The Lion with Four Blue Hands

Based on prehistoric art and adopting a folkloristic approach, Kubo Hiroko uses industrial supplies like tarps to create representations that address topics such as natural threats and marginalized women from a contemporary perspective. For Aichi Triennale 2025, she has created a giant mural-like tapestry on the theme of “war and disaster” along with a number of earthenware vessels with a “creation” theme. Taken together they bring attention to both the positive and negative aspects of human activity.
Kubo’s giant works, using tarps as a material that is both contemporary and familiar, emphasizes the negative aspects. In a continuous stream, she depicts some of the calamities that we face today, including communities destroyed by war, refugee camps, mushroom clouds, livestock as a vector for disease, and flooding. The symbolic lion face and four hands takes as its motif Vishnu, the Hindu deity involved in the cycle of creation and destruction. When J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, recalled seeing the destructive force of his creation, he famously quoted Krishna (one of the incarnations of Vishnu) in the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, saying “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In addition to evidencing his awe at the phenomenal power that humanity had acquired, Oppenheimer’s statement can be read as showing his remorse at the new negative chain. In an unceasing cycle of creation and destruction, the figure holding a child in the center of the tapestry can either be seen as passing hope for creation and rebirth to the next generation, or as an omen foreseeing despair as the next generation will also be caught up in the negative chain. Kubo leaves the interpretation to the viewer.
The earthenware presented in a display case on floor B1 focuses on the positive aspects of human activity in a work combining vessels of different forms with figures of living creatures. Taken together, these individual objects symbolize the power of primitive human creativity as a factor shared between different ages and regions.