Shadows in the Hand: Sayaka Uehara's 'Green Room: Peace Island'

Photographer Sayaka Uehara, born in Okinawa in 1993, presented the exhibition "Green Room: Peace Island" at Gallery Athos in Naha in February 2025. The show brings together two series—the monochrome "Green Room" and the color "Green Days"—for the first time, focusing on Heping Island (Heping Dao) off the coast of Keelung, Taiwan. Uehara's black-and-white photographs document the island's layered colonial history, from Spanish and Dutch occupation to Japanese rule and the 1947 February 28 Incident, where local Ryukyuan residents were killed. The exhibition uses a circular layout that encourages viewers to move repeatedly through the images, connecting historical violence to the present through small objects like souvenir cookies and bottle openers.

This exhibition matters because it uses photography to bridge personal and collective memory, linking Okinawa's postwar experience with Taiwan's colonial past. Uehara's work challenges viewers to consider how tourism and souvenir-taking can both acknowledge and obscure histories of violence. By photographing her own hands holding local crafts, she turns the act of carrying away an object into a metaphor for bearing historical responsibility. The show exemplifies how contemporary photography can engage with political and colonial narratives, making invisible histories tangible through intimate, bodily experience.