HOKUTO, Yamanashi Prefecture--U.S. pop artist Keith Haring visited Hiroshima during the Cold War when the threat of nuclear Armageddon was high.

He died a couple of years later, in 1990, from AIDS-related complications. He was 31 years old.

Now, a museum, the Nakamura Keith Haring Collection in Hokuto, Yamanashi Prefecture, that is dedicated to the artist, has retraced his footsteps to the western Japan city razed by atomic bombing on Aug. 6, 1945.

‘I WILL NEVER FORGET’

A 1988 line drawing by Haring shows a pair of birds hopping up and down beneath the letters “Hiroshima” like people jumping in time with the music at a live concert venue.

The picture was used as the main image for a charity concert held in Hiroshima on Aug. 5 and 6 of that year to raise funds to build one more nursing home for A-bomb survivors.

Haring visited Hiroshima for the first time on July 28, 1988, ahead of the concert. He toured the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where he saw, among other things, photos of a heap of skulls of A-bomb victims, the aftermath of radiation exposure and a melted human face.

At the end of that emotion-filled day, Haring jotted down his thoughts on two sheets of writing paper at the hotel where he stayed and faxed them to his studio manager in New York.

“Today is a day I will never forget,” part of the letter says. “Visiting the peace museum and memorial was one of the most sobering and frightening experiences of my life. You cannot imagine until you see it firsthand.”

Haring wrote in his journal for that day, in referring to world leaders preoccupied with the arms race, “All of these men should have to come here, not to a bargaining table in some safe European country.”

And he asked: “Who could ever want this to happen again?”

MURAL NEVER PAINTED

“Keith Haring: Into 2025,” an exhibition inspired by that rhetorical question, opened June 1 at the Nakamura Keith Haring Collection. It is the world's only museum focused solely on Haring’s works.

A subtext in Japanese for the show reads, “Who could ever want this?” The exhibition will run through May 18 next year.

Starting last year, a team of the museum’s curators began making frequent visits to Hiroshima to interview people who interacted with the artist in 1988 and to locate documents and related records from the time.

Among the subjects of their research was a plan for painting a mural, which never came to fruition.

Haring toured candidate sites for the mural after he approached the Hiroshima city government with his proposal through the intermediary of the concert secretariat.

The candidate sites included the municipal Honkawa Elementary School, an A-bomb remnant on the opposite bank of the river from the Atomic Bomb Dome, and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, which was to open the following year.

Haring made rough sketches for the mural and sent them to Hiroshima after his overnight stay when he returned to the United States.

Haring, however, was diagnosed with AIDS later in the year and died not long after that.

Two weeks before he died, he completed 11 sections for “Altarpiece: The Life of Christ,” a bronze sculpture to be used as an altar for his own memorial ceremony.

One of the pieces has been donated to the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, where he could have painted the mural.

“We had very little information about his time in Hiroshima, just what he wrote,” said Annelise Ream, the 55-year-old director of collections with the Keith Haring Foundation, which is working to carry on the artist’s dying wishes and preserving his works. “He was really impacted by the experience.”

Another exhibition on Haring’s Hiroshima connections will also be held at the former building of the Bank of Japan Hiroshima Branch, another A-bomb remnant in the city’s Naka Ward, in late July this year.

LIFE DEDICATED TO ‘ART FOR ALL’

Haring left his mark on society with his creative activity, which effectively lasted only a decade or so.

With a credo of “art for all,” he drew and painted pictures on streets and walls, where his works would come to many people’s notice, and also provided designs for familiar product items such as T-shirts and button badges.

He celebrated, through his works, the coming-out of sexual minorities, which Haring, as a gay man, was part of. He was highly critical of the nuclear arms by the big powers and South Africa’s apartheid policies.

Haring set up his namesake foundation in the year before he died to provide assistance to AIDS patients and children suffering from disease and disabilities.

Daisuke Fukusho, who is 42 and a resident of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, said after visiting the Nakamura Keith Haring Collection, he felt “encouraged” by the artist’s life and works.

Fukusho, who is also homosexual, tested positive when he was 24 with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. He is drawing on his experience as a certified social worker at Place Tokyo, a nonprofit organization that helps people living with HIV and AIDS.

“I wish to create ripples of change in society through my activity in the same way that Haring’s wishes spread among people in the form of art,” Fukusho said.