Art asks—even compels—us to imagine the otherwise unimaginable. How else can we begin to fathom the existential threat posed by humankind’s nuclear capability? As inhabitants of a world made unstable by geopolitical conflict, rapid climate change, and the advent of AI, everyone is vulnerable to the potential misuse or mismanagement of nuclear technologies intended for warfare or energy production.

The Japanese, as the world’s first and only victims of nuclear war (in 1945), and more recently as casualties of a major nuclear power accident and environmental disaster (in 2011), have long faced the ongoing consequences of nuclear devastation. In the 80 years since American atomic bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their civilian populations, generations of Japanese have grappled with the problem of how to live under the continuing conditions of nuclear precarity. 

The dangers to humanity and the nonhuman world of harnessing the atom have gone largely unseen. Among all forms of expression, the visual arts have arguably best evoked and addressed what Frances Ferguson in 1984 dubbed the “nuclear sublime,” encompassing the unknowable and the unfathomable. The visual arts have also confronted other confounding issues, such as memory, knowledge, and the ethics and limits of representation. My book in progress, “The Nuclear Sublime: Japanese Art After Hiroshima,” examines artworks in various mediums, from painting and photography to conceptual, performance, and installation art. Revealing unparalleled and evolving perspectives from Japan on the universal predicament of life in the nuclear age from 1945 to the present day, it also introduces aesthetic dimensions of Japanese “radioactive discourse” to art history and current ecocritical conversations across the humanities. From multiple perspectives, it interprets selected art objects to reveal them as potent sites where manifold discourses, histories, and meanings converge. With sustained focus on a select number of art objects and the workings of artistic medium, form, and language, chapter by chapter it demonstrates how stylistically disparate artworks have served as vehicles for visualizing the nuclear condition.

My research at the Center focused primarily on the object at the heart of chapter two, The Map (Chizu), the 1965 photobookby Kawada Kikuji (b. 1933) that was compiled 20 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, during the war in Vietnam. It combines images of the disorienting accumulation of stains on the ceiling of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome, of memorial portraits of deceased kamikaze soldiers, and of disquieting marks of American capitalism and colonialism on the contemporary landscape. (Japan served as a staging ground for the US war in Vietnam and nuclear weapons secretly—illegally—passed through its ports on American warships). Juxtaposing taciturn abstractions formed by radioactive black rain with troubling glimpses of military actualities past (Japanese) and present (American), The Map (Chizu) is a bleak rumination on the past in the present, including painful recent histories buried under the accretion of time. 

Generous access to the Manfred Heiting Collection of rare artists’ books, which was acquired by the National Gallery in 2024, proved a significant boon to my research and the development of the project. Two copies of The Map (Chizu) were essential to my study, as were contemporaneous Japanese photobooks by Tōmatsu Shōmei (1930–2012), Hosoe Eikoh (1933–2024), and Moriyama Daidō (b. 1938), comparison with which underscored the radical formal, conceptual, and material innovations of Kawada’s masterpiece. A sizable subset of nuclear-themed photobooks in the collection, primarily photographic compendiums of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were invaluable for further comparative study. These included publications from the early 1950s, immediately following the end of the American occupation and the lifting of censorship of atomic imagery, through the early 1970s, among them Genbaku No. 1: Hiroshima Photo Record (1952), 11:02 Nagasaki (1966) by Tōmatsu Shōmei, Hiroshima Since August 1945 (1970) by Sasaki Yuichirō (1917–1980), Hiroshima Now (1970) by Ishiguro Kenji (b. 1935), and Hiroshima Hiroshima Hiroshima (1972) by the All Japan Student Photographers Association.

Close examination of numerous Japanese, American, and European nuclear-themed photographs in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago complemented my research. While in Chicago, I visited the University of Chicago to study the bronze Nuclear Energy (1966) by Henry Moore (1898–1986) on the 83rd anniversary of the first nuclear chain reaction, at which my grandfather Oliver Volk (1917–2003), a chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was present.

University of Maryland
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, November–December 2025

Alicia Volk recently published a long-researched book on early post–World War II Japanese art, In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan, from which her research project at the Center emerged. Following her residency, Volk continued her study of Japanese photobooks and nuclear imagery at museum collections and archives in Amsterdam, New York, Boston, and London. In fall 2026 she will return to her position in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, and will continue researching and writing additional chapters of “The Nuclear Sublime: Japanese Art After Hiroshima.”