Shores of (Dis)Intimacy

Sakata Kiyoko’s 2016 poem-video installation Taigan ni tsuite (About Opposite Shores) transforms excerpts of Zainichi Korean poet Kim Si-jong’s 1970 narrative poem Niigata into a performative artwork consisting of words and salt crystals distilled from seawater. Collectively, Kim’s and Sakata’s works draw attention away from authoritative histories of migration and assimilation to focus instead on liminal subjects standing on the fissures between land and water. This article argues that Sakata’s discursive experimentation draws associations between Zainichi and littoral spaces to stage them as inherently unstable yet provocative lenses of critical capacity. Sakata’s artwork proposes possibilities for (re)building transregional intimacies without eliding the specificity of racialized experience.