CULTURE GATE to JAPAN - Transcending Prayers

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In Japan, appreciating the fleeting beauty of fireworks is the summer equivalent of viewing cherry blossoms in spring. Each year 1,000 to 1,500 fireworks festivals take place in Japan. Literally meaning ‘flower fires,’ hanabi  (花火) are, watched in the sky as you eat, drink and spend time with friends and family.

The first public fireworks display in Japan dates back to 1733 when fireworks were launched around Tokyo’s Sumida River to remember the almost one million people who had died the previous year due to extreme poverty and an epidemic. To this day, Japanese fireworks displays are symbols of hope, impermanence of life, and fleeting beauty and as a requiem for departed souls.

Artist, pyrotechnician, and fireworks show designer SHIMADA Sayaka explores history, thought, and aesthetics behind Japanese hanabi in her installation titled Fireworks for Another World that Never Came. SHIMADA gathered information on the dates and places where around 1,300 fireworks festivals in Japan were cancelled in 2020 due to the influence of coronavirus. Based on this data, the artwork simulates fireworks bursting into bloom across a map of Japan, as a requiem for the aborted fireworks displays that would have originally been held, and at the same time arousing feelings and a vision of a parallel world that could have been.

The artwork consists of a video documenting the production process and data simulations, where SHIMADA reconstructed the canceled firework shows to produce footage of them “unseen” by audiences. The empty fireworks tubes used in the simulation shoot, form part of the installation in Haneda Airport.