In Nakahira Takuma’s photobook For a Language to Come [Kitarubeki botoba no tame ni] (1970), a haunting diptych of photographs conveys flat, endless tire-track-covered sand that stretches out to a dark horizon under a blotted sky, as if capturing a terrain in the midst of battle. Art historian Bert Winther-Tamaki sensitively unpacks this image taken in 1965 on a human-made island in Tokyo Bay, to reveal the layers of horror and modernity that undergird its spectral form. The island was created from developmental desires both to dredge the bay of Tokyo to allow for the transit of larger vessels, as well as to make new land in the sea that could be utilized by the ever-expanding post-war city. Called “Dream Island,” this pile of territorialized sea became a popular beach spot for local residents. Later it became a municipal trash dump to house the exponential growth of waste from Tokyo’s girding metropolis. The festering piles of waste, in hot, damp summers, would breed dense clouds of flies that encompassed the island, and occasionally, with high winds, they would descend into the nearby neighborhood like a plague of black locusts. To stop this continual arthropodic invasion, the mayor ordered heavy oil sprayed over the mountain of trash and set on fire. It burned 200 meters high—like a torrent of napalm—scorching all life and waste on the island. The remnants were bulldozed back into the burnt sandy wasteland that Nakahira would capture in his photographic diptych. Moreover, this episode happened after the celebratory Olympic Games of 1964, which acted as a coming-out party for Japan to show off its post-war progress and futuristic technology, such as with the monorail built near this island. Winther-Tamaki’s account of this diptych shines a light on the vast, dark underbelly of this period of growth in Japan. In his latest book, Tsuchi: Earthy Materials in Contemporary Japanese Art, Winther-Tamaki deftly weaves together a multifaceted view of tsuchi (which translates to earth or soil) across the last seventy years of the arts in Japan. Winther-Tamaki dwells on the myriad readings of tsuchi, not only as a physical material but also as a symbol of life, decay, and regeneration, relating it to the constant change of the period that also set off waves of nostalgia for a return to a different relationship with the Earth.

Bert Winther-Tamaki is a rare art historian whose knowledge traverses the often segregated fields of ceramics, photography, performance, and installation art. These different artistic mediums have fostered entire worlds of thought, criticism, and historical discourse that are unique from one another except perhaps in superficial ways. This is highlighted in Japan by the distinction between geijutsu, roughly translated as craft, which can incorporate a host of traditional arts in Japan, and bijutsu, a more recent term that formed in the nineteenth century to delineate “fine art.” Winther-Tamaki utilizes the study of earth as a way to meaningfully cross these fields to expand on the post-anthropogenic horizon of interest in return to natural materials. Other important studies have unpacked different facets of this impetus in Japan, including Reiko Tomii’s Radicalism in the Wilderness (2016), which, among other arguments, lingers on the rural and urban divide in contemporary land art, and Ming Tiampo’s Gutai: Decentering Modernism (2011), which unsettles the myth of isolation and highlights the international impact of Gutai’s approach to materiality. In Tsuchi, Winther-Tamaki takes earth’s materiality as his basis to journey through its different developments across media, with each body chapter focusing on a single medium and the final chapter sharing a suite of diverse recent practices.

Tsuchi begins with a focus on mid-twentieth-century ceramics and the critical moments that transformed approaches to conceiving and utilizing clay and earth—changes also important outside of Japan, as he details for example the impact on certain American ceramicists. Winther-Tamaki transitions in the next chapter to explore how photographers grappled with representing the earth in the midst of urban development, in particular how terraforming cities and their peripheries had certain parallels with concurrent violence being perpetrated on peoples and landscapes in Vietnam during the war in the 1960s–1970s. This societal impact resonates through the subsequent chapter on performance and art actions undertaken by the artistic movement Gutai and other artists who incorporated mud into their actions as an ur-material, in contrast to the steel, metal, and concrete increasingly found in the urban landscape of Japan. Next Winther-Tamaki looks at the long end of the twentieth century in Japan—marked by intense economic growth and the subsequent burst of the “bubble economy” in the early 1990s that induced economic stagnation—by exploring the field of sculpture and its propensity to turn away from the glitzy trappings of the wealth of that period. Finally, the last chapter unpacks the events and practices immediately prior to and after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and triple nuclear meltdowns at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which spread radioactive nuclides across the globe and created a domestic resensitization toward earth. Throughout the book, Winther-Tamaki analyzes tactile and sensory engagements with tsuchi, arguing that this material provides diverse artists a means of connecting to Japan’s landscapes, both physically and metaphorically. Their expansive use of tsuchi reflects their deeper interrogation of Japan’s environmental consciousness and the emotional resonance of earthly materials in the face of modernity.

This exceptional study is a blueprint for how scholarship—not only in Japan, but also more broadly—can work across seemingly disparate and traditional media. In particular, Tsuchi demonstrates the value of reattuning our senses to the formal properties of artwork, and how following this empirical exploration can reveal the deep cultural and political fault lines in society. In the face of ecological collapse, how we engage again with our planet has become of primary importance, and Winther-Tamaki’s book highlights how this has not only been a recent concern but is also deeply tethered to modernity.

Despite its impressive depth and breadth, there are two minor lacunae in Tsuchi. The first is the book’s passing recognition of “blood and soil” nationalism, which has been bound up with discourses on earth from the prewar period through the twenty-first century, becoming recently more pronounced with the rise of the far-right in Japan. Winther-Tamaki does not, however, avoid discussing war and the complicity of the state of Japan with the military-industrial complex and the violence it has perpetrated. Additionally, the final chapter of the book, “Earth Diving Before and After the Triple Disaster,” ostensibly centers around artists’ changing relationship with earth after the Fukushima meltdowns. Yet, with few exceptions, such as Takeda Shimpei’s and Akagi Shuji’s photographic practices, the chapter does not dwell much on the myriads of artworks that have responded to the nuclear disaster. Instead, the chapter expands to look back on how artists such as Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group—who have been active in Fukushima—treated earth in other cases, such as with the project Thank You Celeb Project, I’m Bokan (2007), which both tackled the scourge of landmines in Cambodia and took to task celebrity culture. Winther-Tamaki also examines Chim↑Pom’s mentor Aida Makota’s humorous mockery of piles of an imaginary monster’s excrement four years before the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake. Yet the nuclear disaster has spurred a younger generation’s turn toward socially engaged work, and explorations of how politics, gender, and queerness, for example, intersect with the environment remain largely absent. Perhaps this is because the chapter’s purview, encompassing the entire twenty-first century, is too wide. Or perhaps Winther-Tamaki felt that artists focused on the nuclear disaster had already been covered in other studies, or maybe even this will be the focus of Winther-Tamaki’s next book. These minor absences do not detract from the incredible amount of terrain that this book uniquely covers. As human-induced climate change continues to accelerate global transformations, Winther-Tamaki’s material-focused methodology and his tremendous breadth of scholarship across artistic disciplines demonstrate a critical template for how art history can work to analyze this relationship with the environment—sometimes with unexpected results.