Starting from Ground Zero

When a postcard arrived from a friend, I was in my late teens, living in the passive-aggressive air of the bright grey sky in a tiny room in Kobe. The picture on the postcard was seemingly drawn hastily in a graffiti-like style in pale pastel colours. In it, a woman in pyjamas with dark, messy hair is sitting on a single bed, slightly hunched over and covering her mouth with her hands. She appears lost in thought, blankly bemused, as she stares at an open suitcase in front of her, waiting to be filled, with piles of books lying next to it. From her strangely impassive face, I heard an inaudible voice oozing out—“What shall I do?” With the hallucinating whisper stuck in my ear, I saw myself in this picture—a person at a standstill, chocked in a void. I later discovered that it was a self-portrait by the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, depicting herself just before she fled Nazi-occupied Berlin in 1938.

Images travel beyond the constraints of time and space, arriving to us in an unknown place at an unknown moment. The hunched portrait of Charlotte Salomon arrived to me at a time when I was struggling with what had been oppressing my life. The picture is from Salomon's autobiographical picture book Life? or Theatre? (1941–1942), a series of paintings created during her time as a refugee in the South of France before her death in Auschwitz. The book, composed of 769 gouache paintings accompanied by corresponding narratives, describes factual scenes from Salomon's public and private lives as well as her own psychological visions. They deal mainly with the difficulties in family relationships, love affairs, and the position of female German Jews in the immediate aftermath of the rise of the National Socialists to power. Salomon's struggle against depression and the prevalence of suicidal tendencies in her family is most evident, and a sense of distress and anger rings out from the series. Her crude, hasty expressionist style and fragmented pictorial composition