.

I felt a kinship with this specific Larch tree that stands at the top of the hill which overlooks the city of Troy, where I live. The tree is like my teacher. I often go there, and I am learning the way of being from this tree.

Collecting Time: On Death and Birthing with Larch tree, 2024
Acrylic on paper, red cotton string from Oaxaca, Mexico
107.5 x 42 inches

CC: Through this project you mentioned you felt Rob’s presence, as a collaborator. After his passing, you shared how you connected with him through his work and the poem which reflects your time together. You met when you both did a residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude.  You were there as a visual artist and Rob, as a composer. Can you speak about this process?

Hu: It has been a guided, collaborative process with Rob. Since Rob’s passing, my perception and reality have been altered. I wanted to communicate something of that experience that remains unspoken, silenced, and might disappear otherwise. And it felt important to reclaim death as not the end but a new beginning.

For this occasion, I wanted to collaborate with his music and I visited his website and went through his List of Works. And then immediately, I was drawn to this music piece called “Love of Fate, for piano and electronics” (2015–). The word  “fate”  just struck me. Also, the hyphen “–” felt like a continuation, an invitation to collaborate.

We met at Akademie Schloss Solitude, an international artist in residency in Stuttgart, Germany in 2014. After that, we moved to Berlin. So 2015 marks the first year that we lived together in Berlin. And I remember we had the ritual of putting a red rose on his door. And when he put his rose in his door, that meant, don't open his door, he was at work, composing and blossoming through his music. Sometimes he didn't come out, and there was a time I did not see him for three days.

This piece captures the fate of our love, because to me the wholeness of love was understood through separation. Like life itself, one can never fully grasp the whole picture of what it is when one is in the experience but when it ends, one can see what it was. When I listened to his music “Love of Fate”, it reminded me of that feeling. Sometimes, the music sounded disjointed at times but also merges together. But during his lifetime, Rob already knew what love was, he was always very expressive about his love. Now that love is guiding my daily life, as I take care of our three year old son. There is a strong resonance that only absence can emit in our memory. His music sounds different to me now, it sounded as if he was speaking to me. During the edits, the timing of the image and music often matched and these moments felt magical. The last painting you see at the end of the video is the painting I made by channeling the love that Rob showed me while listening to his music.

CC: You mention the practice of deep listening, a legacy of American composer Pauline Oliveros. Alongside deep listening is the breath, which we can hear in the video. What is the significance of the breath in the work?

HU: The sound of breath you hear in the video as Rob’s last breath is actually our three year old son, Kai's breath during his sleep. So it's weaving the continuation of life after death, entering into a dream space through sleep.

Also, one can hear the heartbeat, together with the breath. I wanted to include the heartbeat as it has a deeply personal, symbolic memory to it. When I went to the hospital, the nurse gave me the printed sheet of Rob's last heartbeat. It was very uncanny, but it looked like a musical score. It brought me back to the memory when we did a residency together at PACT Zollverein in Essen, Germany in 2015, the same year his music was created. There was a period when I was away for a long time and when I came back, I found him in a very intense state. He said he was able to listen to his heartbeat and he was making music with it. 

Earth's Breath - Seafloor Core Glass, 2022
Glass, sediment cores from the Deep Sea, Brass, Mirror, Schalstein
Supported by Core Repository, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
19 x 33 x 23 inches

CC: I know you have spoken of the influence Buddhism has had on you. Zen Buddhism has had a great influence on Contemporary art.  Is this important in your work?

HU: I wouldn't call myself a fully practicing Buddhist, but I am definitely influenced by it greatly.  It's an important aspect of the culture that I inherited. I think we can learn a lot from religion, though what I want to address is beyond religion. My question is, how can we approach and reinvent our rituals in our own way? It’s almost like inventing a new language with ourselves. I think there is a great deal that art can also re-imagine this - how can we heal these enormous wounds that we have, and how can we do that collectively?

Fate of Love, Video, 18:17 minutes, 2024

CC: I understand the performance at the end of the video was actually a performance that you did when Rob was still alive. In a way, this is a kind of return. Can you explain why you did the performance in the first place and then how it came to be a part of the video?

HU: Yes, the performance at the end of the video shows the scene captured by the camera where Rob was standing and watching the performance. So it is as if we watch the performance through Rob’s gaze. We go back in time when I was performing death, the state of mourning, and something that emerges out of it as the start of healing.

The performance happened within the event titled Excavating Niagara: Place-based investigations with musical contemporary art, a series of events organized by Null Point, a musical research group based in Buffalo, NY and Toronto, Canada, founded by artist and composer Colin Tucker. Two members from Null Point performed in the piece, Megan Kyle for oboe and Ethan Hayden for trombone. It happened at Artpark next to Niagara Falls. The event was an intervention, highlighting the long history of colonial conquest and its ecological consequences in the Niagara region. I took an occasion to honor the memory of the land before settler colonialism took place and also to the Niagara river that witnessed the change.

In the performance, there is a circular mirror. It is also a symbol of the god’s spirit body in Shintoism. Looking at it now, a circular mirror also reminds us of the eclipse, the sun and moon, and the white cloth looks like a shroud. Also, the river adds another metaphor in this work. In Japan, people say that a river appears when you die or when you have a near death experience, and people call it Sanzu River. It represents in between life and death and you hear a calling across the river saying, “Come here, come here, come across the river. ” And if you cross the river, you really die, but if you stay on the side and not cross the river, then you stay with life.

When I watched the performance after filming the Eclipse, everything fitted and positioned itself in the right place. We perceive time as linear, like past, future, and present, but sometimes, time has a cosmological return. I'm accepting the irreversibility of time but I did not want to end the work with death. How can we engage with the inevitability such as fate? I call the last chapter of the work enchantment. How can we perceive death as the state of becoming, the transformation to the place of abundance, where we can also find healing and hope? Ultimately, this work is about love, it is about longing, an invitation to connect with your loved ones, with everyone.