UN News spoke with Walker during a visit to the UN Headquarters, in New York, to present My Deepest Desire, a newly published edition of Hara’s final work featuring Walker’s ink drawings and a new translation by Liza Dalby.
Published posthumously after Hara’s suicide in 1951, My Deepest Desire is a poetic short story meditating on the desire to live a “different, fuller life”. Hara intertwines the death of his wife before the Hiroshima bombing 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.
Strongly “passionate about the subject of the bombing” as a “justice issue”, Walker said encountering Hara’s writing had an immediate emotional response.
“He communicated his personal experience and his effort to make sense out of the experience that he’d been through,” Walker said, describing the writing as difficult to categorise in conventional literary terms, yet deeply affecting in its directness.
From words come images
“How could [Hara] have done it into words? It’s the same thing,” he said when asked about translating such material into images. “The visual arts are how I can translate.”
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 imagery 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 limits of perception, he suggested meaning often emerges in the space between them.
Bringing absence to life
Earlier 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 behind in Hiroshima where intense heat and blast effects erased bodies but preserved outlines.
The gesture was deliberately simple, but conceptually direct: to make absence visible in everyday environments.
American artist Sandy Walker works on large-scale black and white abstract prints in his Oakland studio, in California.
“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 Washington State’s North Cascades.
“It was a way of bringing that home to people – it was real and they could experience it that way,” he added.
Later, after hearing remarks by Paul Tibbets, the pilot of Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the Little Boy atom bomb on Hiroshima, during a visit to Wyoming in the late 1980s, the couple created an evening-length performance work examining the bombing and its legacy.
It was during research for that performance that Walker first encountered Hara’s writing.
Art as individual encounter
Throughout the conversation, Walker emphasised that art does not operate through collective messaging, but through individual experience.
“Art is experienced individually,” he said. “Then there is a cumulative experience, but it starts with one person.”
Sandy Walker’s artwork. “My Deepest Desire”, a newly published edition of Tamiki Hara’s final work features Walker’s ink drawings.
In this view, the political or historical meaning of a work is not delivered as a statement, but built through repeated acts of attention, with each viewer encountering the work on their own terms.
A continuing belief in transformation
Asked about the relevance of such work amid renewed global nuclear tensions, Walker answered with one word: “Stop.”
He also expressed a continued belief in the power of art to create change over time through accumulated individual experiences.
“I have a very strong belief in the arts,” he said. “I still believe in it.”
For Sandy Walker, work connected to Hiroshima is not only about remembrance, but about sustaining a form of attention that resists abstraction – one that insists on the human scale of historical violence and on the possibility that perception itself can shift.
