The Brooklyn Rail

The lyrics to Bob Dylan’s searing antiwar anthem “Masters of War” reverberated in my head as I walked through Gaku Tsutaja’s latest exhibition:

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs

Over the past decade, Tsutaja, a Japanese, New York-based artist, has produced a body of critical work (in both senses) on the nuclear arms and energy industries. Her research began in earnest in 2016, when her father—a retired civil engineer from the generation that rebuilt Japan after World War II—was called to supervise rebuilding projects in Fukushima. The 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is the world’s second-worst nuclear disaster to date, after Chernobyl in 1986.

In imposing black binders, she compiled her findings: Copies of published and unpublished documents, archival photos, and notes from interviews with hibakusha (survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and denshosha (legacy successors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors). (Through a program initiated by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 2012, a volunteer legacy successor spends several years learning from a survivor in order to transmit their story when they are gone.) She visited Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State, a clandestine town built in 1943 and 1944 to house tens of thousands of workers who were unwittingly recruited to the Manhattan Project. During around forty years of plutonium production, Hanford became one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the US. Tsutaja went to Spokane Tribe Reservation in eastern Washington, where uranium was extracted at the Midnite Mine between 1955 and 1981. She spoke with an activist from the Marshall Islands, where the US conducted nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, including the infamous underwater detonation Operation Crossroads. Oral history is a cornerstone of her research, the specificity of individual voices augmenting and at times contradicting the presumed authority of collective histories.

Another artist might have displayed the binders and called it a day, but Tsutaja is a tireless maker and a wildly imaginative storyteller. Like Trenton Doyle Hancock, Saya Woolfalk, and the ex-Soviet artist Ilya Kabakov—an early influence—Tsutaja is a worldbuilder. Through installations comprised of Sumi ink drawings, gouache and acrylic paintings, traditional Japanese gigaku masks, mixed-media sculpture, and video, she synthesizes her research into complex stories enacted by a fable-like cast of animal and insect characters. By changing the names of countries—the US, for example, becomes the Nation of Ame—she defamiliarizes supposedly settled histories. Similar to the Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy, Tsutaja displays her videos together with the objects that appear in them.

The current show is dominated by the monk parakeet, which has been Tsutaja’s avatar and alter ego for almost a decade. Native to Argentina but displaced to other regions, the monk parakeet is distinguished by its communal nest structure, sometimes encompassing dozens of families, calling to mind immigrant communities in the US and elsewhere. Tsutaja depicts the parakeet without eyes; its blindness initially symbolized her own difficulties in “seeing” her adopted culture. Over the years, blindness has evolved to become a stand-in for cultural estrangement and misunderstanding, as well as propaganda-induced ignorance, a theme of this exhibition. It is also a foil to regimes of surveillance, a topic of perennial interest to Tsutaja.

At the center of the gallery is Pidgingo-no-Inko: Project Head (2025), a sculpture of the interior of a giant head. Amid its many components—nests, branches, eggshells, disembodied hands, protest signs, and parakeet heads representing individuals with whom Tsutaja has engaged—a fever dream of liberation is taking place. The parakeets are plotting to destroy the spider that has been concealing itself inside the body (politic). In Tsutaja’s lexicon, the spider is a symbol of war, and the private interests that benefit from it—namely, the weapons industry. She does not discriminate in her condemnation. Beside the sumptuously drawn and painted Einstein Letter (2024), which refers to the letter that sparked America’s nuclear weapons development, hangs the austere 731 (2025), a Sumi ink drawing of a figure shrouded in medical dress cutting into a body. Adapted from an archival photograph, it depicts an event from Unit 731, a Japanese bioweapons program that conducted tests on human subjects in China between 1936 and 1945.

This pair points to a progression in complexity—both formal and thematic—in Tsutaja’s work. Small Sumi ink drawings represent a single moment, while larger drawings, to which she has recently added rich candy color, synthesize multiple geographies and timelines. Her most complex, even baroque, compositions, are executed on canvas, as in Onitaiji: Project (2024). The extraordinary density of reference and imagery in these works suggests history painting for the digital age. I have a special affection for the simpler (though not simple) Sumi ink drawings; the first works of Tsutaja’s that I saw belonged to her 47-panel series “Daily Drawings: Spider’s Thread” (2020). It is in such works, which allude to the serial form of manga comics, that her themes and concerns come most readily into focus. But focused attention is precisely what this exhibition is not about.

Pidgingo-no-Inko can be translated as Pidgingo’s Parakeet. As the gallery’s press release tells us, “‘Pidgingo’ refers both to ‘pidgin language’ and ‘after pidgin’ (‘go’ meaning ‘language’ and ‘after’ in Japanese).” Language—both written and voiced, human and animal—permeates the video of the same name, which is projected, like a thought bubble, from Pidgingo-no-Inko: Project Head. Voices in many registers, often overlapping one another, deliver messages ranging from documentary-style narration to propagandistic proclamations to social-media exclamations. The latter—urgent, pithy, and punctuated by emojis—come close to the idea of pidgin language, a simplified grammar for shared understanding. I note with some regret that Tsutaja seems to have shifted recently from the rigor of her past research to an increased reliance on the discourse of social media, with its attendant biases and blindspots. But the cacophony of the social media sphere comes under her scrutiny as well. The large drawing of a veined eye that opens the video, and which appears in the gallery (Sisak at the Dark Star, 2025), is a reminder that the phones we train our eyes on are also watching us. These siphons of attention are themselves weapons of surveillance, distraction, and division. Wherever we turn, we are caught in the spider’s web.

Opening the same day that Donald Trump announced he was restoring the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of War,” Pidgingo-no-Inko is an unsettlingly timely reminder of the relentlessness of the masters of war Dylan sang about more than sixty years ago. If Tsutaja, armed with her binders of research, can dream of a world without weapons, perhaps the rest of us can too.