The first thing I noticed at Hong Kong House was the light. Tsunan’s summer sun came through the glass doors at an angle that shifted almost imperceptibly throughout the day, casting shadows that lengthened and shortened against the walls of the exhibition space. I spent two weeks there as a project intern, greeting visitors, stamping passports, and offering guidance through the exhibition — Dialogue with Nature: Bowl of Life and Painting by God — but it was in the quieter moments of observation that the experience became something more than a series of duties.
Bowl of Life struck me first for its groundedness. The premise — exchanging rice bowls between residents of Hong Kong and Tsunan, filling them with locally grown plants — felt immediately right for a region defined by its agricultural identity. Tsunan grows rice as a staple, and the bowls carried that weight: of sustenance, of daily life, of something shared across two cultures that rarely meet. One bowl in particular stayed with me — spring onions and sweet corn, both grown from Tsunan soil, arranged with a quiet confidence. When visitors recognized this, something lit up in their expressions. The piece worked because it made the familiar strange enough to be noticed again.
That said, I found myself wondering about the depth of the exchange. The conceit of cultural dialogue through shared objects is intuitive and moving, but at times it felt like the conversation stopped at the gesture itself. What do Tsunan residents actually know about the people whose bowls arrived from Hong Kong? What do Hong Kong visitors take home beyond the installation’s aesthetics? I also noticed that some visitors wanted more — more backstory, more specificity — than the pamphlet offered. The labels for each bowl could have been introduced earlier and developed more fully, giving the audience a way into the narrative rather than leaving them to fill in the gaps.
Painting by God extended the experience beyond the exhibition hall, unfolding across the grounds of Kamigo Clove Theatre along a path most visitors walked clockwise, beginning with the piece installed inside Hong Kong House. Sitting at reception all day with the glass doors in front of me, I became acutely aware of how the light moved — the same light that determined whether the paintings would appear at all. The works exist only on sunny days, which made the experience conditional in a way that felt honest: some things cannot be helped when nature decides how to present itself. Visitors seemed to feel this, taking their time at each scroll and staying longer than they might have in a conventional exhibition.
My reservation here was with the concept of ‘nature’ itself. It is broad — broad enough to apply to almost any rural landscape anywhere. Tsunan is genuinely distinctive: its snow country geography, its rice paddy culture, its particular relationship to water and seasonal rhythm. But the framework of nature as a general category risks flattening these specifics into something more generic. One of the functions of Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale is to draw attention to a region that might otherwise be overlooked, and I found myself wondering whether a more precise engagement with what makes Tsunan Tsunan might serve that goal more powerfully than the universal motif of nature.
What I did not anticipate was how much the people of Tsunan would shape the experience. I came with a vague concern — one I am slightly embarrassed to admit — that as a Korean, I might not be easily welcomed. Instead, I found residents who were warm, patient, and visibly proud of where they lived. Most visitors and staff spoke only Japanese, and my Japanese was limited, so I often couldn’t offer the detailed guidance I wanted. But the staff, mostly Tsunan locals, were generous every time I fumbled for a word — always willing to teach me the right expression rather than let the gap remain. It was in these small exchanges, as much as in the artworks themselves, that the spirit of the triennale felt most alive.
Through conversations with other interns, I came to think differently about the relationship between Tsunan and cities like Tokyo. The suburbs don’t just border the metropolis — they supply it, quietly and continuously, with crops and water and resources that are consumed without much acknowledgment. Art events like ETAT, in this sense, are not merely cultural. They are a form of recognition, a way of giving a place a cause beyond its function, making visible what sustains the city but rarely receives its attention.
Leaving Tsunan, I carried with me not mere impressions of the exhibitions but a sharpened sense of what it means for art to be placed somewhere — to be in active conversation with the land and the people it grows from. That seems like exactly the right question for a triennale to be asking.
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