It is a woman who rejects the gaze. She is endowed not with speech but with the expected exotic eyes and fuller lips. She turns her back and remains silent and opaque to those questions in the accompanying poetic text. She does not reveal her identification in the duality that the text associates her body with: the homeland to protect or a new land to conquer. Within the duality, the domain of the masculinity of imperial and colonial subject matters, her body is performed as the oppositional femininity. The text positions the viewers within the imperial and colonial construction of masculinity– femininity, in which the question of whether she is the homeland to protect or a new land to seize is posed to the viewers irrespective of whether she is the self or the other.

The tactility of the gaze is aligned with the haptic textual recall, “untouched”. The alignment converts the tactility of the gaze into the masculinity of the imperial and colonial power and embodies it as the dominant power assigned to the seeing of the viewer in the realm of sight. The seeing subjectivity of the viewer is also reformed into the gaze of the heterosexual male towards the photographic object of the female body. It is a space of the pressure of looking.

It is a granite cliff that overlooks the ocean reflecting the azure sky and hears the tranquil rhythm of ripples. The cliff is located at the southern edge of the island of Okinawa. It was the bloody war field of the Battle of Okinawa, where children, men, and women of the island jumped into the water, facing the dilemma of being killed or killing themselves, brainwashed by Imperial Japanese military propaganda. According to the Okinawan religious belief, there is niraikanai the land of the Gods, on the infinite blue horizon. Under the imperial practice of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Okinawa was mobilised as a fortress during the terminal stage of the war in the Pacific Theatre. The Battle of Okinawa was fought by the Japanese Imperial Amy against the US Marine Corps and Army from 1 April to 22 June 1945, and caused the death of 122,228 Okinawans. The cliff testifies to one of the moments of this battle.

Hidden Tides juxtaposes the granite cliff with the female body. This aesthetics of juxtaposition juxtaposes the pain of the other and the pleasure of looking problematising the act of looking as a location of power. The viewers are left in the conflicting and sacrilegious juxtaposition in the realm of sight for contemplation and negotiation.