Monuments, Memory and Meaning

Fine artist Kingsley Baird talks to Malcolm Wood.

The monument stands two metres in height, a sinuous curve of stainless steel cleanly incised with a kowhai motif; the Escher-like pattern of interlocked flowers throws a fretwork shadow across the pebbled mosaic at its base as the sun moves across the sky. To the untutored eye it is simply a beautiful object.

But when you know where it stands – close to the epicentre of the Nagasaki atomic bomb blast – it takes on a terrible ambiguity. So too does the text running across the top, which appears in English, Ma-ori and Japanese: “Remember winter. Spring’s welcome consolation.”1

“You might think of the work as a cloak sheltering and protecting you against the elements or, in the Ma-ori context, about the korowai, or cloak, as symbolising mana,” says the monument’s designer, artist Kingsley Baird.

Or side-by-side you might apply another meaning: “A cloak can also be about smothering.”

That bright, fretwork shadow: for Baird it summons one of the images taken of the bomb blast survivors – a young woman with the pattern of her kimono burned onto her flesh by the nuclear flash.

Kingsley Baird is no stranger to designing memorials. His first memorial commission (a joint partnership with the Studio of Pacific Architecture), the New Zealand Memorial in Canberra, was unveiled by Prime Ministers John Howard and Helen Clark in 2001. His next, the Southern Cross-inspired Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in front of the National War Memorial in Wellington, was completed in 2004. For his master’s degree project he created an installation and video exploring the unresolved grief surrounding the death of his brother in a motorcycle accident many years earlier.

The Cloak of Peace – Te Korowai Rangimarie was donated by the Government and people of New Zealand to Japan to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It represents the unity of peoples for peace and the determination that weapons of mass destruction, capable of destroying humanity, should never be used again.

It is difficult to argue with these sentiments. Who would not wish for an end to the threat of nuclear destruction? The cold war may be done with, but the issue of nuclear proliferation remains. North Korea, one of Japan’s immediate neighbours, is newly in possession of nuclear weapons (the first test took place during one of Baird’s visits to Japan) and countries such as Iran are perhaps on their way to obtaining them. The 21-kiloton yield of the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and killed more than 70,000 people now seems puny; today the average yield of a nuclear missile is 20 times that.

But Baird knows that it is all more complicated than that: memories can be constructed and construed in many ways, and memorials can be put to many uses. In the World Peace Symbol Zone of Peace in the Nagasaki Peace Park, for example, it seems likely that some of nations that donated memorials may have done so for reasons of realpolitik as much as idealism. How else do you explain the overrepresentation of the states of the former Eastern Bloc: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Cuba, East Germany.

Nor is Baird unaware of Japan’s complicated relationship with the events of World War II. Japanese textbooks have tended to gloss over historic atrocities such as the Japanese Imperial Army’s Rape of Nanking in 1937 and the forcible recruitment of ‘comfort women’, and there are Japanese right-wing readings of history that depict the nation at least as much as victim of the War as an aggressor within it.

At Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which Baird has visited, 14 Class-A war criminals from World War II are among the 2.5 million war dead honoured.

In Japan there has been nothing akin to Germany’s contrition.

Baird has no time for those who would excuse Japanese aggression, militarism or atrocities, but at the same time, he says, there are things the victor’s history has been inclined to forget. That Japan was an aspiring colonial power which had come late to the table. That most of the territories Japan invaded (China and Thailand excepted) were not sovereign nations but European colonies. That the ‘war criminals’ commemorated at the Yasukuni Shrine were condemned under a set of conventions their nation had not been party to and had behaved according to Japanese military mores.

Nor was the dropping of the bomb less than morally complicated. “True, from the official American perspective the dropping of the bomb saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of men. But it is also true that in the lead in to the dropping of the bomb the United States stopped the conventional bombing of the candidate cities because they wanted to see how much damage the bomb would do.”

Why was Nagasaki bombed and not some other city? Historical contingency. It just so happened that on the morning of August 9 1945, Kokura, the designated primary target, was under cloud cover.

Is nuclear-free New Zealand implicated? “We didn’t drop the bomb, but we were on the same side that did,” says Baird.

“I am certainly going to write about these things. It won’t be about blame; it will be like my artwork, that is, attempting to express the complexity of such events.”

Most of the sculptures in the Peace Park are of figures. Baird’s sculpture neighbours a skillfully carved peace maiden donated by the Peoples’ Republic of China, and the centrepiece of the park is a 30 tonne bronze of a seated, heavily-muscled man, one hand outstretched and open in a gesture of peace, the other warningly pointing skyward. Memorials like these lend themselves to a particular form of interaction, says Baird. “People arrive, stand there, have their photos taken and move on. I didn’t want that.”

He prefers human-scale, abstract, understated memorials to which people can bring their own stories.

In Nagasaki he wanted a work that would invite people onto the site. “I wanted people to stand within the concave form of cloak.”

During Baird’s two visits to Nagasaki – the first to inspect the site, the second to oversee the final work and attend the unveiling – he was the guest of local peace activists. Most, like Baird, were baby boomers, at a generation’s remove from the horrors of the bomb. He attended a family tea ceremony put on for his benefit and a Noh theatre performance in Tokyo. His hosts were warm, hospitable and open. There was none of the reticence or formal etiquette he had read of when researching the trip.

They made the memorial and it’s meaning much more immediate. “I realised that the Nagasaki bomb fell on people like these. My sense of empathy became that much stronger.”

The Cloak of Peace Te Korowai Rangimarie (at top left and right) was commissioned by the Peace Foundation and funded by contributions from the New Zealand Government and six local authorities: Christchurch, Wellington, Auckland, Whakatane, Waitakere, and Napier.

It was unveiled by Disarmament and Arms Control Minister, Hon Phil Goff, on behalf of the New Zealand Government in a ceremony at Nagasaki Peace Park on 21 October.

In early 2007 Baird will take up an inaugural two-month residency at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium. As part of the residency he will create works on themes of memory, remembrance, loss and reconciliation.

The view from a B-29 Superfortress of the Nagasaki bomb blast on August 9, 1945.


Nagasaki before and after August 9, 1945.


Skin burns on a woman replicate the darker patterns the kimono she wore.