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- Convenors:
-
Theresa Deichert
(Heidelberg University)
Xiaofei Guo (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
Send message to Convenors
- Section:
- Visual Arts
- Sessions:
- Friday 27 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
In an effort to add to the growing field of ecocriticism and to provide visibility for artistic practices hitherto understudied, this panel combines diverse papers that consider collaboration(s) in Japanese art and visual media that engage with ecological crisis.
Long Abstract:
In Japan, a country plagued frequently by a multitude of reoccurring natural and ensuing man-made disasters, the force of nature is ever present. However, surprisingly the field of ecocriticism and ecologically conscious cultural research are mostly still nascent. While recently the edited volume Ecocriticism in Japan (Hisaaki Wake, Keijiro Suga and Yuki Masami 2018) took a foray into the field, Japanese contemporary art still remains largely understudied in the context of its ecological engagement.
With such contemporary art formats as art projects and regional art on the rise in Japan, the limelight has been mostly on socially engaged or collaborative art that is engaged in the practices of disaster aftercare and community revitalization. However, concurrently other collaborative practices taking on an event structure or/and going beyond the confinement of traditional white cube galleries and museum spaces have developed since the early 2000s. Visual art practitioners in Japan increasingly deploy variegated forms of working together as a critical gesture towards ecological crisis. Due to dynamics of censorship and an environment sometimes hostile to critical art practices, collaborative ecological art may have been little explored previously. In an effort to provide space and visibility for such up and coming artistic practices, this panel combines papers that consider collaboration(s) in art and visual media, including video game and socially engaged and activist artistic practices, in the context of ecological crisis. The diverse approaches respond to such questions and aspects as:
- What unique strategies and practices have Japanese artists developed and employed in the context of the countries' turbulent natural and ecological history?
- How does collaboration in Japanese art move beyond traditional art spaces and take place in unconventional territories, such as virtual space, rural environments or the streets?
- How does collaboration in Japanese art facilitate positive exchange/ change to tackle ecological crisis and its related problems?
- In which ways do Japanese contemporary artists consider non and more than-human actors within collaborative practices?
- How can contemporary ecological art in Japan be contextualized art historically?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 27 August, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Tomiyama Taeko's collaborative art incorporates ecological themes in response to 3.11. They evoke "the uncanny" to convey unease, with ghostly fish, fossils, and the marine environment, moving from a "sea of memory" to "toxic seas," and reversing the common perception of Japan as an island country.
Paper long abstract:
Tomiyama Taeko (1921-) is best known for her work on remembrance of Japanese war and colonialism in mainland Asia, and for the fact that she creates art in collaboration with a musical composer and a series of photographers. Typically her imagery includes humans, anthropomorphic animals, and gods and poses large ethical questions. Her later work has also incorporated ecological themes, most notably in response to the 3.11 disaster. Tomiyama and her collaborators are particularly good at evoking the uncanny to convey a sense of unease. We will focus in this presentation on their use of ghostly fish, fossils, and the marine environment, which introduce commentary on nature and science. The phantom fish, not quite healthy and not quite alive, has become a recurring image in Tomiyama's work, but was first introduced by film director and photographer Hara Kazuo in the slide montage he created of some of Tomiyama's paintings and collages in 1986. These ghostly fish are also reminiscent of Lee Bonticue (b. 1931), an American artist who has also produced work that ranges across genres (painting, sculpture, printmaking), comments on science & technology, and is a long-considered response to the devastation of war. She too uses ghostly fish and fossils to evoke the uncanny space between the natural and not-quite-natural worlds. Tomiyama's recurrent engagement with the ocean has long framed it as a "sea of memory" but now more darkly as "toxic seas." In a variety of ways, her projects reverse the historical perception of Japan as "an island country" to show the ways that the ocean and its animal life—both contemporary and Cretaceous—connects us all.
Paper short abstract:
International art festivals in the Japanese countrysides could be characterized by an odd mixture of contemporary art and nostalgia in the natural environment. This paper explores how Typhoon #15 in 2019 affected the local's perceptions toward nature and meanings of artworks in their land.
Paper long abstract:
Japan is facing the major crisis of a rapidly aging society in which at anytime natural disasters can occur. The demographic and environmental transformations are felt with fear and uncertainty. Aging and depopulation seriously strike the countryside harder than in the city. While it is impossible to prevent the decline of population, some areas try to bring more tourists or enhance the exchanges between visitors and locals through international art exhibitions, called geijutsusai in Japanese. It is a cultural phenomenon in the last two decades, led by the Tsumari Art Triennale in Niigata Prefecture and Art Setouchi Triennale staged on islands in the Seto Inland Sea. There are many other art festivals generated in the Japanese countrysides aiming at the revitalization of the aging communities. Such art festivals are characterized by their odd mixture between collaborative contemporary art and nostalgia, embraced by the natural environment while reinventing the abandoned old public-school buildings. The artworks go beyond the white cube of the traditional art museum, while engaging with the locals and their collective memories.
This paper focused on a case study - Ichihara Art×Mix which began in 2014 in order to revitalize the depopulated, agricultural southern area of Ichihara City in Chiba Prefecture, a one-hour drive from the metropolitan area of Tokyo. This is the author's continuing research of the art festival from its outset. Their third art festival will be held from March 20th to May 17th 2020, but the region was seriously hit by a typhoon in September 2019. It became a disaster zone without electric power for weeks. How did such a natural disaster and its damage affect the collaboration between the artists and locals toward the realization of those artworks in their environment? Through examining major artworks and by interviews, this paper investigates the aftermath of the typhoon and how the locals confronted their natural environments and how that affected to reconceive and to redefine their artworks.
Paper short abstract:
Taking Dokuyama Bontaro and Kaihatsu Yoshiaki's works as case study, this paper explores post-3.11 art that dissolves boundaries between art and activism, and establishes alternative and trans-local spaces of exchange that give voice to disaster victims and foster unexpected collaborations.
Paper long abstract:
In Japan government controlled media outlets have fostered the impression of a weak protest culture, while activist artistic practices are often made invisible due to an environment of censorship. However, since the nuclear disaster of March 2011 innovative, critical and socially engaged art dissolving boundaries between art and activism has been gaining ground and visibility. This case study aims to contribute to the exploration, as well as cultural and historical contextualization, of such emerging, but still understudied artistic practices.
In September 2011, Japanese anti-nuclear activists established an occupy tent site, known as tento hiroba, in front of Tokyo's Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry (METI). In June 2016, inside the camp's "Anti-Nuclear Tent Museum", artist Dokuyama Bontaro presented his work "The 4th branch, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry". Based on Dokuyama's dialogue with long-term activist and tent representative Fuchigami Tarô and his collaborators, the work envisioned a utopian future for the campsite.
On March 15, 2012, artist and activist Kaihatsu Yoshiaki opened "House for a Politician." For the work, he constructed a small shed located in Haramachi, just about 20 km from the Fukushima Daiichi. Kaihatsu send hundreds of letters inviting politicians to come visit the hut urging them to see the stricken area and hear the voices of the disaster victims. While his initial appeal remained unanswered, "House for a Politician" has since been host to a multitude of events establishing collaborations between artistic practitioners and local activists and residents.
Aided by Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory, this paper traces the newly emerging collaborative and trans-local networks, which Dokuyama and Kaihatsu's works foster within the nuclear ecologies of crisis. How do these works serve to connect disparate localities and create new avenues of exchange? How can they be contextualized historically within post-war Japanese activist artistic practices? Furthermore, following Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, the paper explores how such alternative artistic spaces may challenge the cultural hegemony of the Japanese government and media and can serve to envision utopian futures, where power is redistributed, so that the voices of the otherwise repressed and invisible can be heard.