We played golf under a beautiful sky.

We played golf under a beautiful sky.
2026
Mixed media video installation with three-channel sound
201 1/4” x 286” x 96”

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

Guardhouse on a Two-legged Table (with a speaker)
This model Guardhouse depicts the Fort Missoula Alien Detention Center's WWII building, seen in archival photos behind Japanese Issei playing golf. Still standing today, it helped pinpoint the detainees' handmade golf course. A half-cut, two-legged table keeps it upright, while a moon-phase diagram in the drawer tracks days. A speaker inside plays the video's audio.

Torre Centinela Box (with an amplifier and a media player)
The cardboard box supporting the "two-legged table" symbolizes records gathered by the FBI and national powers. Its artificial-grass lid's glowing blue hexagonal facets reference the Torre Centinela's heliport in Ciudad Juárez, a border tower built to curb immigration and drug trafficking, equipped with license plate readers, cameras, drones, facial recognition, and integrated citywide feeds.

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

Train - GAZA
This train fuses human confinement, weapons development, and information manipulation within Gaza, an ongoing weapons testing ground. Its body depicts an Israeli military truck carrying Palestinians rounded up en masse, blindfolded and bound, on December 8, 2023. The lid and arms mimic mobile Iron Dome launchers, which entered service in 2011; each missile costs roughly $40,000-$50,000, backed by billions in U.S. investment. The front features an Apple Lisa 1 (1983) from the Paul G. Allen Collection, which laid the foundation for the Macintosh and influenced Windows' design.

Train - Mittelbau-Dora
Mittelbau-Dora, a Nazi armaments camp, forced about 60,000 prisoners from occupied Eastern Europe to expand tunnels and build V-2 rockets and V-1 flying bombs, working up to 14 hours daily amid beatings, starvation, and executions. Over one in three died, with the highest mortality rate by late 1943. From 1944 onwards, Jews from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, Roma, and Sinti people were also deported there. After the war, the U.S. seized its materials and recruited engineers who would contribute to the American space program, as did the Soviets.

Train - UNIT 731
This train metaphorically represents Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese Army's top-secret biological and chemical warfare facility in Harbin, Manchukuo, active from 1933 to 1945. It orchestrated one of history's largest biological weapon attacks and conducted violent and lethal human experimentation and chemical weapons testing on prisoners and civilians. The train’s body carries "Maruta" (logs), the code name for prisoners, including Chinese civilians, Russians, and Koreans. The front takes the shape of the iconic Unit 731 gas mask, its headlight illuminating a drawing of rope. After the war, the U.S. granted key figures within the unit immunity in exchange for research data, concealing history.

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.

Spy Box

Toppled Table (A-Bomb)
Missing Boy (drawing)
X (drawing)
Blood bed (drawing)
Blood bed depicts an autopsy room refers to the description by journalist Kikujiro Fukushima, who conducted undercover reporting for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) in Hiroshima. The ABCC was established in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a 1946 presidential executive order. The ABCC was built to investigate the effects of radiation on the human body. Over a period of 17 years starting in 1948, it performed autopsies on approximately 3,000 bodies annually, 50,000 in total. Surrounding the dissecting table were autopsy instruments and the tools to boil dissected organs and harden them with wax. The bodies of Hibakusha were transformed into a mass of specimens here; they were shipped to the United States in top secrecy as samples and data to be utilized for military nuclear strategy against the Soviet Union. They were never collected for the purpose of researching medical treatments to help the victims. I also visited the facility, which continues its research today as the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, a Japan-US cooperation, and added in color the "No Entry" sign on the door I saw at the time.

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

Express ASIA
Launched in 1934, Mantetsu's streamlined, air-conditioned Asia Express, modeled on American trains, symbolized Japan's colonial conglomerate, which expanded into mining, steel, hotels, and aviation. Connecting Dalian and Harbin, it served as a gateway to the Trans-Siberian Railway. Its director later became JNR president and used Mantetsu-laid lines for the Shinkansen. In the installation, the train's headlight illuminates a Panama Canal map during the "loyalty hearing" scene.

Watchtower - Fort Missoula
Fort Missoula Alien Detention Camp was enclosed by a fence. 60-foot watchtowers stood at the north and south gates.

Watchtower - Za'tara/Tapuah Checkpoint
This watchtower is modeled after a military one near the Za'tara/Tapuach Checkpoint in the West Bank, based on a photograph by Japanese independent journalist Hiromu Odagiri. It sits near Kfar Tapuach, an Israeli settlement illegal under international law and home to many supporters of Meir Kahane, a rabbi convicted of terrorism-related offenses. Positioned higher on the wall, it symbolizes surveillance and isolation walls as colonial tools, where the "terrorist" holds the power to label others. Half embedded in the wall, it connects to a room in CECOT's watchtower outside.

Watchtower - CECOT
On the side, a "night scene" darkens the green-roofed section, where a third watchtower seems to float in the night sky. Modeled after towers at El Salvador's CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center), this octagonal prism minimizes blind spots and features a walkway around the room; it towers over the facility to oversee a capacity of 40,000 inmates, the largest scale in Latin America. After Maduro's 2025 abduction, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a law once used against Japanese, German, and Italian nationals, to intern over 250 Venezuelans there. The State Department paid at least $4.7 million, and detainees faced "systematic torture," unseen since the Abu Ghraib prisons.

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.

A-Bomb Blueprint
Implosion sphere cross-section used in the 1951 Rosenberg spy case, in which an American couple was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. This drawing is based on National Archives records. The couple was executed in 1953 after being convicted of providing the Soviet Union with top-secret information regarding U.S. radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs.

Suits

Fictional Flag with a shoe
This transformed American flag is the final element. This work includes three American flags, which transform gradually. The first flag appears in the live-action record of the loyalty hearing room at the Fort Missoula Alien Detention Center, remade and preserved at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula. The second one appears in a Sumi ink painting of the loyalty hearing scene; a close look reveals that the stars on the flag have morphed into a circular arrangement. The last one is tied to a bamboo pole wearing a single shoe (weighted with stones inside) worn by the internee character in the video, and steps out of the barracks in a form reminiscent of the "Karakasa Obake" (umbrella monster) from Japanese folklore. The inspiration for this third transformation was the speculation that the American flag planted on the moon has faded to white due to solar ultraviolet radiation. These three steps lead to the white flag "Surrender" displayed at the entrance of the installation, visible through the window to the right.