While the cold concrete floor of my studio absorbed much of the heat, enabling me to go on living as normal in France throughout the summer of 2003, the country as a whole suffered from phenomenally hot weather which resulted (according to one unofficial statistic) in more than ten thousand casualties. Inhabitants of warmer countries might well be surprised at this and wonder at the high number of deaths. France is situated in high latitudes and its environment is such that the population does not generally have to reckon with extremely hot summers: when the temperature rises to its peak, people simply escape inside their stone houses where the air is cool. Indeed, prior to 2003, neither air-conditioners nor fans had ever been sold in any department stores or electrical shops: no one could buy anything like it, and retailers did not consider that there was a market for such devices. It seems to me that the true cause of this summer tragedy occurring at the heart of a modern society lies in the way that the sudden climate change tore people out of the particular social environment they were used to.

I had never thought of introducing into my art as artistic concepts environmental concerns such as air pollution, climate change and acid rain, despite their being amongst the most important problems our society has to confront. In my long artistic career I had, however, made use of natural materials and worked in difficult weather conditions, rains and storms, in order to construct outdoor installations, and had repeatedly racked my brains about how to make artworks resistant to violent weather. Then, that summer, I witnessed how severely unexpected climate change could strike at the helplessness of people trapped in the solid system of their society – an experience which was most probably decisive in changing the direction of my thinking.

Project « Air in Peril »

I started developing artworks on the theme of earthly elements such as water, color, plants, sunlight and air, as if chewing on morsels of these enormous subjects for transformation into artistic pieces. And then there came a moment when these key elements all seemed to converge in a single new project.

In 2003, the same year as the heat wave, I began to conceive a new idea on the theme of Town and Forests. When I visited the site in which I was to intervene and found it to be basically a vast and wild forest, I realized that I knew very little about true forests. Plants such as we encounter in towns are cared for by people and subsist almost artificially. In the course of researching real forests removed from our everyday city life, I came across a report published by the European Union in 1996 entitled International Program concerned with the Evaluation and Monitoring of the Effects of Atmospheric Pollution on Forests, and the European Union Program for the Protection of Forests against Air Pollution.

Disturbed by the damage caused by acid rain in the 70’s and 80’s, the EU undertook to monitor the effects of air pollution on European forests in numerous places across Europe. “More than one quarter of trees suffer from defoliation of more than 25%, and one tenth shows a discoloration of foliage of more than 10%”: thus do they wrap up their findings. Air pollution has an impact not only upon human health, but also on European forest ecosystems.

The fact that vegetation produces oxygen is well-known. It is therefore imperative to avoid deforestation on a large scale, in order to preserve the global environment.

What particularly caught my attention in the report was the fact that “Forests suffer from discoloration of their foliage”. There are colors for everything on earth and every color in living things has a function. In my art I had for a long time been occupied, rather than with coloring canvases, with finding out what would appear from underneath living colors when they were taken away, and this concern no doubt contributed to my interest in the report.

Did the discoloration of forests mean that they were lacking chlorophyll? Air pollution diminishes and destroys chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants, which is activated by solar energy and functions as a catalyst in the process of photosynthesis By means of chlorophyll, plants produce glucose for their own sustenance and oxygen for us. Less chlorophyll, less oxygen.

The subtle 10% chlorophyll decrease of in forests’ trees may still go mostly unremarked. But by the time we actually see that forests are no longer green, will it not be too late? A visual perception of the decrease in green pigment in forests would alert us: « Air in Peril »!

Chlorophyll cells look very much like the red blood cells which transport oxygen in the human body; chlorophyll is nothing less than the blood cell of Earth. This consideration led me to respond to an idea which then sprang up in my mind, namely “to restore color to the forests and bring aid to the Earth, which is beginning to lose its capacity for regeneration”, and I decided to devote myself to a new project clearly occupied with ecological concerns.

And the project « Air in Peril » was born.

The project consists so far of three major elements: 1. "Tree of Photosynthesis", which aims to visualize the photosynthesis of plants, in which chlorophyll is the catalyst; 2. "Air Wheel" is a form symbolizing the power of sunlight energy which photosynthesis needs, and 3. "Molecule of Oxygen": air produced by photosynthesis, and they are developing.

Tree of Photosynthesis

The key element of the project « Air in Peril », “Tree of Photosynthesis", will be presented at the National Art Center, Tokyo, and thousands of plastic discs with photochromic pigment hung in trees will every day visualize photosynthesis replacing chlorophyll in deficit. The plastic leaves do not become green but violet. The function of this violet color is to give maximum alarm. The photochromic pigment in the leaves will react in accordance with the quantity of ultraviolet rays and will be violet while they receive solar rays, but by night will become translucent milky-white, giving the tree the appearance of a ghost tree.

"Tree of Photosynthesis" was realized for the first time in autumn 2006, two and a half years following its conception, with full support from the French City of Argenteuil, thanks to their understanding of the importance of the project, and every day the tree was allowed to do its work of reviving photosynthesis. The discs which changed color in reaction to changes in the weather were attractive enough to awaken the curiosity of passersby, who ended up watching them for the two-month duration of the show. It would have been worth this artwork being amongst these people if, by their interest in the plastic discs, they had been brought to an awareness of the daily natural metamorphoses of the tree itself.

The 2003 heat wave in Europe had not only a human cost; it also damaged nature. Forests subjected to exceptional heat in the summer can change their behavior of photosynthesis: instead of absorbing CO2, trees belch it back out. Climate change provoked by global warming sends nature mad and impairs its capacity for regeneration and renewal of the air. Air is doubly, triply “in Peril”. When I recognize that only nature – and ceaseless learning from nature on the part of mankind – can show us what to do in time to come, it becomes plain that the project « Air in Peril » has a future and can be developed further.

January 2009,
Shigeko Hirakawa

(Supervision of English: Darran Biles)