Meiro Koizumi

This video installation is made for the exhibition "Journey to the West" held in January 2012 in New Delhi, where a group of curators invited 6 Japanese artists to commission a work to be made around the relationship between Japan and India. In this framework of the exhibition, Meiro Koizumi decided to use a controversial book in the modern Japanese history "the Judgement of Justice Radhabinod Pal", as a material of his experiment. Koizumi constructed a performance combining the paradoxical context of this book with monstrous representation of Indian gods. The central performer had to read the Judgement of Pal as seriously as possible, while other two on the sides had to try as hard as possible to make a comedy out of the situation. It's Koizumi's attempt to create a new god-like mythical figure that embodies the contradiction inscribed within the modern Japanese history and its identity. The context of this work has much to do with the war trial held in Tokyo right after the war to judge Japanese war criminals. Here is the famous scene of Shumei Okawa, a philospher/ Thinker acting crazy on the first day of the trial. After this, he stared to laugh out loud, and screamed "It's a Comedy!", and taken out of the court by the guard. His charge was dropped later because of his mental illness. But some people believes he didn't scream "it's a comedy!". Instead, he screamed "Inder Kommen Sie!". They started the trail before the Indian Judge Pal arrived to Tokyo. Judge Pal was the only Asian judge to be invited to the trial, and he was the only one found all the defendants NOT GUILTY. Even today we don't know if Okawa screamed "It's a Comedy" or "Inder Kommen Sie!" and if he was really crazy or was just pretending.