Hindsight 2020

The most striking thing about “Homeland 2020”, Misaki Kawai’s exhibit at Take Ninagawa, is the size: it’s tiny. Just one room, the gallery is further miniaturized by Tokyo Tower, which looms over the neighbourhood like a disapproving elder statesman. Kawai responds to this environment with an explosion of kindergarten reminiscences: startling fabrics, papier mâché painted in unmixed tones, felt and string and plastic baubles and gems.

From these familiar materials, Kawai has built an amusement park that is itself miniaturized, though it is barely contained by the walls of the gallery. Floating in space on a shard of an Earth long destroyed, “Homeland 2020” is nostalgic without necessarily being celebratory. It is as if the thirty-something Kawai is looking at herself as a four year old girl looking twenty years into the future. It is wickedly kitsch.

The very purpose of an amusement park is to distract and diverge, but “Homeland 2020” is suffused with environmental advocacy. We large creatures walk among its pieces carefully and protectively, squeeze against the wall to avoid damaging it in narrow places, float among satellites and debris in a Nintendo fantasy galaxy where everything is close.

“Homeland 2020” has three parts which fit together like an exploded pie chart, and are united by a ring-road train that navigates the circumference of the sculpture. Its cartoony, katamari characters perch on tree branches and ledges to watch giant screens embedded in the plaster hillsides, broadcasting animated advertisements for future products (Black Hole Time Travel Service) and touchstone brands (Panasonic; and for whom was the barrage of advertising not influential during childhood?). One particularly ebullient promo shouts, “Let’s go onsen! Let’s go moon!” Another more bitingly portrays a bear and a seal drowning after all the icecaps have melted. (I was reminded of the informational info-spots in Starship Troopers, but with construction paper.)


“Homeland 2020” must be taken seriously, if only because its conceit is that the Earth has been destroyed. With simple, juvenile instincts Kawai points to the fly-by-night instinct for survival that has let humanity stumble through a cold war but not necessarily environmental catastrophe. By idealizing the past, she acknowledges our infinite proficiency in idealizing a future free of consequence.