Create Virtual Tours to Share the Hiroshima Panels

We have two great news to share with you today!

Firstly, our project was covered by NHK World News on June 24^th.

 Reaching Beyond Borders to Save Famed A-Bomb Art

--- Art can play an important role in passing down the lessons of war. In Japan, one of the most famous examples of this is in danger of being lost. But as NHK World's Yotsumoto Jun reports, a rescue operation is underway.

This 4 minute video clip explains about our project to create virtual tours as well as our new efforts to preserve the Hiroshima Panels for future generations. Please watch the video and share it with your friends and family! 

Secondly, we have reached our first goal of raising 5,000 USD from over 40 unique donors. As of June 25^th, we have received 5,899 USD from 53 donors around the world! We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to you!

This will allow us to graduate from the GlobalGiving Accelerator Program, which means that we can fundraise permanently on GlobalGiving! Now we can continue to fundraise for this project even after the campaign period ends on June 26th. We also plan to launch our new global preservation of the Hiroshima Panels for future generations. We will share updates with you as we move forward!

Thanks to your contribution, the Marukis' works and the Gallery itself will be accessible to people all over Japan and the world – for the first time in the Gallery’s history. We will share stories surrounding the Hiroshima Panels, the Marukis’ other works and historical events of the Gallery. We believe that these videos will serve as a global tool for peace building far into the future. We will keep you posted on the filming and editing of the first tour of the Gallery, and inform you once the tour becomes available for you to see it. 

THANK YOU AGAIN FOR ALL YOUR SUPPORT!!!

With sincere gratitude,

Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels

Links:

• NHK World News: Reaching Beyond Borders to Save Famed A-Bomb Art

Dear Friends,

Thanks to your generous support, we are making progress in this fundraising project. We are getting close to reaching our first goal, which means we are moving forward with the plan! Thank you so much! 

Today, we would like to introduce the director of the virtual tour, Mr. Takashi Arai.

Mr. Arai is a visual artist and filmmaker. He is known for his use of the daguerreotype technique, the first popular photographic medium. When the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami occurred on March 11^th, 2011, he happened to be taking photographs of the fallout that Daigo Fukuyu Maru, a tuna fishing boat which returned to Japan after beingdamaged by the hydrogen bomb test conducted by the United States in 1954 at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. This project led him to photograph the deeply interconnected subjects of Fukushima, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

After the earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Mr. Arai frequently visited the Tohoku (Northeast) region of Japan to photograph and record the aftermath of the disaster. He held a solo exhibition “Eyes of Fukushima - Mirrors Half Asleep - Takashi Arai Contemporary Daguerreotypes” at the Maruki Gallery in 2012. 

Mr. Arai is highly acclaimed both in Japan and abroad for his works that trace the history of nuclear issues from the atomic bombings to nuclear testing and to contemporary nuclear disasters. We asked Mr. Arai to work with us on this virtual tour project because he is one of the artists who deeply understand Marukis’ works and the significance of the Gallery.

Mr. Arai has received various awards including the 41st Kimura Ihei Award for his first monograph “MONUMENTS” (PGI, 2015) and the category prize at the 72th Salerno International Film Festival for his recent short film “Oshira Kagami (The Mirror of the Oshira Deity)”.  His works are held in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Musée Guimet, among others. For more information on Mr. Takashi Arai and his works, please visit his official website.

We are still short of reaching our goal to secure a permanent fundraising spot on the GlobalGiving platform, or launching a worldwide fundraising project to care for and preserve the Hiroshima Panels for future generations. We hope that you can continue to spread the word to your friends and family until the end of the campaign period on June 26th ET.

We hope you are excited to learn who will be guiding the virtual tour of the Gallery! We will keep you posted on further progress! Thank you for all your support!

Warmest regards,

Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels 

Links:

• TAKASHI ARAI STUDIO