Posthumously published after Hara’s suicide in 1951, My deepest wish is a poetic story that meditates on the desire to live a “different and fuller life.” Hara intertwines the death of his wife before the bombing of Hiroshima with the devastation and aftermath of the attack itself, creating a work that moves between dream, despair, memory and survival.
Throughout the conversation, the American artist returned to a central idea: art can translate historical trauma into something urgently human.
Walker, strongly “passionate about the issue of the bombing” as a “question of justice,” said encountering Hara’s writings had an immediate emotional response.
“He communicated his personal experience and his effort to make sense of the experience he had gone through,” Walker said, describing the writing as difficult to categorize in conventional literary terms but deeply moving in its directness.
Images emerge from words.
“How could (Hara) have turned it into words? It’s the same thing,” he said when asked about translating that material into images. “Visual arts are my way of translating.”
Walker explained that the project evolved slowly over decades. After first reading Hara’s work while researching a performance piece about Hiroshima with his wife, dancer and choreographer Ellen Webb, he carried the text with him for years before the images emerged.
“One dark night I found the images, or I could say they found me,” he wrote in the book’s artist preface, describing how the project eventually took shape through a series of ink drawings.
Rather than treating text and image as separate domains, he described them as complementary ways of approaching the same lived reality. Referencing the idea that painting and writing each have their own perceptual limits, he suggested that meaning often emerges in the space between them.
Giving life to absence
Previous collaborative work also shaped this approach, particularly the “Shadow Project,” developed with artist Alan Gussow in 1982. The project involved marking human silhouettes in public spaces using white paint, referencing the shadows left in Hiroshima, where the intense heat and effects of explosions erased bodies but preserved contours.
The gesture was deliberately simple, but conceptually direct: making absence visible in everyday environments.
American artist Sandy Walker works with large-scale black and white abstract prints in his Oakland, California studio.
“It wasn’t an abstraction,” Walker said. “It was real and people could experience it that way.”
Over time, the project expanded internationally, with participants in more than a thousand locations recreating the silhouettes around the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. Walker and Webb also participated in the project in their small community in the North Cascades of Washington state.
“It was a way to make people realize that: it was real and they could experience it that way,” he added.
Later, after hearing the statements of Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gaythe plane that dropped the atomic bomb Little Boy on Hiroshima, during a visit to Wyoming in the late 1980s, the pair created an all-night performance piece examining the bombing and its legacy.
It was during research for that performance that Walker first encountered Hara’s writings.
Art as an individual encounter.
Throughout the conversation, Walker emphasized that art does not operate through collective messages, but through individual experience.
“Art is experienced individually,” he said. “So there is a cumulative experience, but it starts with one person.”
Artwork by Sandy Walker. “My Deepest Desire,” a newly released edition of Tamiki Hara’s latest work features ink drawings by Walker.
From this point of view, the political or historical meaning of a work is not presented as a statement, but rather is constructed through repeated acts of attention, in which each viewer encounters the work on their own terms.
A continued belief in transformation
When asked about the relevance of that work amid renewed global nuclear tensions, Walker responded with one word: “Stop.”
He also expressed a continuing belief in the power of art to create change over time through accumulated individual experiences.
“I believe very strongly in the arts,” he said. “I still believe in it.”
For Sandy Walker, work related to Hiroshima is not just about remembering, but about sustaining a form of attention that resists abstraction, one that insists on the human scale of historical violence and the possibility that perception itself can change.