Hiroshima Paintings Exhibition at Brunei Gallery Aug-Oct 2010

The Light - Portraits of the 'Hibakusha'


Aug 06, 2010 To Oct 08, 2010

Brunei Gallery, SOAS Thornhaugh Street , Russell Square , London , United Kingdom

At 00.15am on the 6th August 2010 in London, when this exhibition was started, 65 years back, at 08.15am it was Hiroshima when Little Boy’ was dropped. The exhibition of the 65 Hibakusha portrait paintings are displayed and it will last for 65 days, one for each year since the bombs were dropped on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All paintings have detailed description of each subject’s unforgettable recollection of exactly how they were able to survive and be found after the bombing.
Aims of this exhibition are not just displaying paintings but are reminders of the penalties of our wrong doings and the horrible things we had chosen for one another. According to Young and Edwards (2005), after the hiroshima bombing, any humans that survived the initial blast were suffering from radiation exposure. Forty-five percent of 280,000 people who survived the exposure were still alive, sixty years later, and become part of the largest study ever to be conducted for the long-term effects of radiation poisoning. The study resulted in many upsetting findings.
Innocent Prisoners of Hiroshima
Unborn children exposed to radiation on average grow to be smaller and less intelligent than their peers, and their risk of developing leukemia peaked after ten years (Yong& Edwards, 2005). Many of the women that were pregnant at the time of the Hiroshima bombings gave birth to children with congenital malformations that were attributed to the radiation (Ohara, 2005).
One of the exhibitions aims is to remind the world of man’s inhumanity to man and for each portrait painted to remind us all that we are human with a responsibility for each other’s well being and that wars are not solutions for anything.
An accompanying day of lectures will be held on the 7th of October in the ‘ Brunei
Gallery Lecture Theatre’ with speakers from Hiroshima City University , The University
of London and Kingston University .