Distance and Risk: Chim↑Pom & Finger Pointing Worker

This paper examines how artists responded to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster by confronting the problem of visualizing an ecological catastrophe that is largely imperceptible to human senses. Unlike the earthquake or tsunami, radiation cannot be directly seen, smelled, or touched, yet it permeates landscapes, bodies, and temporalities with lasting consequence. Focusing on two case studies, Chim↑Pom’s Real Times (2011) and the anonymous Finger Pointing Worker(represented by artist Kota Takeuchi). The paper considers how artists mobilized performance, materiality, and mediation to make visible the invisible.

Chim↑Pom staged their intervention at the gates of Fukushima Daiichi, donning Tyvek suits and raising a flag that combined the Japanese rising sun with the nuclear trefoil symbol. Their act materialized radiation as a new form of sovereignty over land, linking invisible fallout to histories of colonialism and state power. By contrast, the Finger Pointing Worker emerged from within the plant itself, using TEPCO’s own surveillance infrastructure to perform a silent, ambiguous gesture—pointing directly at the live-stream camera. This act recentred the labouring body within the disaster, implicating viewers in the slow violence of nuclear energy and its displacements. Both works rely on “poor images”—grainy surveillance feeds, shaky handheld cameras—whose material conditions embody the risk, precarity, and immediacy of the disaster. They reveal how radiation, though unseen, structures space, time, and social relations, and how art can register ecological harm through gesture, index, and material mediation rather than representation alone.