We played golf 2

We played golf under a beautiful sky.
2026
Mixed media video installation with three-channel sound

Beautiful Sky Golf Course 2019 20-min video
Watch a 2.5-minute excerpt video

New Mexico Museum of Art, Vladem Contemporary

"We played golf under a beautiful sky" draws on the series, Beautiful Sky Golf Course. Through the archive at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, I found that Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants) built and played on a handmade golf course. This series blends history, personal narratives, mythology, and satire, featuring storytellers such as bespectacled golf balls with simplified noses and mouths as Japanese internees, and the 9 Headed Dragon as the American state-power monster, with 9 animal faces adorning golf club heads.
The structure is modeled after the Fort Missoula barracks. I scaled it down and added medieval-style battlements on its roof. Peering through open walls or lower, smaller windows into this familiar yet altered structure, the viewer sees interior walls that evoke the room where Issei underwent the “Loyalty Hearings” for the United States. On the floor, a winding track runs around the watchtower and guardhouse that were once part of the Fort Missoula Alien Detention Center. This track connects sculptures made of cardboard, vintage objects, or the kanshitsu technique, and drawings, depicting a range of motifs that are the accumulated technologies and plans for exclusion, such as uranium mines, nuclear weapons, human dissections, B-29, F-35, K2 KAMIKAZE (AI drone), a map of the Panama Canal, a fishing boat, a suitcase, signs inciting racial hatred, a presidential portrait, and trains symbolizing the historical genocides and camps associated with the Empire of Japan, Germany, Israel, and the United States.
In this uninhabited room, a shadow of Nakajima B5N is on the right wall, and an embedded military watchtower in Tapuach Junction, West Bank, is on the left wall. That watchtower connects to a CECOT watchtower in El Salvador through the wall.

Components

Railroad

Gate

Guardhouse on a Two-legged Table (with a speaker)
This model building is a Guardhouse at the Fort Missoula Alien Detention Center during WWII. Some archival photos show it behind the guard tower and behind the Japanese Issei playing golf. As it still stands in the same location today, I could pinpoint the site of the handmade golf course the Japanese detainees built. To make this building a landmark, a half-cut, two-legged table has not fallen, keeping the Guardhouse as it is. A diagram of the moon's phases in the desk drawer shows the dates the illegal ones might count their days there. A speaker is in the Guardhouse.

Torre Centinela Box (with an amplifier and a media player)
The cardboard box, which structurally supports the Two-legged table, symbolizes the FBI's records and the public's records; its artificial-grass-covered lid features raised hexagonal facets that reveal a blue glow from within. These hexagonal facets reference the rooftop heliport of the Torre Centinela (Sentinel Tower) in Ciudad Juárez—a structure built on the border to curb immigration and combat drug trafficking. The tower is equipped with 1,791 automated license plate readers, 3,065 pan-tilt-zoom cameras, and 74 drones, and integrates live video feeds from cameras owned by local businesses and residents, facial recognition capabilities, and connections to citywide infrastructure.

Suitcase and railroad
Coyote and a black frame

Target
This signboard recreates a swimming pool advertisement from the World War II era—one of many examples of wartime anti-Japanese propaganda in the United States. Although I originally created this piece in 2019, for this installation I draped it in linen cloth—a material used in the kanshitsu (dry lacquer) technique for my other miniature models—so the image beneath is only faintly visible under the darker conditions, lit only by video projection lights.

Nakajima B5N

Rope

Spy Box

Train 1 - UNIT 731
A train metaphorically represents Unit 731, a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research facility of the Imperial Japanese Army in Harbin, Manchukuo, from 1933 to 1945, which orchestrated one of the largest biological weapon attacks in history and conducted human experimentation (infection with lethal pathogens, vivisection, organ removal, decompression chamber tests, limb amputation, and the use of chemical weapons and explosives on prisoners).
Body: Transporting "Maruta" (meaning logs in Japanese)—the code name for human test prisoners, including Chinese civilians, Russians, and Koreans.
Front: The shape of the iconic Unit 731 gas mask. Its headlight illuminates a drawing of a rope ahead. After the war, the U.S. granted immunity to many key figures in exchange for research data, thereby concealing the historical facts.

Train 2 - Mittelbau-Dora
This train symbolizes the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp—an important facility in the German wartime armaments industry within the Nazi concentration camp system. There, forced laborers transported from German-occupied Eastern Europe were made to expand tunnels and manufacture V-2 rockets and V-1 flying bombs. Prisoners were forced to work up to 14 hours a day under brutal conditions—severe beatings, deliberate starvation, torture, hanging, and summary execution; about 60,000 prisoners were sent there, and more than one in three lost their lives. By late 1943, the Dora camp recorded the highest mortality rate of any camp in the Nazi system. Following the occupation, the U.S. immediately inspected the rocket factory, seized materials, parts, and documents, and promptly recruited the engineers and scientists. Initially, they worked on developing U.S. rocket weaponry and jet aircraft, and many later participated in the American space program. The Soviet Union also recruited some of the engineers.

Train 3 - GAZA
This train represents a fusion of elements—human confinement, weapons development, and information manipulation techniques—within Gaza, an ongoing testing ground for weapons development.
Body: An Israeli military truck carrying Palestinians who had been rounded up en masse, blindfolded and with their limbs bound, in the Gaza Strip on December 8, 2023.
Lid and its arms: The style of mobile Iron Dome missile launchers, one of Israel’s most powerful defense systems. This mobile air defense system was designed to protect the nation from incoming short-range rockets by coordinating radar detection and missile launchers; it entered service in 2011. Firing a single missile costs about $40,000 to $50,000, and the U.S. has invested billions of dollars.
Front: An Apple Lisa 1 microcomputer (1983) from the Paul G. Allen Collection. This model laid the foundation for the highly successful Apple Macintosh series and influenced the design of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Portrait of President

Uranium Mine
The lid evokes a golf course, and the side features a sealed entrance to a uranium mine—though light still leaks from within, and empty mine carts line the tracks leading out.
This mine-golf box symbolizes not only the uranium mine in Congo—which produced the world's highest-grade uranium ore, used for the Manhattan Project and subsequent U.S. nuclear weapons production in the 1940s and 50s—but also the uranium mines in the native american lands, and the ceaseless Congo-plunder of minerals essential for car batteries and smartphones until now.

Toppled Table (bottom)

Toppled Table (top)
B-29 drawing
F-25 model and K2 KAMIKAZE model
Panama Canal Map

Express ASIA
Asia Express, which began service two years after Manchukuo's 1932 founding, was the South Manchuria Railway Company's (Mantetsu, established in 1907) symbolic super-express. Its innovative design, featuring a streamlined body, air conditioning, and observation cars, was modeled after American express trains. While playing a pivotal role in regional development, the railway rapidly expanded its lines to connect Dalian and Harbin, serving as a crucial international gateway to the Trans-Siberian Railway, which linked Asia and Europe. Mantetsu also expanded into diverse sectors—including transportation, mining, steel manufacturing, livestock farming, the hotel industry, and aviation—evolving into a massive conglomerate that embodied the Empire of Japan's colonial management. Shinji Sogo, the Mantetsu director who launched the "Asia" express, later became president of the Japanese National Railways (JNR) in the postwar era; he used some of the railway lines originally laid by Mantetsu to help build the Shinkansen.
The train's headlight illuminates a map of the Panama Canal that has slid off a toppled table. This map appears during the "loyalty hearing" scene in the film's narrative.

Stone Fever and Solar models
This series of stone works recreates the sculptures—known as "Stone Fever"—that Japanese internees created while awaiting their "loyalty hearings." They gathered and polished pebbles, using mortar to craft items such as pen holders, ashtrays, and purely decorative sculptures. To understand the psychology and motivations behind this activity—which became so popular it earned the name "Stone Fever" and resulted in a vast number of pieces—I collected pebbles on-site and retraced their creative process. Achieving that polished luster required painstaking, patient labor. I suspect the repetitive nature of the work—which demanded no special technical skills and let them pass the time watching the stones grow increasingly radiant—suited their circumstances well. They may have been inspired by the stone pillars at the gates of Fort Missoula, or perhaps crafting these stone objects served as a form of psychological defense. I was also reminded of the Buddhist story of the Sanzu River. On the banks of this river, which souls must cross after death, they are required to stack pebbles into towers. However, demons appear and knock the towers down, forcing the task to continue endlessly until a Buddha arrives to save them and complete the work.
In this installation, metal rods emerge from the "Stone Fevers", suspending models of the solar system's planets in mid-air. LED cables that illuminate various objects pierce these planets, visualizing that humanity extends its reach into the cosmos to devise economic plans.

Watchtower 1 - Missoula

Watchtower 2 - West Bank
It's modeled after a military watchtower near the Za'tara/Tapuah checkpoint in the West Bank. This specific watchtower is from a photograph taken by Hiromu Odagiri, a Japanese Journalist who has been to Palestine more than 70 times.

A-Bomb Blueprint

Watchtower 3 - CECOT

Suits