interview: a girl who almost swallowed a tapeworm

I recently visited the world only Parasite Museum to find soon afterwards Kuronuma Mayumi, the artist who got inspired by the tapeworms displayed in the ultra-marine-colored background show cases.

Here's an excerpt of an interview with the artist published in WHO series.

Roger McDonald: The first artwork that caught my attention was the tapeworms. I heard that she would go to the parasite museum to sketch, but what was interesting was that, she would not only draw from the skatches but also creat life-size knitted tapeworm. I asked Kuronuma san to exhibit her knitted tapeworms in the several projects [..] At Fukui Art Musuem it was displayed on the floor as one long line. Just like an actual tapeworm, the work keeps changing its form.

RM: Have you ever tried to put one inside you?
Kuronuma Mayumi: It's said that they are probably now extinct so you cannot get larva anymore [..].

RM: Mayumi are there any artists that you particularly like?
KM: I like Kelly and Henry Darger.

RM: Kelly really makes interesting things. He is an artist fascinated by subculture, punkhorror and the occult. When we talk about Mike Kelly, the word 'abject' is often used.
I don't think you are an ousider like Darger, but you have this kind of haunting or obsessive quality [..].

video: Hiraki Sawa

Hiraki Sawa, Figment, video, 2011
"A boy closes his eyes for 25 minutes and wakes up with the world gone from behind his thoughts. His language slips and shifts, he tastes orange juice without knowing anymore to describe it as sour, he likes numbers but cannot put names to faces. His room is filled with a thousand records and many more. He sees the records, unable to listen. He can't see the floor, has never seen the floor beneath them, wouldn't recognise it if he met it in the street. He meets people in the street and his only option is to trust that they know him when they say they do. His records become opaque, circular slabs of the unknown and the unknowing. A fog of landscapes without contours, without borders, that can only be read by touching. To move forward he must step out, one foot then the other, and believe that he is indeed moving. His mind like an emptied lake, the sky welling upward and outward, unable to contain the depth of it all, the bottomless, fathomless wealth of the things he lost in his sleep"*.

A new work in which Sawa explores the phenomenon of amnesia and the devastation of severe memory loss through a series of abstract visual sequences.

*Text by Dale Berning

neo-Nihonga

On the ocassion of the Singapore Biennale Japan Creative Center presents Akira Yamaguchi new project Singa Planet along with few previous pieces. In the catalogue forward we read: The characteristic feature of Yamaguchi Akira's work is his way of incorporating various manners and events from different ages and cultures, as well as scenes of contemporary life into the formats of rakuchu rakugai zu (panoramic scenes of urban life during the Edo period). This time however Singa planet was inspired by the contemporary life of Singapore and its publicly governed and developed housing facilities populated by over 85% of society.








Department store: New Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi, 2004
From the previous works that attracted me a lot is the one above partly because it shows my neighborhood, party because it brings new dimention to the discussion about Meji-era Nihonbashi Bridge and the Metropolitan Expressway arching above it. The later was built in 60s. when Tokyo underwent major makeover before Tokyo Olimpics and is considered a symbol of landscape distruction since it was built over the old bridge. When the city competed for 2000 Olimpics there had been some plans to hide the expressway underground. But there are also voices that the present landscape is far more precious and Tokyoesque than Nihonbashi bridge which is after all just a mere copy of something one would find in Europe.
In his painting Yamaguchi adds another bridge to the landscape which is the orginal wooden bridge from Edo-era built over the expressway and a cinical comment to the whole discussion.

Yamaguchi witty painting style with sense of play and enterteinment makes his picture accounts for his popularity among the viewers and the rising prices for his works which I experianced personally buying recently one of his prints.

art in public space: Merlion Hotel

I've been recently to Singapore which holds art biennale now in its 3rd edition. On this occasion, Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi created an installation around the 8.6-meter-tall Merlion turning it temporarily into a hotel where for the 80$ per night one can enjoy intimacy with the Singapore iconic landmark and a beautiful view over Marina Bay Sands. During the day people can visit the hotel, while each evening is for checked-in guests only. In this project public and private spheres overlap and bring citizens eye-to-eye with a monument that usually towers far overhead. Reservations for Merlion Hotel, which were available to the public for one month sold out within a day.

Merlion Hotel is part of the Berlin- and Tokyo-based artist's series of site-specific room installations that incorporate public landmarks. Merlion is the latest in the series which includes Villa Victoria (2002), a platial suite constructed around neoclassical marble and bronze monument dedicated to Queen Victoria in Liverpool, and Villa Kaihoutei (2005), an 85-squere-meter room encasing a gazebo in Yokohama Chinatown. Each work creates an alternative and more physically immediate perspective on the respective monument by juxtaposing public icons with the immediate setting of the bedroom.

project room: Ei Arakawa

Henning Bohl, Sergei Tcherepnin and Ei Arakawa, Reorienting Orientationalism,
New Directions (Haircolour) International Class, 2011

















photo: Toshiya Suda, Courtesy of the artists and Tokyo Wonder Site, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

On Friday I went to TSW Shibuya to watch performance which turned out to be my favorite thing I saw in Tokyo in a while. In their performance, Ei Arakawa in close collaboration with composer Sergei Tcherepnin and Berlin based artist Henning Bohl using simple props examine the interplay of music and visual art. They share the same interest with modern avant-garde and several postwar movements in creating artistic environment engaging visitors in an open game in which borders between participants, viewers, objects and processes become diffused.

exhibition: contemporary horror

Odhani Motohiko, New born, 'mouse', 2007
Just came back from the curatorial tour of 'Phantom-Limb', Odani Motohiko show at MAM and I have this lingering thought in my head that some of Odani works are echoing the visual language of Capuchins who were also sculpting from bones. But unlike the latter, Odani is using bones of animals reconstructed in plastic which makes it less of a horror and more of the beauty. Pity that not all the works on the exhibitions are of the quality. Japanese art world “golden boy” has already represented his country at Venice Biennale and has been the youngest artist so far having solo exhibition at MAM which is one of the biggest spaces artist can be asked to fill on his own and I would argue if Odani lived up to the challenge.

Capuchins Crypt, Rome and The Sedlec Ossuary, Kotna Hora

highlights of 2010

The 2010 saw some cross-media shows examining Japanese contemporary art in terms of its craft aesthetics - Noe-Orientalism from Japanese Contemporary art and its architectural aesthetics - Where is architecture? Seven Installations by Japanese architects. Among the galleries presenting contemporary art the most interesting shows were held in Taka Ishii Gallery of Naoya Hatakeyama who with a scientific zeal examines Tokyo cityscape, Hiromiyoshii which displayed maquettes by more than a dozen young architects, Mizuma Art Gallery which showed three-by-seven-meter painting of a mound of dead Japanese businessmen and office appliciencies by Aido Makoto and Edo-era inspired ink drawings by Akira Yamaguchi while at Misako&Rosen Yuki Okumura displayed videos of rakugo actor retelling a classical Japanese story.

Yuki Okumura, Anatomy Fiction, video, 2010
Privately run museums often stage city's best exhibitions and so the Mori Art Musuem held third of its triennial surveys of Japanese artist Roppongi Crossing 2010: Can there be art?, Watari Musuem of Contemporary Art celebrated its 20th year with solo exhibition of multimedia artist Tam Ochiai and architect Sou Fujimoto while Hara Museum of Contemporary Art presented first solo show in Japan of Chinese artist Yang Fudong.

Outside Tokyo to the West, Hiroshima City Musuem of Contemporary Art presented More of an Activity: The Artist as Choreographer and to the North, 21st Centuary Musuem of Contemporary Art Kanazawa held a larg exhibition of multimedia artist Tadasu Takamine which then traveled to Yokohama.

Tadasu Takamine, Melody Cup, 2009

















photo: Takezaki Hiroto

In addition to the proliferation of the architectural shows at home, it was a big year for Japanese architects abroad. Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA were awarded the Pritzker, architectural Nobel. Sejima was also the first femal and Asian director of Venice Architectural Biennale, where Junya Ishigami received a Golden Lion.

The post is based on the Ashley Rawlings report for ArtAsiaPacific Almanac 2011