The Suddenly Relevant Activist Antics of Artist Collective Chimi ↑ Pom: Challenging Japan's Nuclear Power Agenda

Extract

Chimi↑Pom, the young Japanese art provocateurs’ collective, first attained notoriety in 2008, when they hired a small plane to fly over Hiroshima to draw the word Pika (an onomatopoetic for the atomic flash) in smoke against skies once dwarfed by the mushroom cloud. Their un-announced “art prank,” which they filmed for a video art project, drew sharp rebukes for its insensitivity to the hibakusha community and the group of five men and one woman had to publicly apologize. That was three years before the great trifecta of earthquake, tsunami and meltdown jolted the nation's consciousness into a re-evaluation of their singular nuclear history and vulnerability. Since March 11^th, 2011, the group has responded by deploying their deceptive amateurism (none has attended art school and all have day jobs) to detonate Japan's post-3/11 taboos. In the PBS Frontline program “Atomic Artists”