This group of etchings documents Hamada's firsthand experience as a young soldier conscripted into the Sino-Japanese War, where he saw what he described as "the darkness of the Middle Ages transported into the present." Hamada's images address the horrors of the battlefield, the suffering of soldiers and civilians alike, and are often set in the barren landscape of northern China's Shanxi Province—a geography that he found both alien and beautiful. The decision to work in etching for this series was a purposeful one, as Hamada likened the process of an image emerging from an ink covered etching plate to that of smoke clearing on the battlefield.
Gallery label from Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War, October 24, 2015-March 20, 2016.
