In 1968 Nakahira co-founded Provoke, the short-lived but influential photography journal that revolutionized photography in Japan. Nakahira, who had been mentored by the master Shōmei Tōmatsu, deviated from the reigning social realism popular in Japan and, with his Provoke colleagues, advocated an expressionistic style known in Japan as are, bure, boke (rough, blurry, and out of focus). Nakahira and his colleagues were interested in the intersection of photography and language—in the first issue of Provoke in November 1968 they declared: “The image itself is not an idea . . . we as photographers must capture with our own eyes fragments of reality that can no longer be grasped through existing language.” This interest was further developed in Nakahira’s first book, For a Language to Come, published in 1970 and a landmark publication of postwar Japanese photography.

Nakahira’s career as a photographer is fractured and somewhat difficult to assess, as most of his negatives and prints have been destroyed. His controversial project for the 7th Paris Biennale in 1971 is among his best work, and, luckily, a large portion of it still exists today. This piece consists of more than 1,500 photographs, which he shot, developed, and then exhibited without omission over the course of seven consecutive days. These gritty chiaroscuro pictures offer glimpses of his daily wanderings around Paris, including strangers passing on the street, displays in shop windows, close-ups of movie posters and signs, Metro platforms, and his own breakfasts. As the walls of the exhibition space became filled with photographs, the artist began to spread prints onto the floor. Unfortunately, a disagreement with the exhibition organizers forced Nakahira to cut short his project, and a few years later he destroyed most of his earlier negatives and prints. For unknown reasons, most of the negatives from the 1971 Paris Biennial project were preserved. The gelatin silver prints available today were printed in 2013 in Tokyo, overseen by master printer and photographer Osamu Kanemura, from the original 35mm black-and-white negatives. MoMA recently acquired a selection of new prints, which evoke the spirit of the 1971 biennial exhibition—they are reproduced here.

Nakahira‘s project for the biennial reveled in chaos—he presented a world of unedited images, in which the accumulation of images was perhaps more important than any single picture. Viewers found themselves stepping into his world, and within the cacophony of the installation, they caught glimpses of its maker’s quotidian rituals. While certainly Nakahira’s project is a far cry from today’s obsessive documentation of minutia on social media, his unedited approach to image making and his investment in questioning the role of photography were signals of things to come.

The post For a Language to Come: Takuma Nakahira’s Photographs for the 1971 Paris Biennial appeared first on post.

The vivid memories of the scents and tastes of East Asia have stayed with us long after the trip. We enjoyed delicious dishes prepared by artist Siren Chung for the Chuseok holiday in Seoul, quaffed magic water consecrated by the father-in-law of Japanese artist Wada Masahiro, at the Yokohama Triennale, enjoyed the best tofu while talking to Lee Mingwei about exquisite Taiwanese snacks in a restaurant near the Tokyo Tower, and sipped amazing hibiscus tea infused with sun-dried tangerine peel in the company of artists Lee Minghsueh and Tseng Yu-chin at IT Park in Taipei. It is incredible how food connects people and how many times we chatted over food and drink with art professionals. At such moments, life and art are inseparable.

Two weeks are of course barely enough to take the pulse of the dynamic art scenes in three countries. Numerous galleries, studios, museums, restaurants, and cafes slipped out of our intense schedule.

01. Gwangju Biennale: Okin Collective Intervention in the Exhibition Space

By Yu-Chieh Li

It would be difficult to miss Okin Collective’s intervention in the exhibition space at the Gwangju Biennale. While we were touring the show, a cheerful, amplified voice broke in unexpectedly throughout the day and in a pleasant cadence started giving instructions in English and Korean for performing lung exercises.

Hi everybody. We’re Okin Collective.

Now, it’s time for lung exercises.

Now, it’s time for lung exercises.

No lung, no art.

Your lungs, our power!

Guards in the exhibition space took part in the performance, by performing the gymnastics, to encourage visitors to participate. The sound piece For the Beloved and Song (2014) was broadcast with exercise instructions at irregular intervals over the PA system in and around the exhibition space, its background music adapted from “March for the Beloved,” the official song commemorating the Gwangju uprising of 1980. The lung exercise is presumably beneficial for general health, but it can also potentially protect practitioners during social and political emergencies. Lungs power the song that recalls the past and prepares for the future.

The political implication of the piece was not perceived quite as directly as this description suggests. As is typical of Okin’s work, the call to exercise was mostly taken at face value. In the exhibition space and on the Biennale Plaza, we saw members of the public performing Tai chi-like movements to the broadcast. Spontaneous participation of this kind diluted the work’s heavy intent.

02. Gwangju Biennale: Yamashita Kikuji

By Sarah Suzuki

Sometimes a work is so good or so strange or so unexpected that it will stay with me for days. Such was the case with Yamashita Kikuji’s 1968 painting Season of Change, installed at the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. As I’ve familiarized myself with the art of postwar Japan, I’ve been fascinated with the surrealist tendency present in some of the work. You can certainly see it in the etchings of Chimei Hamada. Born in 1919, Hamada studied art, and upon graduation was immediately drafted into the military. His first-hand knowledge of the horrors of war reverberated in his work for decades to come: his dark, forceful etchings of the mid-1950s depict the tragedy and absurdity of war while revealing his artist’s eye for composition and his ability to use abstract forms to convey horror.

Yamashita (1919–1986) was also drafted and fought in China. His paintings from the postwar period, which drew on his battlefield experience, suggest the hallucinatory, nightmarish paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, in which animals, demons, and humanoid figures interact in scenes of horrific depravity. A pointedly political allegory, Season of Change addresses the power dynamic between the United States and Japan after World War II. Having seen just a few examples of Yamashita’s work before, notably in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), this strange and haunting picture left me curious to know more.

03. Lionel Wendt at the Gwangju Biennial

By Eva Respini

Biennials offer plenty of opportunities to make discoveries. My favorite discovery at the 2014 Gwangju Biennial was not a hot new young artist, but rather an artist who was at his prime in the 1930s and ’40s—the Sri Lanken Lionel Wendt (1900–1944). About halfway through the maze of galleries presenting works (many of them in large installations) by artists active today, I stumbled into a beautiful gallery with approximately 25 modestly sized black-and-white photographs. A closer look revealed that many of the pictures were solarized and montaged, techniques that are hallmarks of photographic experimentation that took place in the 1920s and ’30s. Indeed, the label revealed that Wendt was working in Sri Lanka during the waning years of colonial rule. I was fascinated by the variety and beauty of the pictures, ranging from a handsome portrait of two men in turbans, with its silvery patina from solarization, to a doctored seascape, a photomontage of a boat at sea collaged into a frame reserved for decorative art works. A quick Google search revealed that Wendt was also a musician, critic, and cinematographer and that there is an art center in Colombo dedicated to his legacy. Surrounded by contemporary art, Wendt’s works seemed utterly fresh and surprising, and they held their own in an elegant and quiet way. Since leaving Gwangju, those pictures have made an indelible impression on me. Perhaps a trip to Colombo is in order to learn more?

04. The Belated Funeral as Performance: A Dialogue with Minouk Lim

By Yu-Chieh Li

The opening performance of the 10th Gwangju Biennale, a powerful piece by Minouk Lim, took place on a rainy afternoon. A helicopter hovered over Biennale Square, where ambulances and buses converged, carrying high school students, relatives of civilian victims of the Korean War, and members of the May Mothers’ House, who lost children in the Gwangju uprising. Remains of civilian victims from the Korean War were carried from an ambulance by blindfolded family members to shipping containers on the square as the May Mothers and high school students looked on. A mourning ritual was enacted in front of one of the shipping containers, surrounded by reporters and Biennale visitors. Spectators were silent; sounds of camera shutters and rainfall dominated the scene. The performance was streamed live both in the exhibition space, where it was shown as a two-channel video installation, and on the website of OhmyNews. The shipping containers holding the human remains were left on the square until the Biennale ended. The next day was sunny. We were amazed to see the square empty and the two containers standing under the blue sky. The bright image presented a striking contrast with the gray scene of the day before. We had loads of questions for Minouk, with whom we had a fifty-minute talk rather than a formal interview. It ended up being a great time for sharing thoughts.

Click here to read the transcript of the dialogue.

05. SeMA Biennale Mediacity

By Jenny Schlenzka

Seoul is a bustling metropolis with lots to observe: high-tech screens beeping and flashing everywhere, hyper fashionable teenagers, K-Pop blaring in all directions, and, of course, tempting flavors from street-food vendors, all clamoring for attention. It wasn’t easy to stick to our packed schedule, but luckily the Mediacity biennial, held at the Seoul Museum of Art, turned out to have its own worthwhile sensations. Founded in 2000, the biennial was intended as a reflection on the media and technology frenzy that is at the heart of Korea’s booming economy.

Whereas former iterations reportedly focused mainly on new-media art works, the 2014 edition included some sculptures, installations and two-dimensional works that gave the exhibition some breathing space and made for a stimulating walk-through. According to his catalogue statement, this year’s artistic director, the artist/film director Park Chank-yong, chose to focus on Asia and aspects of its history that continue to inform the present, though often in forgotten or overlooked ways. The theme of invisibility is hinted at in the biennial’s title Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers, three key words through which to look at Asia’s “experiences of intense colonialization, the Cold War, rapid economic growth and social change in such a short period.”

The biennial presented 42 international artists from 17 countries. Haegue Yang’s Sonic Rotating Ovals (2013), which were installed at the beginning of the exhibition as well as on the top floor, are playful sonic sculptures covered in countless small metallic bells that, triggered by visitors’ movements, make an enchanting sound reminiscent of spiritual or religious rituals. The night before we had had dinner with the artist, who had just moved back to her native Seoul after a long and professionally successful stay in Europe. She told us about her feelings of exhilaration regarding Seoul’s cultural and economic boom mixed with a slight frustration at its slow shedding of the old political and social systems, which make life in Korea more complicated and restricted than she had hoped.

The video SeaWomen (2012) by the young Anglo-Greek artist Mikhail Karikis is an impressive portrait of a community of elderly female sea laborers called haenyeo, who live on a South Korean island and make their living by diving for pearls and seafood. The immersive soundscape of the installation is composed of so called sumbisori, the traditional breathing technique. The sound resembles seabird screams and invokes a sense of the danger these women face in their daily work. None of the laborers in the video seems younger than 50, which leads one to wonder about the sustainability of this ancient matriarchal and communal profession in times of globalization.

Another room featured an extensive archive of the Japanese avant-garde group Zero Dimension, led by Kato Yoshihiro and Iwata Shinichi and active from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. Most of the photos and flyers on display carried images of the group’s so-called “rituals” and “art terrorism,” which the members often staged in public spaces, dressed in costumes and equipped with props. Their activities climaxed with the anti-Expo movement in 1970, captured in the documentary White Rabbit of Inaba (1970). Unlike the Japanese avant-garde artists who got involved in the international mega-exhibition, Zero Dimension protested with rituals in and around Osaka against art’s participation capitalist consumer culture.

A whole chapter of the biennial focused on Shamanism, once the official religion in Korea and still practiced widely today, albeit in reduced form. My favorite contribution, Ba Ba Bakuhatsu (Grandma Explosion) Series (1969–70), was by the photographer Naito Masatoshi, whose portraits of elderly Japanese women shamans are taken at night with a flashlight as the women speak to their deceased husbands and sons, conduct nocturnal prayers, mourning ceremonies, and dances. The vitality and intensity in the women’s expressions, heightened by the lighting, makes one believe in their ability to communicate with the afterworld.

06. Seoul: Soo Sung Lee at Audio Visual Pavilion

By Yu-Chieh Li

Audio Visual Pavilion is an art space that feels like a secret garden hidden in the hustle and bustle of the Korean capital. With traditional tile roofing, a simple residential interior, and plain exhibition rooms of various sizes, it is an anomaly among Seoul’s sophisticated galleries. We saw an exhibition by Soo Sung Lee, who merged his works with the architectural setting, filling every space with light colored, minimalist sculpture, including a pool placed in the yard. The entire pavilion was incorporated into the artist’s work.

07. Yokohama Triennale

By Eva Respini

What happens when an artist curates a biennial? Our group had the opportunity to find out on our first day in Japan, when we traveled 30 minutes by train from Tokyo to the busy port city of Yokohama. The 2014 edition of the Yokohama Triennial was directed by the esteemed photographer Yasumasa Morimura, who is known for his performative recreations of iconic images from art history, from Duchamp’s gender-bending alter ego Rrose Sélavy to Cindy Sherman’s centerfolds. The triennial’s title, Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the Sea of Oblivion, took as its inspiration Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel, later adapted to film by François Truffaut. A newbie curator, Morimura stated on the Triennial’s website: “The future is unknown. But a ship has set sail from Yokohama Port, and to be completely honest, the journey is likely to be risky with me as the captain. Being an artist, I’ve never had the chance to serve as the artistic director of any international exhibitions. I’m taking the wheel for the first time and the ship has already left port without my having had a chance to learn how to steer.” Armed with this information, we set off to view the triennial, which filled all the floors of the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as a large, airy pier on the water, reachable by bus in 10 minutes. Free to explore as he wished, Morimura included a wide range of artists working in all mediums, hailing from all over the world, from the past and the present. Smaller than previous iterations of this triennial, the 2104 show offered a window onto Morimura’s many interests, from the performative photographs of French provocateur Pierre Molinier to the drawings of Japanese artist Chiyuki Sakagami. A discovery for many in the group, Sakagami’s intricate (verging on obsessive) drawings were like little jewel boxes, each seeming to contain a universe, a whole cosmology of new biomorphic forms. Another crowd favorite was Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers’s Interview with a Cat, a recorded interview from 1970 that provided comic relief for the group. We ended the tour with a trip to the pier, where we witnessed the performative unveiling of a mobile stage for Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi’s theater piece Nichirin no tsubasa (Wings of the Sun), based on a text by Kenji Nakagami.

08. Tokyo: Mori Art Museum

By Sarah Suzuki

For me, no trip to Tokyo is complete without a visit to the Mori Art Museum in the towering urban complex known as Roppongi Hills. Sure, the view is a draw but more important are the memorable exhibitions I’ve seen there: big midcareer surveys of Lee Bul and Mokoto Aida; projects with emerging artists like Meiro Koizumi and Tsang Kinwah; in-depth investigations of historical moments, such as Metabolism: City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present Day Japan, held in 2011; and Roppongi Crossing, the museum’s biennial exhibition of new art that always yields fresh discoveries.

On this visit, we arrived between shows as construction and planning were underway for Lee Mingwei and His Relations. The galleries might have been empty of objects, but they were full of deep thinking, conversation, and planning by the artist and the museum staff. Lee Mingwei’s work is not primarily object-based but instead is often centered on ideas of interactivity and participation. Over the last 20 years, his projects have involved dining, mending garments, conversing, and letter writing. This kind of experiential art can be challenging to show in an institutional context and is further complicated by a retrospective presentation in which multiple works are activated at once.

We’ve faced similar challenges at MoMA while installing Rirkrit Tiravanija’s landmark installation untitled 1992/1995 (free still) and Superflex’s CopyLight Studio. One of the key opportunities of travel is the chance to engage in in-depth dialogue with colleagues around the world about institutional issues like these and the varying strategies we employ to respond to them. In the past, I’ve had the pleasure of discussing the challenges and complexities of reinstalling Gutai works from the phenomenal collection of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art with curator Koichi Kawasaki. On this trip, we had the honor of talking with the Mono-ha artist Kishio Suga and hearing his views on reinstalling and recreating sculpture made of ephemeral materials. Lee Mingwei described to us his aim for a multipronged approach at Mori, including experiences that visitors would have to register for in advance, and others that could be encountered by chance in the galleries. Conversations like these are crucial. They suggest new approaches and new answers to questions that we’re all asking. Alas, I left Tokyo without getting to experience Lee Mingwei and His Relations for myself, but I look forward to another conversation about it on my next trip to the Mori.

09. Taipei: Chen Chieh-jen’s “Realm of Reverberation”

By Yu-Chieh Li

On a warm and humid afternoon we strolled from The Cube Project Space in the Gongguan area through the streets teeming with snack bars to Chen’s studio, situated in an apartment building in the Wenzhou Street area. Located opposite National Taiwan University, the neighborhood is a labyrinth of cafes and bookstores but smells more like a rainforest.

Chen Chieh-jen was a leading performance artist in Taiwan in the 1980s. In the 1990s, after an eight-year pause in his career as an artist, he started to address Taiwan’s colonial history using the moving image. We had the privilege of seeing his almost-finished film Realm of Reverberation before its debut at the Asia Triennial Manchester 2014.

The film takes the Losheng protest as its starting point. The Losheng Sanatorium for Lepers was founded by the Japanese Colonial Government to forcibly house and quarantine people suffering from Hansen’s disease. In 2002 the sanatorium was demolished by Taipei’s Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) over vehement protests by residents, scholars, lawyers, engineers, and documentary filmmakers.

Chen showed us the second section of the film, which depicts the visual narratives of the inmates and takes the viewer on a tour of the ruins of the sanatorium. Like many Taiwanese films, Realm of Reverberation is slow-paced. With much modesty and shyness in his smile, Chen kept telling us, “This passage is almost over. But let me know if you want me to fast-forward.” On the contrary: we were deeply moved by the tranquil beauty of the lepers’ faces—the images still linger in our minds.

10. Taipei: Yao Jui-chung and his archive

By Yu-Chieh Li

Yao Jui-Chung’s 18-year-old cat Moca kept wanting attention from us as we pored over the artist’s portfolio and archives in his studio. Yao is also an art critic and an enthusiastic collector of newspaper clippings, ephemera, and photographs of art events. Such documents fill his studio and are the basis of his pioneering works Installation Art in Taiwan 1991–2001 and Archives on Performance Art in Taiwan, 1978–2004.

Yao might well be described as a modern literati figure, but his projects are concerned with political and social issues rather than his own emotions. He has never concentrated on a single medium at any one time. His latest work, Ruins Series, a photographic project documenting unused public buildings that were originally intended as exhibition spaces in Taiwan, was shown in this year’s International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Unfinished landscape drawings made with ink on paper were also on view in his studio. From afar they look like traditional ink scrolls, but up close the brushwork is idiosyncratic and tumultuous.

11. Taipei: IT Park

By Yu-Chieh Li

IT Park is perhaps the oldest artists’ space in Taiwan. Founded in 1988 by Chen Hui-chiao, Liu Ching-Tang, and Tsong Pu, it is an exhibition space, a place where artists’ archives are preserved, and, even more importantly, it is a center for artistic exchange and a place to socialize and hatch ideas.

Lee Ming-Hsueh’s brilliantly-installed solo show largely comprised conceptual prints and found objects: dust brooms joined with dust pans, sculptures made of contact lenses, lighters attached to the wall and combined with graffiti. The highlight was the watermelon/knife. I was surprised at how these readymades went so well with the gallery space. Everything had a minimal, casual beauty.

IT Park captures the persistent energy behind Taiwan’s relatively slow-paced lifestyle. In fact, I find that much Taiwanese art does just that.

12. Taipei: Yu Cheng-Ta’s “Practicing live”

By Yu-Chieh Li

Yu Cheng-Ta’s new three-channel video is a send-up of the contemporary art world. The plot is woven from the dialogues of a fictional family of art professionals portrayed by renowned artists, curators, art critics, and gallerists from Taiwan, Japan, and the UK. The actors play alternate versions of themselves: for instance, the gallerist Chi-Wen Huang plays a museum director. Their conversation centers on the rules of the global art world and their plight as art professionals. Well-known maxims from philosophers and cultural theorists pop up in mockery of the overuse of quotations in art criticism.

The story culminates with the arrival of the news that son, David Yu, deemed by his family to be an unsuccessful artist, has won the Turner prize. It is also revealed that he has two other identities – famous artist David X and collector Skyban. With a story woven around an artist with multiple identities, this film throws a question to the global art system—How do you survive today as a contemporary Asian artist?

13. Taipei: Stray Dogs at the Museum: Tsai Ming-Liang Solo Exhibition

By Yu-Chieh Li

“Before Tsai Ming-liang’s films appear, we actually did not know what ‘slowness’ is.” – Chang Hsao-hung. “Slow Walk in Museum.” (from the brochure for Tsai Ming-Liang Solo Exhibition at MoNTUE)

We left time in the afternoon of our last day to slow down with Tsai’s award-winning film Stray Dogs presented in an unusual way, in an unconventional setting. In recent years, Tsai has identified himself more as an artist who works with moving images than as a film director. When entering the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE), we had to walk between heaps of tree branches to reach the screening places. The film was shown in several locations and scales: beneath staircases, on walls, and in a cozy space furnished with floor cushions where it was projected on two facing walls. Visitors were free to orient their cushions any way they wished.

In the brochure to the show, Tsai explains how he’d like to challenge the traditional idea of cinema as a temple-like place.

In my childhood, the cinema was usually a single-building architecture, like a big box surrounded by barbed wires outside, also like a temple with more than one thousand seats…All family would see the movie together, too. At that time, going to the cinema was like a pilgrimage. It happened during the 1960s and 1970s….Now the cinema has become a shopping mall… It is composed of small halls and frequent showing sessions. You can go to see them at any time.

The artist defies conventions of big-box cinemas and multiplex warrens by isolating fragments of the film and projecting them in corners as independent installations. The magic of Tsai is his ability to create drama by showing unremarkable slices of ordinary life—people eating, walking, sleeping in real time and suddenly introducing a disturbance. By decontextualizing these sequences, he opens them up to new and different readings.

The post Burning Down the Biennials: Reports from Gwangju, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei appeared first on post.

From 1953 to 1954, Izawa Takumi, a young editor at the popular weekly magazine Asahi Graph (often compared to Life), commissioned artists to design images for publication in the magazine. The artists, who included the core members of Jikken Kobo, made sculptural environments incorporating the letters of the magazine’s English-language acronym, APN (Asahi Picture News). The sculptures were then photographed and published as lead images for the magazine’s featured columns. Asahi Graf assigned two photographers, Otsuji Kiyoji and Kitadai, to collaborate with other artists, including Yamaguchi, Komai Tetsuro, and Teshigahara Sofu, to produce photographs for the publication. The APN portfolios feature a selection from the images that were produced during this vital period and show objects made by Yamaguchi and Kitadai photographed by Otsuji and Kitadai. The photographs are experimental in nature, radical in their composition, and bear the formal hallmarks of the artists’ works in other media. They represent some of the most interesting avant-garde accomplishments in postwar Japan.

Yamaguchi, one of Jikken Kobo’s co-founders, likened the workshop to “Bauhaus without a building” He was particularly influenced by Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy’s seminal publication The New Vision, but the group also took inspiration from pre-war European and American movements such as Constructivism, Cubism, and Surrealism, as well as from John Cage’s compositions, Martha Graham’s choreography, and Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Although influenced by the Western avant-garde, Jikken Kobo incorporated new technologies to create signature works relating to the specific conditions of 1950s Japan, which was undergoing rapid industrialization and modernization.

The two APN portfolios, published by Tokyo Publishing House, were acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 2011 as a direct result of curatorial travel to Japan through the C-MAP initiative. Since Jikken Kobo was primarily involved with stage productions, slide shows, and theater presentations, much of what they made was ephemeral or exists mostly in Japanese collections. These modern prints are a critical visual representation of the style of the group and bear witness to their multifaceted activities. MoMA has strong holdings of postwar Japanese photography due to the landmark exhibition New Japanese Photography, which was presented at the Museum in 1974. The show featured the work of luminaries such as Moriyama Daido, Tomatsu Shomei, and Hosoe Eikoh. The APN portfolios represent a different photographic tradition and are a vital link to the European avant-garde—the very foundation of MoMA’s collection.

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Day 1

Keio University Art Center and Archives

By Michelle Elligott

Great to see the Sogetsu ephemera collections at the Keio University Art Center. The Sogetsu materials dovetail nicely with pieces we have (including great Akiyama Kuniharu material) in the Museum’s Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives. The unique materials (like the letters in the Takiguchi Shuzo Papers) were wonderful.

Materials at the Keio University Art Center and Archives

By Michelle Elligott, Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy Lim

Roundtable at Tokyo University of the Arts

Organized by Kobata Kazue, the roundtable at the Tokyo University of the Arts started with Kobata’s introduction on performance and perfomativity in Japanese art in the 1960s. She screened 8mm film footage of Hijikata Tatsumi’s performance Revolt of the Flesh, and spoke about the activities of the Ankoku Butoh movement. Kobata raised an interesting point regarding the relation of painting and performance in 1960s Japanese art.

I was particularly struck by the work of Tadasu Takamine (born in 1968, lives and works in Kyoto), who was a member of a radical performance group Dumb Type. Tadasu is a very interesting artist with radical video and performance practices dealing mainly with politics and sexuality. During the roundtable, the artist screened his controversial video piece Kimura-san (1998), featuring footage of the artist providing sexual relief for a disabled friend, as well as the performance he did during his residency in New York of exchanging clothes at flea markets in the East Village in 1993. He is well-known for his video God Bless America, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003. For eighteen days, Tadasu and his female partner lived in an entirely red room, filming themselves as they worked, ate, slept, and had sex. In the resulting time-lapse footage, we see them kick and punch a sculpture into being: a giant head, resembling George W. Bush, which continually sings God Bless America.

Roundtable at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music

By Nancy Lim

Day 2

Meeting with Hisano Atsuko of the Saison Foundation

Founded in 1987, the Saison Foundation is one of the leading organizations providing grants to contemporary theater and dance groups from Japan and abroad, offering residency and studios for rehearsal. Its origins are in Studio 200, an experimental artistic space from the 1980s that was situated in the Ikebuko department store. The white box of Studio 200 hosted performances by Hijikata, Teshigawara Saburo (an important figure in contemporary dance during the ’80s), and concerts by rock groups from Korea and China.

The Saison Foundation, with Hisano Atsuko

By Nancy Lim

Chim↑Pom: Not Just Provocations

By Doryun Chong

I used to feel unsure as to where this young group’s provocations were headed. In the wake of the disasters in Tohoku in 2011, and seeing their courageous series of projects and performances, I’m beginning to think that they really have a sense of purpose and mission—trying to shake the art scene and even the wider society, which perhaps have grown too comfortable and complacent after many decades of stability and prosperity. http://chimpom.jp/

Meeting Chim↑Pom

By Christopher Y. Lew

Chim↑Pom presented an overview of their work, which includes projects from their solo show Real Times, made in response to the March 11 disaster at Fukushima. It’s amazing how quickly they reacted. They made a powerful series of videos and actions: they collaborated with local youths in Soma City, raised a flag in dangerous proximity to the Daiichi plant, and made a polemical intervention in Taro Okamoto’s mural in Shibuya train station.

A Visit to MUJIN-TO Production’s Gallery

By Nancy Lim

Mori Art Museum

By Nancy Lim

“METABOLISM” Exhibition at Mori Art Museum

Visit to the Mori Art Museum and the exhibition METABOLISM: The City of the Future. Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present Day Japan. Very extensive exhibition about the most widely known modern architectural movement to have emerged in Japan in the 1960s. Meeting with Mami Kataoka, the museum’s chief curator, after a walkthrough.

Kudos to the “METABOLISM” Team!

By Doryun Chong

I think we were blown away by the depth of the scholarship, impeccable installation, and of course, the richness of the subject itself. Kudos to the Mori!

Dinner with Minemura Toshiyaki, Hirasawa Go, and Hayashi Mihchio

By Nancy Lim

Film Critic Hirasawa Go’s Shinjuku Night Tour

By Doryun Chong, Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy Lim

Day 3

A Visit to the Hara Museum

By Doryun Chong, Michelle Elligott

Utterly delightful: loud, semi-naked cabbage throwing and water spitting

By Sarah Suzuki

We Are BANANA!!

By Banana Gakuen Theater Company

Hello Guys!! We are BANANA!! from Tokyo made in Dangerous JAPAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!

Thanks for your LOVE to BANANA.

Ecstatic Critique?

By Doryun Chong

There are about 40 to 50 performers, split equally between men and women on a stage that’s barely big enough to hold all of them. But somehow, they manage to jump up and down and around, dancing and singing like a giant boyband or girlband-cum-cheer squad en masse in constantly changing formations for over an hour! It’s also like Billy Blanks’ Taebo or one of those extreme, military-style workouts. We were overwhelmed by the constant sensory overload, including some of those sweat-drenched actors running into the audience. The director, Nikaido Toco, who later joins the troupe on the stage, was incredible too. She sounded like Kim Carnes screaming at the top of her lungs while doing all those moves in perfect sync with her actors. In the midst of this madness, there’s actually something serious and a complexity there. Sonically and visually, they reproduce a struggle of the sensory overload of Japanese mass media, where any meaningful message is impossible to hear unless you can project even louder over that noise. Maybe their performances are an ecstatic critique of the uniformity that they at the same time wear and abuse in school uniform.

Day 4

National Museum of Art, Osaka

By Michelle Elligott

Two highlights of the National Museum of Art, Osaka, included a Shiraga Kazuo painting dedicated to Michel Tapié and a wild, surrealistic Tiger Tateishi painting depicting a samurai, the KKK, Mao, and a crawling child. (We all agreed Doryun should include it in his Tokyo exhibition!)

Breaker Project

By Nancy Lim

Breaker Project

By Nancy Lim

Breaker Project is a cultural organization that started in 2003. Based in Osaka, it supports a variety of community-based art projects and presents them in temporary exhibition spaces throughout the Kansai region. At the time of TsukaharaYuya’s installation, Breaker Project occupied a two-story, multifamily residential unit from the early 20th century that the current artist-in-residence discreetly transformed by means of delicate light, sound, and sculptural installations that fiddle with the infrastructure. One room was also modified to include a sleeping area for overnight visitors, and on the floor above, an enclosed platform was built in the otherwise unstable attic (the artist had fallen through the attic floor a few months prior and broken his arm). The project was accompanied by varied educational programming intended to engage the local community indefinitely — even after the show closes and Breaker Project moves on.

Contact Gonzo

By Nancy Lim

Contact Gonzo is a performance group from Osaka founded in 2006 by Tsukahara Yuya and the dancer Kakio Masaru. Gonzo means “eccentric” or “hooligan”; the name comes from Gonzo journalism of the ’70s in the United States. The group has developed a very specific form of contact improvisation and Russian-style Aikido. Based on physical ability and trust, its innovative practice is at the crossroads of contemporary dance, performance, and street actions. Contact Gonzo’s first works were performed outdoors, mainly inspired by street and skate culture, and uploaded on YouTube. Recently they have been performing in many festivals and art spaces in Japan and Europe. The group has also developed a an innovative strategy of documenting their performances.

Contact Gonzo Live

By Eva Respini

I traveled across town to the Kichijoji area of Tokyo to catch a performance by the Osaka-based performance collective contact Gonzo. We met the members of contact Gonzo in Osaka, and they showed us documentation of their performances. This young collective straddles the worlds of dance, performance, and visual art: the founder is trained in theater design and dance, but other members come from the fields of graphic design and art, as well as dance. When I heard they were performing as part of the Teratotera Festival of contemporary dance and performance, I jumped at the chance to see them live. Contact Gonzo performed for 20 minutes on the roof of the Tokyu department store, in front of an audience of about fifty people.The performance included five of the six members (the sixth member was photographing and videotaping), was improvisational, and included water bottles and a single illuminated lightbulb as the only props. It was one of the most exhilarating performances I have seen, especially since it was punctuated by a dramatic darkening of the skies and light rain.

Day 5

Interviewing Shiomi Mieko

By Michelle Elligott

I had the honor and privilege of conducting an interview with Shiomi Mieko. A strikingly elegant and articulate artist, she spoke with insight and ease about her work and her participation in Fluxus activities. I especially appreciated her explanations of how she arranged the cards for the MoMA exhibition Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978 and her inspirations for Spatial Poem and Disappearing Music for Face. In regards to the latter, she stated her belief that anything can be music, even the shifting clouds. She once saw a young girl’s smile fading; she said it was like beautiful music.

Day 6

Yumiko Chiba Associates, Ginza Showroom

By Eva Respini

My day in Tokyo began with a viewing of vintage photographs by Uematsu Keiji at the Ginza showroom of Yumiko Chiba Associates. We have only one work by Uematsu in MoMA’s collection, and I was excited by the opportunity to see more. The Uematsu exhibition included vintage 1970s prints of his performative actions in the landscape. With these works, he was seeking to draw out shapes in space and use his body to find the equilibrium point within a gravitational field, creating mutual interrelationships between the body, the object, and space. He is an artist who later became associated with the Mono-ha movement. It was interesting to see the little-known photographic works of an artist mostly known for his sculpture. In addition to the exhibition of works by Uematsu, there was a fascinating exhibition of conceptual photography titled To the 1970s: The Turning Point of Photography and Art. The exhibition traced conceptual photographic practices in the 1970s in Japan, including works by Masafumi Maita, Kanji Wakae, and Takamatsu Jiro’s 1972–73 series Photograph of a Photograph (one example is in MoMA’s collection). Many of the works in the exhibition explored the materiality of photography and an intermedia relationship. The works were made by artists rather than photographers, and at this time, photography emerged as a tool to escape known forms of visual perception and forge new visual languages. Many of the works and artists in this exhibition were new to me. It was exciting to become acquainted with a different tradition in Japanese photography.

Day 7

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

By Eva Respini

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography has one of the best photography programs in the world. Kasahara Michiko is their chief curator and a friend. She is ambitious and inventive in her programming, and I was happy to see her again and to meet her fellow curators at the museum, Fujimura Satomi and Tasaka Hiroko. We viewed works from their storage collection, including Otsuji Kiyoji prints. The images dated from the 1950s, but the artist made the prints in 1989 and ’90, at the time of the museum’s opening. We also looked at photographs by Hosoe Eikoh, including works from his seminal collaboration with Butoh legend Hijikata Tatsumi for the book Kamaitachi, which involved a series of journeys to northern Japan in order to embody the presence of mythical, dangerous figures at the peripheries of Japanese life. At MoMA, we have works by Hosoe in the collection, but only a few from his collaboration with Hijikata. As always, there is no substitute for seeing works in the flesh, so to speak. We ended our visit of the museum with a viewing of the Naoya Hatakeyama exhibition Natural History. The exhibition was a survey of some 150 color photographs focusing on the landscape, including pictures made in Switzerland, France, and Japan. The exhibition included new work detailing the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Hatakeyama’s hometown, one of the hardest hit areas. The work juxtaposed a slide show of pictures Hatakeyama had taken in his hometown before the destruction with some sixty photographs of the disaster and its aftermath. The exhibition also included a new video animation of his well-known explosion series, for which he scanned and animated his previously still photographs. This step represents a new artistic endeavor for Hatakeyama.

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