Moeko Fujii writes on the Japanese-American artist Michael Koerner\u2019s photo series \u201cMy DNA,\u201d which confronts the effects that the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki has had on his family.<\/b>
\nWhen the U. S. dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Michael Koerner\u2019s mother, Kimiko, was an eleven-year-old girl living in Sasebo, a mere forty miles away from the epicenter of the detonation. She grew into womanhood on that irradiated land, and married her American sweetheart\u2014a civil servant with the Department of Defense\u2014after a nine-year courtship. They relocated to the U. S. base in Okinawa, where Koerner was born, and then to Arizona. In 1976, at the age of forty-three, Kimiko received a diagnosis: as a likely result of the nuclear radiation, she had a tumor growing on top of her pituitary gland, causing high spikes of adrenaline to pump through her body in moments of distress. That summer, the family returned from vacation to a home that had been robbed. Koerner was thirteen, with his Japanese mother\u2019s slight wrists; his younger brother was six. The two beach-tired boys followed their parents into the house to inspect the damage. Suddenly, they heard screams, and when they entered the kitchen they saw their mother swinging a ten-inch meat cleaver above her petite body, yelling that she was going to kill the neighbor\u2019s kids. When their father tried to calm her down, she picked him up and threw him against the refrigerator.
In his photo series \u201cMy DNA,\u201d currently on view at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, in Chicago, Koerner, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, confronts the long legacy of the atomic bomb in his family. Kimiko\u2019s diagnosis was the beginning of a string of medical crises. Koerner\u2019s brother, Richard, died of pneumonia in 2002, at the age of thirty-two. Richard couldn\u2019t fight the infection because he didn\u2019t have a spleen\u2013it was removed years earlier as part of his treatment for Non-Hodgkin\u2019s Lymphoma. Around the time of his funeral, Koerner learned, from a cousin, that he had been the eldest not of two boys but of five: three brothers had been lost to crib death, stillbirth, or miscarriage. His mother would die, from complications due to Cushing\u2019s disease, in 2008. \u201cI used to say, \u2018Family, what family?\u2019 \u201d Koerner told me on a recent afternoon. \u201cAll of mine are dead.\u201d In \u201cMy DNA,\u201d he used collodion tintype, a laborious method of photography that was in vogue during the eighteen-fifties. His process, which involves sloshing, slapping, flinging, and blowing chemicals through a straw, yields abstract works that tackle the subject of atomic radiation through transformation, dilution, and chance\u2014in short, the fraught process of inheritance. \u201cSee those fractal patterns, these bursts?\u201d he asked me, pointing at at work titled \u201cFingerprints #6187.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019re mutations.\u201d
\u201cFinger Prints #6175,\u201d 2018.
Richard\u2014who was born on the same day as Koerner, seven years and two minutes apart\u2014received his cancer diagnosis in college. When Koerner accompanied his brother to radiation therapy, the doctors asked Richard to lie down, so that they could lower a topographical lead mask over his chest. The mask was thinnest above the cancerous lymph nodes and thickest above his vital organs; there were marks tattooed on Richard\u2019s chest as guides to help target the radiation. Koerner told me that, as he was asked to vacate the room, for his own safety, he felt the grim irony of the family\u2019s predicament: \u201cThey were combatting the results of radiation that causes cancer with radiation that cures cancer.\u201d Before his death, Richard became a chemistry professor, like his older brother. After hearing his story, I looked at Koerner\u2019s work \u201cRichard\u2019s Heart.\u201d I saw the tattoos\u2014rendered as fractal flowers\u2014and the gentle, arrhythmic feathering of the organ, lying on a bed of bronze and blue blossoms: the cosmos of a brother\u2019s care.
\u201cMaru #7286,\u201d 2018.
\u201cUntitled #7433,\u201d 2018.
Kimiko outlived four of her sons. Koerner recalls that his mother sat hunched in the same spot on the living-room couch, stitching temari balls\u2014a type of Japanese embroidery\u2014through each new complication of her disease. He held one of the balls out to me, and we both looked at it closely: thousands of stitches of crimson and marigold, not a single one out of place. If his mother\u2019s art reflects aching precision and control, Koerner\u2019s pieces both embrace these traits and deliberately elude them. \u201cAs a scientist, I try to control everything, but I have no control over my genetics,\u201d Koerner said. Currently, his doctors are monitoring a large cyst in his left kidney for signs of malignancy. \u201cI\u2019ve had these issues since I was an embryo,\u201d he said.
\u201cRichard’s Heart #4664L-4660R,\u201d 2017.
As a Japanese schoolchild two generations removed from the atomic bombs, I learned their history through the potent efficiency of documentary-style realism, like that of the mannequins in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum\u2014the precisely bent \u201cO\u201d of a child\u2019s mouth, as red, burned skin sags off his bones\u2014or the detail-driven chronicles of Masuji Ibuse\u2019s \u201c Black Rain \u201d and John Hersey\u2019s \u201c Hiroshima .\u201d Such narratives echo in the background of Koerner\u2019s work, but his images offer a more oblique kind of testimonial. There is at once an exacting minuteness and an unnerving vastness to them; in one, we trace multiplying fingerprints clawing into a gray-tinged black; in another, dozens of blue circles blossom into what looks like a CAT scan of a cancerous brain. His photographs ask the questions of those who are too young to have lived through paradigm-altering historical atrocities but not too young to have lived with their consequences: What shall we remember? What has been warped? What and who has, and will, slip from our grasp?
\u201cThree Sisters #860,\u201d 2018.
There\u2019s a plate in \u201cMy DNA\u201d that I return to again and again. Titled \u201cThree Sisters,\u201d it shows a trio of abstract figures bending toward one another, their outlines blurred, each with a beautiful fractal pattern standing in for a face. Koerner calls the figures Kimiko, Sumiko, and Emiko: his mother and her two sisters. In 2004, when Kimiko\u2019s condition worsened, Koerner invited the sisters to visit them in Arizona. One couldn\u2019t make it\u2014she was too sick\u2014but Sumiko and her daughter made the trip from Japan. The two sisters hadn\u2019t seen each other in decades. They spoke in Japanese, and Koerner couldn\u2019t understand what they were saying, but he remembers them scrunched on the couch, shaking and laughing together, holding each other\u2019s hands, crying. He thought that their conversation must\u2019ve been like one of his last serious talks with Richard, when he\u2019d asked his brother whether he, Michael, had anything to apologize for. He held those dual memories in his mind when he made \u201cThree Sisters\u201d with elemental silver, \u201cbecause it can\u2019t be divided,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a chemical compound. It is the purest form of silver, and it\u2019s grown by nature.\u201d
\u201cWaterfalls #7458,\u201d 2018.
\u201cR\u014dji #7785,\u201d 2018.
\u201cDNA #7262L — #7266R,\u201d 2018.
\u201cFinger Prints #6191,\u201d 2018.
\u201cCoronae #9887,\u201d 2017.<\/p>\n