Eiko Otake’s playful curiosity accosts the audience as they enter BAM’s Fisher Theater; a large wide-eyed portrait of this longtime New-Yorker and artistic force is projected onto the scrim. Lights dim. A video dialogue between Otake and Wen Hui, co-creator of What is War, plays. Levity. Two kindred spirits somehow joking through personal experiences of the Second World War. In halting English, Wen Hui recalls her grandmother’s death in a Japanese air raid, and then –
Silence. In the only noticeable transition of the entire work, the video fades abruptly and is replaced by Wen Hui and Otake’s bodies tucked into two corners of the stage. With nearly imperceptible slowness, these relics of war advance to the center. Their footsteps are muffled by a thick border of dirt, which shoulders the responsibility of grounding the mostly barren theater, otherwise only adorned with canvas projections and a mirror’s reflections. The audience forgets how to fidget as they watch these two bodies reach toward one another, glaciated tension compressing time between them. When they finally meet, ghostly limbs pass through lithe frames dressed in baggy clothes that muddle physical outlines. They cross, kneel, gather dirt–sink into shared histories.
Otake leaves this exposition with graceless, haunted footsteps that wander upstage into a darkness that swallows her black dress and thin frame into its landscape. Wen Hui eventually joins her. Their bodies look small in the emerging pool of light, humanity and complexity minimized with distance. Criticizing war has been Otake’s artistic domain for years; joined by Wen Hui, her narratives are activated and complicated by new lineages of Chinese storytelling crafted with Western imaginations in mind. Labels of the colonizer and the oppressed intertwine. In these vulnerable bodies seen from afar, without the powers of nation-states and war, these labels mean nothing.
Naked, Otake’s weathered body mirrors projections of the weathered faces of Comfort Women in China. Subsequent slides tell the audience that these women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. From afar, Otake is a nameless victim. Edging closer to the audience, her silent humanity becomes a confrontation. Suddenly, the frantic thumps of Wen Hui’s stomping feet fill the space. Wen Hui’s body is erupting from the womb, from her shoulder. She pulls at imagined wounds in her stomach, pain skittering down her arm, ejecting from her fingertips like an anxious animal ridding nuclear shrapnel from her body. Otake glances upwards, imagining her mom looking at the Great Tokyo Air Raid above, worry etched on her face. Her head lands sharply in Wen Hui’s hands as bombs rain down. Wen Hui belts out songs for wounded soldiers. “Now I question myself. Why was I singing?” Otake’s exhausted fist pumps support. In the brutalistic empty theater, each tableau in this duet, no matter its volume, barely takes up space. Yet, again and again, their bodies bind together, protesting their separation and disappearance.
The piece reaches peak poignancy when Wen Hui scribbles Kanji, a written link between China and Japan, all over Otake’s body in black marker. Otake writhes away like a child filled with innocent fear. Her wide-eyed expression and unfocused movements make her seem uncertain about whether she’s even allowed to be afraid. Wen Hui’s mothering grasp responds, holding Otake’s body in place while reading a letter in rapid Chinese. Once Otake’s body is covered, the marker switches hands. Now, Otake scribbles Kanji on Wen Hui, speaking emphatically in Japanese, her speech punctuated by a frenzied, pleading confrontation: “Wakaru? Wakaru?” (“Do you understand?”)
Covered in foreign histories, they then repeat their lines in English, translating the untranslatable. In doing so, the lilting, carefully emphasized stories of their mother tongues become a set of facts. “Wakaru?” disappears. Their native languages let implications linger longer, while English allows us to forget: My histories have touched your body. Your histories have touched mine. We are all tangled in this mess. Do you understand?
Wen Hui and Otake cross the dirt border into the house aisles. Their bodies magnify, yet they are still small. With distance they become ants, but with proximity they don’t become larger-than-life. They just become human. Stopping at the scale of humanity is the point. When clothes and national identities are shed, what remains are scars of war engraved in wrinkled skin. These scars remind the audience that the Second World War did not end when the bombings stopped. It lingered and metastasized, generating new horrors and powerful revolutions that will shape generations to come.
To learn more, read ankita’s interview with Eiko Otake and Wen Hui about the making of What is War.
What is War, Eiko Otake and Wen Hui, BAM: Brooklyn Academy of Music, October 21.
Correction Notice (Nov 4, 2025): An earlier version of this article stated that “these women were sold into sexual slavery by the Japanese military.” The text has been updated to read “these women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military” to more accurately reflect the historical context.
