Mao Ishikawa 石川真生

KYOTOGRAPHIE is honored to host an exhibition by Ishikawa Mao, a photographer representing postwar Okinawa, as part of its 2025 program on the theme of ‘HUMANITY.’

During its long history, dating back to the Ryukyu era, Okinawa has been exploited by the feudal domain of Satsuma, Japan, the United States, and then Japan again. During the Pacific War, Okinawa was used as a ‘sacrificial pawn,’ resulting in tens of thousands of casualties in ground battles, and even after Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972, much of its land and nature were taken over to make way for military bases for the U.S. military and Japan’s Self-Defense Forces.

Ishikawa, who was born in Okinawa under U.S. military rule, has dedicated her life to photographing Okinawa, including U.S. military bases and the islands’ people, from close range, with a gaze of enduring love for Okinawa and humanity.

Ishikawa was inspired to take up photography by demonstrations in 1971 against the Okinawa Reversion Agreement, which called for the continued existence of U.S. military bases and the deployment of the Self-Defense Forces. In 2023, in response to Japan-U.S. joint military exercises and missile base construction, Ishikawa once again trained her camera on issues surrounding the military bases in the Ryukyu Islands, despite battling a seriously illness.

Titled Akabana—Okinawa no Onna (Red Flower—The Women of Okinawa), named after the native Okinawan hibiscus that Ishikawa loves, this exhibition features Okinawan women who are as strong and beautiful as this flower, as well as works from an earlier series on Black American soldiers who, like the people of Okinawa, have been unfairly discriminated against.

Text by Yusuke Nakanishi, Co-founder and Co-Director of KYOTOGRAPHIE

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This is a solo exhibition by Mao Ishikawa, a photographer based in Okinawa.

In recent years, Ishikawa has held major solo exhibitions at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum in 2021 and the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2023. Since then, she has continued to gain significant recognition, receiving the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize (74th edition, 2023), the 43rd Domon Ken Award, and the Domestic Photographer Award at the 40th Higashikawa Awards. Her work has also been featured at the Busan Biennale 2024 and the Mead Gallery (Warwick Arts Centre, UK), and is scheduled to be showcased at the 36th São Paulo Biennial in 2025. With her numerous accolades and ongoing solo and international exhibitions, Ishikawa is one of the most globally recognised photographers of our time.

Akabana—Okinawa no Onna (Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa)

All kinds of people connected with Okinawa appear in Ishikawa’s work. Whether American soldiers stationed in Okinawa, members of the Self-Defense Forces, or ordinary citizens, she approaches them all with an equal gaze, depicting them from the same distance. She does not seek to condemn the soldiers stationed in Okinawa. Rather, her perspective is unbiased and human-focused, transcending national frameworks. This approach stems from her early experiences photographing the U.S. military in Okinawa. To document American soldiers, she began working at a bar in Koza that catered exclusively to black servicemen. This was in 1975. That experience culminated in her first major photographic work, Hot Days in Camp Hansen (1982), which marked her debut as a photographer. It also laid the foundation for Akabana—Okinawa no Onna (Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa) (2022).

This exhibition also features new works from The Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll, a project Ishikawa started in 2014. Filmed on Yonaguni Island and Ishigaki Island last year, these works are about what is currently happening on the islands. They deserve to be shared with as many people as possible.
Text by Taro Amano (Chief Curator, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery)

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Akabana—Okinawa no Onna (Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa) is Mao Ishikawa’s earliest body of work. The women captured in the photographs lived in the same time and place as she did. This is what Ishikawa once told me.

“I can’t take photos where I’m just an outsider. When I wanted to photograph the bases and the U.S. soldiers, the quickest way was to become one of the women in town myself.”

“Okinawa is a damn small island—throw a stone, and you’ll hit a friend or a relative. But these women lived with a kind of bold, unshackled freedom that is incredible. I decided to live that way too, without worrying about how people saw me.”

To stand before Ishikawa’s photographs is to be overwhelmed by the visceral reality of ‘humanity,’ charged with intensity. It is instantly clear that the act of photographing is a direct encounter between one living human and another, drawing the viewer into that relationship as well.

Ishikawa was born and still lives in a place where personal wounds mirror the wounds of history, where the lives of ordinary people are inscribed in the raw, unforgiving chronicle of time. In recent years, she has turned her lens to the islands of Yonaguni, Ishigaki, and Miyako, documenting the accelerating shift of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to the southwest.
Her work confronts us with an Okinawa where the photographer cannot remain a mere observer, forcing us to reconsider the very meaning of objectivity in documentary photography. And yet, her work is uncompromisingly free and overflowing with love.
The ‘now’ of Okinawa, which she has been photographing since the 1970s, has accumulated in layers, forming a contemporary history with a human face—here, right before our eyes.
Text by Kumiko Kakehashi (Nonfiction writer)