‘Stop’: Sandy Walker uses art to confront the legacy of Hiroshima

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…