Alive IV exhibited at Earth Festa Kanagawa 2025

As of January 2025, over 284,889 people with foreign backgrounds live in Kanagawa Prefecture, including many whose families have lived here for generations.

This exhibition of "Alive" at Earth Festa Kanagawa were born from a desire to focus on these individuals and share their history and present-day lives.

When considering “multicultural coexistence,” we hope audiences were able to look to those who have already been “living together” here and learn about their struggles, sorrows, dreams, and hopes. When people with ‘different roots’ live in the same space or land, mutual respect for each other's history and culture fosters ‘harmony,’ which in turn connects to hope for the future.

We hope to “think together and build together” the society of tomorrow, while carefully observing what emerges from this perspective.

Photographer Kim Hak's “Alive IV” powerfully conveys the personal stories of people who survived Cambodia's harsh era and immigrated to Japan. The photographs convey the experiences of that time, the ‘pain’ that continues to this day, and their ‘hope’ and ‘strength’. This power is a great force that enriches a society where people with different backgrounds and experiences live together. On the 30th, an “Interactive Appreciation Tour” was held, where guides who were also subjects of the works engaged in dialogue with participants to deepen their understanding of the pieces together.

"Alive IV" was exhibited together with “삶(Sam) ~ The Paths Walked by Halmonis ~” expressing the lives and bittersweet experiences of halmonis (grandmothers) from the Korean Peninsula through letters and drawings learned in literacy classes. What future do these grandmothers, who have lived over half their lives in Kanagawa Prefecture and say “Japan is also my homeland,” dream of?