Muisto ja Myytti — Memory and Myth: When Finnish Traditions Meet the Spirit World
- Chiaki Kamikawa
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Growing up in Japan, Finnish culture was not entirely foreign to me — Moomin troll stories were part of my childhood, as they were for so many Japanese children. That gentle, slightly strange world of Tove Jansson's creation, full of odd creatures living ordinary domestic lives, left a quiet impression. So when the invitation came to make work for Talo! Tampere, Finland already had a small corner in my imagination — not as a place I knew firsthand, but as a world I had once inhabited through pictures and stories.
Three Breads, One Table, Many Souls
The large acrylic canvas Finrando no Omoide brings together three of Finland's most beloved traditional foods: Karjalanpiirakka (Karelian pie), Mustikkapiirakka (blueberry pie), and rye bread. In Japanese folklore, objects that have existed for a hundred years develop their own soul — they become Tsukumogami, spirits born from age, care, and memory. In the painting, these three foods peer over the edge of a table draped with a vividly patterned Finnish folk textile, their eyes curious and a little mischievous. This is precisely the quality I pursue in all my folklore-rooted work: the moment when the familiar tips into the uncanny, when you look again at something ordinary and find it looking back.
A Pie on a Porcelain Plate
In Shhhhh, the Karelian pie takes centre stage once more — resting on an ornate Imari-style Japanese porcelain plate. The collision is deliberate and tender: two cultures, separated by thousands of kilometres, sharing a moment of quiet domestic intimacy. The pie itself seems to have a face, whispering shhhhh to the small hairy figures flanking the scene.
A Charmed and Haunted Interior
Rockin' Rocking Rocking takes as its starting point a photograph of a traditional Finnish house interior. A figure with a porcelain rice bowl for a head plays an upright piano, dressed in Sami-influenced clothing. In the rocking chair sits a soft pink creature — my contemporary reimagining of the Zashikiwarashi, a child spirit of Japanese folklore said to inhabit old houses and bring good fortune. I have given this spirit a new, modern form: unborn, unnamed, but very much present.
Why Finland — Before I Had Even Been
These works were made for Talo! Tampere (House in Tampere), an exhibition held in Finland in 2025. There is a small joke hidden in the title Memories of Finland — because at the time of painting, I had no memories of Finland whatsoever. I had never visited. These are imagined memories, an invented nostalgia. I usually paint from physical familiarity, the objects and interiors of Cyprus, Japan, and the Netherlands, places I have lived with and been changed by. But the exhibition theme of House gave me permission to imagine differently. A house, after all, is universal. The Tsukumogami I placed inside that imagined Finnish home were my way of knocking on a door I had not yet opened — a greeting sent ahead of arrival.
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