On the exhibition’s oblique threshold, visitors can read a statement. Both addressing and signed “All citizens of the Republic of Ryukyu,” the letter declares a collective creation of a “social constitution” for “an entirely autonomous society.” This hopeful announcement is in fact the opening of a 1981 poem by Kawamitsu Shinichi, penned more than a century after Japan dissolved the nominally independent Ryukyu Kingdom to form what we know today as the Okinawa Prefecture. By entering the exhibition space, visitors acknowledge and come under the jurisdiction of this constitution.

Titled “Wishful