Chiharu Shiota
The Hand Lines
A project by
Published by
With the collaboration of
Chiharu Shiota
The Hand Lines Menene Gras Balaguer (Ed)
Chiharu Shiota The Hand Lines Edition Menene Gras Balaguer General Coordination Rodrigo Escamilla Sandoval Clarissa Seidel Texts Menene Gras Balaguer, Toshikatsu Omori, Madoka Matsumura, Kelly Long, Mami Kataoka, Akiko Kasuya, Hitoshi Nakano, Tsutomu Mizusawa, Akira Tatehata, Andrea Jahn Translations Amaia Judge, Olga Miró (Spanish) Angela Bunning (English) Brian Amstutz Communications (The Works of Chiharu Shiota - A Study) Pamela Miki (Eloquent Silence) Christopher Stephens (The Work of Dreams) Kikuko Ogawa (What Lies in the World of Silence, Something Wriggling in the Distant Quietude, Where Chiharu Shiota Belongs) Miwako Tezuka (The Allegory of Absence) Stephen Lindberg (Chiharu Shiota’s Way into Silence: Moving inside the Eternal Triangle in Art) Proofreading Olga Miró, Angela Bunning, Menene Gras Balaguer, Atelier Chiharu Shiota Photographs Sunhi Mang Except: • Trace of Memory(2013), Tom Little • Tristan und Isolde(2014), Olaf Struck Cover Chiharu Shiota State of Being (Children’s Dress), 2013. Metal, dress, red thread
Published by Actar Publishers Casa Asia Graphic Design Papersdoc Printing and binding Grafos S.A., Barcelona © of the edition Actar Publishers, Casa Asia © of the texts Menene Gras Balaguer, Toshikatsu Omori, Madoka Matsumura, Kelly Long, Mami Kataoka, Akiko Kasuya, Hitoshi Nakano, Tsutomu Mizusawa, Akira Tatehata, Andrea Jahn © of the translations Olga Miró, Angela Bunning © of the photographs Chiharu Shiota, Stage design All rights reserved ISBN: 978-1-940291-07-9 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA. With the collaboration of Japan Foundation Galeria Nieves Fernández EACC (Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló) Acknowledgments Chiharu Shiota, Azusa Kuno, Noriko Horie, Athena Tsantekidou, Christina Tsantekidou (Atelier Chiharu Shiota), Hiroyuki Ueno, Rie Okada (Japan Foundation), Nerea Fernández, Idoia Fernández (Galeria Nieves Fernandez), Kenji Taki, Mikako Kato (Kenji Taki Gallery), Lorenza Barboni (EACC), Ámister Hotel, Lanas Stop, Columpiu, La Memoria Artística de Chema Alvargonzález, Narch Arquitectos and Claraboia Espai d’art.
Casa Asia Board of Trustees and Governing Council Their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain Honorary Presidency of the Board of Trustees President of the Governing Council Mr. Xavier Trias Major of Barcelona First Vice-president Ms. Ana María Botella Mayoress of Madrid Second Vice-president Mr. José Manuel García-Margallo Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation Third Vice-president Mr. Artur Mas President of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia Management Team General Director Ramón Mª Moreno General Secretary Montserrat Riba Director of Culture and Exhibitions Menene Gras Balaguer
8 The Hand Lines (2013) Menene Gras Balaguer 82 A Correspondence with Chiharu Shiota (2013) Toshikatsu Omori 100 The Works of Chiharu Shiota - A Study (2012) Madoka Matsumura 108 Memory, Dreaming and Death (2012) Kelly Long 122 Eloquent Silence (2011) Mami Kataoka 130 The Work of Dreams (2008) Akiko Kasuya 136 What Lies in the World of Silence (2007) Hitoshi Nakano 144 Something Wriggling in the Distant Quietude, Where Chiharu Shiota Belongs (2007) Tsutomu Mizusawa 150 The Allegory of Absence (2003) Akira Tatehata 156 Chiharu Shiota’s Way into Silence: Moving inside the Eternal Triangle in Art Andrea Jahn 169 Works 409 Image Index 419 Bibliography & Biography * The slight alteration of some titles are mostly due to the need concerning the name of the artist, as these texts appear together for the first time in the same volume devoted entirely to Chiharu Shiota and work.
Chiharu Shiota The Hand Lines Menene Gras Balaguer*
*
Director for Culture and Exhibitions, Casa Asia, Barcelona/Madrid.
1. Hand Lines and Life Lines. 2. Stories that create space 3. Foggy Rain. 4. Threads that Knot into Rhizomes. 5. Temblor of the Fallen Leaves. 6. The Age of Trees. 7. Sad and Beautiful. 8. The Trace of Shadows. 9. The Fate of what Disappears. 10. The Ashes of Time. 11. Facing the Abyss of Nothingness. 12. The Dark Energy of Emptiness.
1. Hand Lines and Life Lines Chiharu Shiota’s hands slide across the white paper coated in red, extending the lines on her palms in the drawings from the RED LINE series for her first exhibition in Barcelona, held at Casa Asia between October 2012 and May 2013. Hand lines (1) and fingerprints overlap, imitating movement through repetition, generating the reverberation associated with indecipherable signs that seem to multiply as the eye runs over them. The lines left behind are comparable to shodo (sho: writing, do: the way), which means “calligraphy” in Japanese and is literally “the way of writing”. It posits writing as a way, or a path, that can be walked along, and travelled along as you write. The movements of the calligrapher’s arm or hand as he draws kanji characters, or words in the syllabaries hiragana and katakana are understood as identical to the movements that are characteristic of walking. How the arms and the hands are used in the practice of Japanese calligraphy requires great control of every part of the upper extremity; the wrist is kept immobile for security in the stroke. Shodo is an art form derived from Zen practice, in which the calligrapher transmits the essence of each word through the brush strokes. In these drawings by Chiharu Shiota, the artist’s fingers become her drawing or painting tools, imitating the Japanese calligrapher’s brush ( fude), and the component parts are identified with the different parts of the tip (Ho) that make up the calligraphy tool, the handle of which ( jiku) is usually made of wood, bamboo, bone, animal horn or clay. The five parts of the brush tip (Ho) are associated with parts of the human body —inochige the “hairs of life”, the longest hairs in the brush; hokosaki, or “iron point”; nodo, “throat”; hara “belly”, at the center; and koshi “loins”, at the base. The brush hairs may be white, made of goat hair or sheep hair, which is the finest and the softest; they may be brown, made of deer or horse hair, of medium texture; or black, made of weasel or wild horse hair, which is the thickest and the hardest. To walk across the paper, a calligrapher needs a prop, a calligrapher’s brush, and enough knowledge of arm control to govern the stroke. Once the writing has begun, there can be no turning back or correcting errors, which makes the learning process very 9
demanding. Because of the way the artist uses gestural brush strokes in these centerless compositions, and because of the way she experiences emptiness, it is easy to bring up connections between the drawings in this series and Japanese calligraphy. From there, comparisons can be made between the material she uses to get her hands dirty before she slides them across the empty paper and sumi, the red ink used in calligraphy since its beginnings, as well as the black coal ink, or sumi-e. In traditional Japanese culture, ink is the equivalent of blood and, as such, it is compared with the flow of blood that gives life to the human body, establishing an even closer relationship with the material the artist uses for these drawings. The movement of her hands across the white paper, which is interpreted as the expression of emptiness, is carried out in the same direction as writing, from left to right, or top to bottom, letting us see how she first determines where to make the first contact with the paper, and then slides the palm of her hand across to the other side, repeating this action innumerable times until the illusion of movement is created. The magic of Japanese calligraphy is mingled with the sacred aspect attributed to it, dating from when it was imported from China through Korea in the 4th and 5th century inscribed on stones, objects and household accessories, until it was picked up by courtesans and Buddhist monks alike who developed the two phonetic writing systems mentioned above: the hiragana and the katakana, respectively, which are still in use today. The art of calligraphy is related to Taoism, which puts Man in contact with the cosmos, and Man with his body, so that he becomes aware of how energy circulates from his arm to the paper and how he needs to persevere in attaining concentration so that nothing will interrupt his attention. Knowing how to hold the brush is essential —not too hard or too loose a grip; it is important to control the brush in order to get the shape right, since the strokes cannot be improvised. In the RED LINE series, the drawing manifests the gesture of the artist’s arm and hand on top of the white paper; the hands, if they are read as pictograms, multiply to create ideograms, the equivalent of a graphic representation of an idea or a word, which can be deciphered despite the unknowns that arise during the reading process because of their enigmatic shape, and because the work is deliberately open in that respect so that the reader can complete it. What do they mean, the shapes left by those hands and arms that seem to be amputated, or perhaps just separated from their bodies, as they drag across the paper as if, although they are not brush-shaped, they could leave behind the perfect imprint of their essence? The essence of Japanese calligraphy can help to better understand
the artist’s gestural painting (2), tying it in with the energy that is transferred from the calligrapher’s arm to his hand and then onto the paper. This connection does not prevent us, however, from establishing other kinds of relationships that are superimposed on top it, which allow for identifying the hand lines and the hieroglyphics that are created in the prolongation of the artist’s gestures as they cross over one another, as though they could imitate movement through multiplication. From the beginning, the exhibition of the artist’s work in Barcelona took on the form of a project that was undertaken specifically for Casa Asia, as is her usual approach, without preconceived notions, except for the ones she develops as a result of her contact with the particular space where she has been asked to intervene. The artist thought up a route, taking into account the vertical structure of the building, from the first floor to the third, with a pre-established itinerary, in which she included drawings, which became part of the exhibition (1st floor), installations (2nd floor) and videos (3rd floor). The Catalan art nouveau orientalism of the Puig i Cadafalch building was not an obstacle to her intervention, just the opposite. The building that belongs to the historical heritage of the city was an incentive to her acceptance of the project, despite the architectural characteristics of a hundred-year-old building that was originally designed as a family residence before it became the city’s music museum and then, later, Casa Asia. The six drawings that were installed on the first floor correspond to the RED LINE series mentioned earlier (XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI), in large and medium-sized formats, aligned vertically or horizontally. They seem to assert the validity of drawing, but only insofar as it takes into account having overcome the limits that separate it from painting, sculpture, photography, video, or installation art, as well as the separations between each of those categories (3). The artist uses her hand instead of a brush, leaving behind the mark of her fingers, which she carefully coats in order to record the fingerprints from each of the five fingers of her hand and the lines across her palm, respectively. She drags them across the white background, indentified with emptiness, controlling the gesture, without damaging the base. The hands as they paint are like a calligrapher’s pen, as we have suggested, and yet that doesn’t mean they can’t be compared with the paws of an animal scratching at the ground for food, or being used for hunting and capturing prey, or for self defense. But they can also be compared with the delicate fragile hands of an absent vulnerable body, hands that speak for themselves, unaware of their possible partners in conversation; their image is the same as an x-ray, which shows the internal bones and ligaments but excludes the covering of flesh. They paint with a material that imitates blood, so
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A Correspondence with Chiharu Shiota Toshikatsu Omori*
*
Art Critic Omori, Toshikatsu. “Contemporary Fine Art”. “A Correspondence with Chiharu Shiota”. Originally published in the January 2014 issue of “Bijutsu Techo”, Vol. 66 No. 998, pp 118-135.
Since relocating to Germany after first going to the country as a student in the 1990s, Chiharu Shiota has had the opportunity to present her work in a wide range of countries. Fixated on specific materials such as yarn, dresses, window frames, and shoes and bags filled with the memories of unknown people, Shiota gradually refines her works by showing and making them over and over again. This approach coincides with developments in her own life. In the following exchange, based on an email correspondence, she looks back at the last approximately 20 years of her career. Toshikatsu Omori There are several subjects I would like to explore in this exchange, but the reason I asked you to take part in an email correspondence (I usually write essays in this column) is that I wanted to ask you directly about your work up until this point as someone who is familiar with the early part of your career when you began to make your way as an artist in Germany. To make a long story short, I first met you in a context that had nothing to do with art. I think this was slightly before you moved from Hamburg to Braunschweig, and began attending Marina Abramović’s class and auditing Rebecca Horn’s classes at the Berlin University of the Arts. I remember being very surprised when you showed me your portfolio around that time. It consisted of two bulging volumes. I realized then that you had already been engaged in a long, serious undertaking since your teens, and that you had a tremendous amount of energy. Not much mention is made of that portfolio anymore, but it included lots of photographs of your works dating from your time at Kyoto Seika University. Regardless of the university framework, it was from that time that if you found a place to show your work, you would go and negotiate the conditions and hold an exhibition there. This was how you were able to realize shows like the solo exhibition you did at that temple (Honen-in), something that would normally be daunting to a university student. It seems to me that you had already created the foundation for your artistic practice at that point – namely, an acute sensitivity to spaces, and above all, making demands of and engaging in a dialogue with a space. Here, I’d like to embark on a brief tangent. I imagine that the fact that you are Japanese and a woman who makes use of artistic materials like yarn and dresses to create magnificent spatial expressions can sometimes lead to delicate problems. If left-wing feminist artistic expressions arose in the late ’70s in response to the Eurocentric, male-dominated myth of (stereotypical) Modernism, the ’90s saw the spread of multicultural art that evoked concepts and contexts from the traditional cultures of Asia, Oceania, and South America and cultural anthropology. In the ’00s, this multicultural environment, com-
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bined with urban development and global strife, and the revamping of long-established nationalistic and economic structures, prompted the conspicuous emergence of stateless expressions that could not be contained within either a Western or a non-Western framework. Naturally, it is impossible to simply classify things according to a certain era, but assuming that this is more or less an accurate description of the changes that have occurred over the years, your work seems to coincide with each of these characteristics. At the same time, however, your work has an evasive quality that does not fit into any prescribed context and contains a uniquely disengaged sensibility, making it difficult to simply state that it deals with gender issues or can be placed within the schema of Western vs. non-Western. Further, I have the sense that this sense of “transience” itself functions as a motivation for your work. I’d like to begin by asking you about problems related to spaces. How do you deal with the memories and the invisible historical implications that dwell within a given space, regardless of where the venue happens to be in the world, and to what extent do you sublimate the space internally and transform it through the act of filling the “absence” (with an installation)? Is it safe to assume that Abramović, who was your teacher, influenced you in your approach? I would be very pleased if you could tell me something about your ideas regarding the concepts of space and “absence,” Abramović’s significance to you, and any memories you might have from the time that you first arrived in Berlin. Chiharu Shiota Thank you for contacting me. I was hoping to send a quick reply to your email, but I had to install a number of different works and attend openings for my solo exhibitions at the Church of St. Anne in Montpelier (France), and the Towner Contemporary Art Museum in Eastbourne (U.K.), and a group show at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Germany), and I couldn’t find a free moment. I’m not sure why, but over the past month, since the middle of September, I’ve had six shows back-to-back, including solo exhibitions at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh (U.S.) and Galerie Daniel Templon (Belgium), and I’m writing this in a train as I head to an opening in Wolfsburg that’s scheduled for later today. First, let me answer your question about my ideas regarding the concepts of space and absence. When I see a room, an abandoned building, or an empty exhibition space (including those in museums and galleries), where someone might have lived but doesn’t actually live now, I feel as if my body and spirit transcend a certain dimension and return to zero. I find myself entering a different world that is somewhat removed from regular life. It’s not that I see apparitions or anything like that, but in a sense I myself return to zero and my conception of the work emerges for the first time in that place.
I generally have a vague image about what kind of work I’d like to make, but I don’t make any specific plans and the image remains vague until I actually see the space. I rarely ask a museum to do something like build a wall for an already completed work. The procedure begins with the existence of a space and because the space has a certain quality, I decide how to make a work for it. I also like paintings and sculptures that slowly speak to people and spaces, but in my case a work begins with an absolute absence and a total space. Many of the works I make appeal to viewers’ emotions by instantly enveloping them in a space. So I start by going to see the space when another exhibition is underway. This is so vital that almost all of the works I’ve made in which I wasn’t able to visit the venue during the planning stages ended up being failures. Projects like the one I did in which each artist was provided with a four-room apartment on the Torstrasse in Berlin and the exhibition I did in an abandoned mental hospital, were very different from showing my work in a white cube. Since I was making works in a way that was similar to tracing footprints through the rooms, it was easy to do. For some reason, when I see an empty place with signs of people in it, my heart begins to tremble. My apartment-cum-studio, which I’m now in the process of renovating, is located in Prenzlauer Berg in the former East Berlin and there’s a watchtower that the Stasi (the East German secret police) used for surveillance on top of the building. From there, you have a panoramic view of what remains of the Berlin Wall. Every day that tower was used as a lookout to make sure that no one escaped from East Berlin to West Berlin. The fact that I have made my studio in this kind of historical building has great significance to my work. I first came to Germany in 1996. This was prompted by my being accepted to Marina Abramović’s class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. But I actually went to Germany because I wanted to study with the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. It’s a funny story. I got their names mixed up, but Marina accepted me anyway, and I began my life in Germany. Seventeen years have already passed since I started making my work here. I didn’t leave Japan because I hated it. There just wasn’t any place for me to work or show my art after I graduated from art school, and of course I had to eat. Since it wasn’t permissible for me to leisurely make my works while living with my parents without a job, I entered a German art university so that I could study abroad, and I went back to being a student again. At the time, artists like Hans Haacke, Anselm Kiefer, and Gerhard Richter were in Germany, and it was possible to see fantastic examples of contemporary art firsthand. I remember how I frantically tried to make and show my work in order to become an artist while I supported myself with a part-time job.
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Eloquent Silence Mami Kataoka*
*
Chief Curator., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
Kataoka, Mami. “Eloquent Silence”, in Chiharu Shiota - Memory of Book. (Gervasuti Foundation, Venice / Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2011, pp. 210 – 213).
Chiharu Shiota is not eloquent. This is probably not unrelated to the fact that the sources of her art practice lie in the nonlinguistic realm, including emotions and senses, and to the fact that even though she has lived in Europe for fifteen years, one can still sense Eastern origins in her hold on the world. What we see ultimately in her practice are a questioning of her own existence, individual emotions tossed about on the collective tides of politics, economics, and society, unstable emotional states and personal memories - all universal issues that go beyond space-time regardless of whether one is in the West or the East. However, rather than being analytical objective, or rational, the psychological states and processes leading there follow a sensory, emotional, irrational path reminiscent of, among other things, prehistoric ceremonies and rituals. The idea of “presence in the midst of absence”, which Shiota often refers to as the essence of her practice, is a clear expression of this. One could also probably make an interesting comparison between the sense of feeling a presence of some kind in absence and the sound John Cage detects in silence. It is well known that Cage was influenced by Eastern philosophy. For example, in New York he attended lectures by Daisetsu Suzuki, who was instrumental in spreading Zen in the West. According to Cage, “Formerly, silence was the time lapse between sounds, useful towards a variety of ends, among them that of tasteful arrangement…or that of expressivity…or again, that of architecture… Where none of these or other goals is present, silence becomes something else-not silence at all but sounds, the ambient sounds. The nature of these is unpredictable and changing. These sounds (which are celled silence only because they do not form part of e musical intention) may be depended upon to exist?”1 Silence is not “nothing” as opposed to “something”, but rather the sounds of living space, including noise, and the sounds that become audible once we become more aware of silence have much in common with the Eastern worldview, which detects a presence of some kind in “nothing”. We can also learn about this presence in absence from the ideas of Noh one of Japan’s traditional performing arts. The simplicity of Noh stage settings and scenery is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Western opera, and the barren stage and slow movements of the actors serve to transform the space from a physical, realistic space into a psychological space between the audience and the actors. This is also clear from the fact that most Noh programs deal with human emotions, especially negative emotions such as enmity, anxiety, and feelings of loneliness, and the de-
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parted souls, insane people, demons, and so on born out of these emotions. According to the psychologist Yasuo Yuasa, Noh is “a world of delusions. It is a world of love, of sadness, of anguish, of struggle, and of the bitterness of death and the departed.”2 In addition, Yuasa explains that the demons, tengu, and other grotesque characters that appear in Noh “are, in psychological terms, concrete expressions of the evil powers that lurk within human nature, and in the sense that they are given inhuman form as scapegoats which exist outside the body, they also perform a cathartic (purifying) function.”3 Because the stage settings and movements of the actors are minimal, these formless beings manifest themselves amid the surrounding space and silence. The ability to sense a presence in absence also has a lot do to with the traditional Japanese view of nature. According to ethnologist Kenichi Taniguchi, in Japan “ancient people viewed the violent fluctuations of nature as the work of the gods and out of this they created a unified mythical space.”4 The climate changes with the seasons, and in the rainy, humid monsoon climate, people coexisted with a bountiful natural environment. In this context, people became aware of divinities and gods dwelling in the formless natural environment and natural phenomena around them. It was in the pages of Japan’s oldest official history-the Nihon Shoki, published after the introduction of Buddhism from the Chinese continent in the sixth century - that the religious views which formed around these ideas first appeared as Shinto. The nature worship, spirit worship, magic religious ceremonies, and so on that existed up until then, in the Jomon, Yayoi, Kofun, and Asuka periods, were referred to as “primitive Shinto”, and included elements of animism and shamanism. By this stage, the tradition of sensing a spiritual presence of some kind not in a personified god or religious founder, such as Christ or the Buddha, but in formless natural objects and natural phenomena such as the earth, wind, light, and water had already taken shape. According to these pantheistic, polytheistic religious views, the Buddhism that was introduced from the Chinese continent was welcomed as one manifestation of the “myriads of gods and deities”, and the interpretation in the Avatamsaka Sutra, one of the sutras of Mahayana Buddhism, that all sentient beings are possessed of Buddha nature was understood to mean that not only living things, such as humans and animals, but the whole of creation including trees and plants and the earth can attain Buddhahood. These traditional religious views and views of nature still exist today in the form of a nonobjective understanding of space, in which there are no physical “objects” as such, or what might be called an awareness of an irrational, illogical realm where
a kind of presence is detected in negative space. It would also appear that this same awareness is clearly visible in the practice and relationship to space of various artists in Japan from the modern period onward. For example, Lee Ufan, one of the major theoretical proponents of Mono-ha, the important sculptural movement that emerged in Japan in the late nineteen-sixties, comments, “Amid the inseparable relationship between the earth, air, timer and all the other things in existence, one should strive to free consciousness itself from representation, just as if it were a tree or a rock or a person.”5 Lee called the relationship that arises when natural rock and a manufactured commodity, in the form of a sheet of steel, for example, are placed opposite each other in space “an encounter” and spoke of the importance of perceiving the invisible vibrations that arise from such an encounter. In the most symbolic Mono-ha Work, Nobuo Sekine’s Phase-Mother Earth (1968), a cylinder several meters deep is carved out of the earth and placed as is on the ground nearby; no doubt Lee would say of this Work, too, that it represents not the division of the earth into two but the bringing together of the earth into one. According to Lee’s explanation, what we see is “an expanse of space that is not an object, or what a nonobjective world would look like,”6 and the aim of the artist’s actions (gestures) is “to free [the world] into the midst of nonobjective phenomena (the ground level of perception).”7 Mono-ha art tends to be interpreted as relating to matter (mono) and materials, but in fact it relates to the surrounding space associated with each object in the form of the mutual relationship between them. Based on the arguments outlined above, I would now like to take a fresh look at the artistic practice of Chiharu Shiota. In several of her Works, Shiota has used mud or soil to represent the Mother Earth where spirits dwell. Says Shiota, When I was a child, l pulled out weeds that had grown above where my grandmother was buried, and I remember the fear I felt and the sensation on my hands… It was frightening pulling our those weeds, almost as if I could still hear someone breathing, and l think the memories of this and soil and weeds and death are all important points as far as the creation of my artwork is concerned.8 This awareness seems to fit with the idea that spirits dwell in the earth and soil, and that the ground on which we stand serves as the boundary between this world and the next or between this life and a previous one. It was revealed in a performance she gave after moving to Germany and experiencing an extreme mental state at a fasting workshop while studying in Braunschweig under Marina Abramović. This was Try and Go Home, in which Shiota dug a cave at the top of a cliff and repeated 125
What Lies in the World of Silence Hitoshi Nakano*
Curator, Department of Contemporary Art, Kanagawa Arts Foundation.
*
Nakano, Hitoshi. “What Lies in the World of Silence�, in From in Silence Chiharu Shiota. (Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery, Yokohama, 2007, pp. 67-75).
The breezes of love are all-pervasive By Shijimi River, where love-drowned guests Like empty shells, bereft of their senses, Wander the dark ways of love Lit each night by burning lanterns, Fireflies that glow in the four seasons, Stars that shine on rainy nights. By Plum Bridge, blossoms show even in summer. Monzaemon Chikamatsu, Sonezaki Shinju Scene Two: Inside the Temma House. English version by Donald Keene, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki.
From in Silence - The Eve The passage quoted above is from Sonezaki Shinju [The Love Suicides at Sonezaki] This play is renowned as a representative work by Monzaemon Chikamatsu, a playwright for kabuki and ningyo joruri [puppet theatre] known for works such as Meido no Hikyaku [The Courier for Hell] and Shinju Ten no Amijima [The Love Suicides at Amijima]. It is a story of the tragic love between Ohatsu and Tokubei, who commit suicide together in the Wood of Tenjin. The current exhibition From in silence was inspired by this story. I met Chiharu Shiota for the first time on 25th August 2004 at Kenji Taki Gallery in Hatsudai, Tokyo. That was when I saw Failing Sand (cat.nos.14-16), which is also included in the current exhibition. It was the third video recording of a performance featuring the artist herself following Bathroom (1999, fig.1) and My Stomachache (2001, cat. nos. 33-36). That year, it so happened that Kanagawa Kenritsu Ongakudo (The Kanagawa Prefectural Concert Hall),1 ‘ where I was working as one of the performance producers, was celebrating its 50th anniversary and several commemorative performances were taking place. Among them, an original stage composed of literature, noh, music, and calligraphy was premiered on August 8th. It was entitled Musical Verse Drama: The Story of lkutagawa, Based on the Noh Play ‘Motomezuka’.2
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Toshi Ichiyanagai, composer, pianist, and general artistic director of Kanagawa Arts Foundation, was deeply involved in this project. Together with the production team, he laid three axes in this work and planned to turn it into a series. The first axis was to reset Japanese tradition in the present. The second axis was to break away from the general concept of a music hall, which tends to be regarded a place to perform Western music, and place artistic elements other than Western music at the centre. The third axis was to incorporate fine art, which is an art based on space, into a live performance, which is an art based on time, as a fusion. Moreover, the fine art was to be by a contemporary artist. Though this sounds noble and beautiful, there were various hurdles to be cleared in order to realize such a project. The Story of Ikutagawa based on a noh play by Zeami entitled Motomezuka was written by the poet Makoto Ooka, He wrote a new script with a new interpretation. This was produced by the noh performer of the Kanze School, Hideo Kanze. In addition to Kanze himself, the cast included prominent members such as Mansaku Nomura, a leader in kyogen. The music was composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Three calligraphy works by the calligrapher Yuichi Inoue, who pioneered a unique world of his own, were displayed on the stage. Each sheet consisted of a single Chinese character. Two read “love” and one “bird”. Being a single character, each work gave off a sense of tension and profundity. The “appearance” of these three works played an organic role in making the distance between the stage and the audience airtight. As preparation for The Story of Ikutagawa progressed, plans for the second work were contemplated. As in the first work, as the aim of this stage was to reconstruct the Japanese tradition as a new composite art of the present, to begin with, the names of two artists, one classic and one modern, were proposed to form the basis. The base point of the theme of the second work was to be a work by Monzaemon Chikamatsu, who wrote many master plays for the joruri [puppet theatre] in the Genroku age of the Edo period, approximately 300 years after the late Muromachi period, in which Zeami lived. From the numerous works Chikamatsu wrote, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki was selected. The first work in this series was based on a noh play by Zeami and the second on a joruri play by Chikamatsu. Who as an artist would be able to embody the idea of the “life and death” of human beings, which lies between the ideas of these two playwrights? Unlike exhibiting a work of art in a museum, that artist would be required to grasp the existence of diverse distances between the audience and the artwork within the characteristic space of a hall, in which the stage and the audience are
differentiated and fixed into two poles. Just as the actors devote themselves to the performance, the artwork would be required to maintain life as an independent existence of its own on the stage. It was no other than Chiharu Shiota that was chosen. We proposed the plan to Shiota and she readily agreed to undertake the project immediately. Kanjuro Kiritake III, an accomplished joruri puppeteer, also agreed informally to take part. Despite gradually taking form, this project has yet to be realized. Three years later, the location was transferred from Kanagawa Kenritsu Ongakudo to an exhibition space in Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery and the project is realized as a solo exhibition featuring Chiharu Shiota. Although slightly different from the original intent of basing the project on Japanese tradition, a variety of contemporary artists active in the worlds of music, literature, and dance are invited to perform with Shiota’s works as the axis.
In a Sea of Memories and Anxiety The origin of the creation of Chiharu Shiota’s works lies in her memories, which are incised deeply in the basis of her body and soul and lurk in her body as an indelible existence. In her own body and amidst the world around her, such memories are led towards an unescapable anxiety. Yet, she does not flee from such uneasiness. The reason is that by immersing herself in that uneasiness or the sea of anxiety, she is laying the foundation of her works. From her young days, Shiota was sensitive about what was taking place in the outside world. She looked hard, took in such incidents, and incised them in her memory. As a schoolgirl, Shiota experienced the death of her grandmother. She remembers the smell and feel of the soil when her grandmother was buried. While being brought up in a happy family and loved by her parents, there were occasions when she would happen to sense her own absence. When a neighbour’s house caught fire, she could hear the sound of the dying piano trapped in the raging fire. Based on such memories and anxiety, later on, she created works in which mud was poured onto huge dresses or the artist’s own body in the bathtub. In the gallery, the burnt piano incapable of sounding became the voice of the artist herself wanting to say something yet unable to utter a sound.
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The Allegory of Absence Akira Tatehata*
*
President of Kyoto City University of Art, Kyoto. Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama. Tatehata, Akira. “The Allegory of Absence”, in The Way into Silence. (Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg, 2004, pp. 34-41).
In 1994 Chiharu Shiota performed a piece entitled “Becoming Painting” in Canberra, Australia where she was studying abroad. She wrapped herself in a canvas cloth standing in front of a wall covered also white canvas. Red paint was then poured over her body and the canvas behind her. This fierce performance literally merged body with painting. For this student majoring in painting at an art school, her work was more about self-affirmation than self-expression. This was an attempt that allowed her to scrutinize her identity as an artist through the body. This performance seems to contain the seed for her later works. The haunting anxiety about identity is an obsession that relentlessly drives her work. Place of birth, location of residence, concepts of nationality and family, or her existence as an artist - notions that usually confirm identity- seem ambiguous to her. Nothing fully satisfies her search for affirmation. She submerges herself fully to explore this anxiety rather than to flee from it. Commenting on the fact that she works while travelling constantly, Shiota states: “Waking up at the break of dawn, I often lose grasp of where I am, as if all things visible are tangled into a web of anxiety, my body freezes. But, if this anxiety disappears, I may no longer be able to produce my work, and that makes me even more fearful”1 Chiharu Shiota first studied under Saburo Muraoka at Kyoto Seika University, and then moved to the Hochshule der Bildenden Künste in Hamburg to study with Marina Abramović. Muraoka is a sculptor known for his disquieting sense of the object that enables him own body as a medium and treats it as a theme in itself by imposing on it the conditions of fear, danger, exhaustion, and endurance. An encounter with these two artists has had lasting influence on Shiota’s formation as an artist. She found a possibility of expressing her deep-rooted obsession in the way these artists trigger nervousness in the viewer by dealing with the taboos of ordinary living, and potent will in doing so. After moving to in Berlin, in 1999 Shiota produced a video documentary that detailed her performance “Bathroom” in which she incessantly washed her hair, face and her entire body, in a bathtub filled with muddy water. The mud that clang to her skin embraced her, while at the same time confining her. We read it as a symbol of the mother earth from which she can never be free and of which she can never wash away. She will never escape by simply changing location. Such appears an a priori memory that has been stained inside of her. This performance aroused a memory in a primordial state though a physical experience. Indeed, even cleaning her body after the performance, she could not rid herself (her skin) of the residual
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Chiharu Shiota’s Way into Silence: Moving inside the Eternal Triangle in Art Andrea Jahn*
*
Director of Stadtgalerie, Saarbrücken.
Jahn, Andrea. “Chiharu Shiota’s: Way into Silence”, in The Way into Silence. (Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg, 2004, pp. 4-22).
“Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka in 1972 and belongs to a generation of young artists.” Director of Stadtgalerie
Saarbrücken who have gained international attention in recent years for bodyrelated art. The concentration on the process-oriented aspects of the physical is their special focus. And yet Shiota’s works should be understood as being on the edge of contemporary movements in recent Japanese art,1 which enthusiastically embraced electronic media during the economic boom of the 1980s and reflected on the schismatic character of a culture that is based on an imaginative connection between tradition and adaptation to a hypermodern world. Therefore Shiota’s performative works can only be categorized with recent Japanese art to a limited extend. They are closer to a much broader tradition that began to form in the late 1960s in Japan, the United States, and above all in South America and Europe. Her education at German art schools with Marina Abramović from 1996 provides a key to her pictorial language that is unmistakably oriented around the artistic solutions of the performance and installation art of the 1970s.
I. Roots and Models In the performance “Try and Go Home” that Shiota presented in France in 1998, her own body became part of the landscape and thus part of the elemental phenomena of nature. The artist had fasted for four days, before she stayed naked and silent in a hollow, surrounded by leaves and roots and smeared with mud. The title of the performance alludes to the soil as the origin of live –should the performance “Try and Go Home” then be the expression of an impulse to return to the place from which we comes?2 Within this framework it may be supposed that Shiota, as a Japanese artist, would relate her work directly to the philosophy of Butoh, which revolutionized dance in Japan in the 1960s. It is central to an understanding of Shiota’s performance work, however, that Butoh is seen as an important precursor to the development of Western performance art to which the young artist had access while studying in Australia and Europe, which thus presented her with a kind of “filtered” form of Butoh. It is also relevant to a consideration of her work that Butoh not only transformed our awareness of the body and its movements but also reflected its fleshy 157
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State of Being (Kimono), 2012. Metal, kimono, black thread.
State of Being (Kimono), 2012. The Museum of Art, Kochi. Metal, kimono, black thread.
State of Being (Dress), 2011. Galeria Nieves Fernández. Dress, thread.
Memory of Skin, 2000. Kunstmuseum Bonn. 22 dresses, water, dirt, showers.
Memory of Skin, 2001. Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary Art. 5 dresses, dirt, water, showers.
Making of “Memory of Skin”, 2001.
Traces of Life, 2008. Torstrasse 166 –Das Haus der Vorstellung, Berlin. Wedding dress, black wool.
Trauma / Alltag, 2008. Metal frame, dress, black wool and black thread.
Inside – Outside, 2008. Goff+Rosenthal, Berlin. Black wool, dress.
After the Dream, 2011. La maison rouge, Paris. Dresses, paint, black wool.
Labyrinth of Memory, 2012. La Sucrière, Lyon. 16 dresses, black wool.
State of Being, 2012. Casa Asia, Barcelona. Black wool, wedding dress.
State of Being, 2012. Casa Asia, Barcelona. Black wool, wedding dress.
Traces of Life, 2008. Torstrasse 166 –Das Haus der Vorstellung, Berlin. Shoes, red rope.
Traces of Life, 2008. Torstrasse 166 –Das Haus der Vorstellung, Berlin. Shoes, red rope.
Dialogue from DNA, 2004. Manggha, Centre of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow. Red wool, shoes.
Dialogue from DNA, 2004. Manggha, Centre of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow. Red wool, shoes.
Dialogue from DNA, 2004. Manggha, Centre of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow. Red wool, shoes.
Over the Continents, 2008. The National Museum of Art, Osaka. Red wool, shoes.
Where to Go, What to Exist, 2010 Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya, 2010. Suitcases, cement, etc.
Where to Go, What to Exist, 2010 Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya. Suitcases, cement, etc.
From Where We Come and What We Are, 2011. La maison rouge, Paris. About 400 suitcases.
State of Being, 2010. Galería Nieves Fernández, Madrid. Back wool, suitcases.
Accumulation – Searching for the Destination, 2012. Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art. About 200 suitcases.
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C H I H A R U S H I O TA
Lives and works in Berlin.
1972 Born in Osaka, Japan. 2011 California College of the Arts (Guest Professor). 2010 – 2012 Kyoto Seika University (Guest Professor). 1999 – 2003 Universität der Künste, Berlin. 1997 – 1999 Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig. 1993 – 1994 Semester Exchange to Canberra School of Art, Australian National University. 1992 – 1996 Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto.
Solo Exhibitions 2014
“Dialogues”, The New Art Gallery, Walsall. “Earth and Blood”, Galería Nieves Fernandez, Madrid. “Chiharu Shiota: Presence in the Absence”, Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN (USA).
2013
“Other Side”, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne. “After the Dream”, Carré St. Anne, Montpellier. “Chiharu Shiota”, Galerie Daniel Templon, Brussels. “Earth and Blood”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya. “Trace of Memory”, the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh. “Chiharu Shiota – Letters of Thanks”, The Museum of Art, Kochi, Kochi. “Collection + Chiharu Shiota”, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney. “Crossing Lines”, Manege, Moscow. “Red Line”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo.
2012 “In Silence 2012”‚ Biennale Cuvée, Power Tower / Offenes Kulturhaus, Linz. “Synchronising Threads and Rhizomes”, Casa Asia, Barcelona. “Me as Others”, Art Gallery ARTIUM presented by Mitsubishi-Jisho, Fukuoka. “Other Side”, Haunch of Venison, New York. “Labyrinth of Memory”, La Sucrière, Lyon. “State of Being”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo. 425
“Where Are We Going?”, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa. “State of Being”, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Victoria. “Stairway”, Schleswig-Holsteinischer Kunstverein, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel. “Infinity”, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris. 2011 “Chiharu Shiota-Presence of the Past”, Alexander Ochs Galleries, Beijing. “Chiharu Shiota drawings”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo. “Memory of Books”, Gervasuti Foundation, in cooperation with Haunch of Venison, Venice. “Home of Memory”, La Maison Rouge, Paris. “In Silence”, Detached, Hobart. 2010 “Dialogue with Absence”, Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris. “Wall”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya. “One Place”, Haunch of Venison, London. “Chiharu Shiota”, Galería Nieves Fernández, Madrid. 2009 “A Long Day”, Rotwand Gallery, Zurich. “Flowing Water”, Nizayama Forest Art Museum, Toyama. “Chiharu Shiota”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo. “Unconscious Anxiety”, Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris. 2008 “Breath of the Spirit”, The National Museum of Art, Osaka. “State of Being”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya. “Zustand des Seins / State of Being”, CentrePasquArt, Biel / Bienne. “Inside / Outside”, Gallery Goff + Rosenthal, Berlin. “Waiting”, Goff + Rosenthal, New York. 2007 “From In Silence / Art Complex”, Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery, Yokohama. “Trauma / Alltag“, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo. 2006 “Dialogue from DNA”, Wildnis + Kunst, Saarbrücken. 2005 “RAUM / room”, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin. “During Sleep”, Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten, Klagenfurt. “When Mind Become Form”, Gallery Fleur, Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto. “Zerbrochene Erinnerung”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo. 2004 “Falling Sand”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo. “In Silence”, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima. “Dialogue from DNA”, Manggha, Centre of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow. “Du côté de chez”, installation in the Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Lille.
2003 “All Alone”, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. “In Silence”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya. “Bleibend von der Stimme ... ”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo. “The Way into Silence”, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. 2002 “In Silence”, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. “Uncertain Daily Life”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo. 2001 “Chiharu Shiota”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya. “Under the Skin”, Alexander Ochs Galleries, Berlin. 2000 “Breathing from Earth”, Kunstraum Maximilianstrasse, Stadtforum München, Munich. “Bathroom & Bondage”, Project Room ARCO, Madrid. 1999 “Where Are You From?”, Performance, K&S, Berlin. “Dialogue from DNA”, Alexander Ochs Galleries, Berlin.
Group Exhibitions 2013 “Everyone Carries a Room Inside”, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem. “Matrix. Textiles in Art and Applied Arts from Gustav Klimt to the Present”, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg. “Asian Art Biennial”, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung. “Mindfulness! , Kirishima Art Museum, Kagoshima-ken. Sapporo Art Park, Sapporo. “TO BE OR NOT TO BE. Portrait Today”, Munich Modern, Munich. “Red Queen”, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart. “The Pulse of Time”, Future Perfect, Singapore. “Domani”, National Art Center, Tokyo. 2012 “Women In-Between: Asian Women Artists 1984-2012”, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka / Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum, Okinawa / Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Tochigi / Mie Prefectural Art Museum, Mie. “Trace of Time, Francis Bacon and the Existential Condition in Contemporary Art”, Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina a Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. “Sky over my Head”, Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Kumamoto. “After the Dream”, ARSENALE -The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Kiev. 2011 “The Ephemeral”, Arndt, Berlin. “Lost in Lace”, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. “Ainsi soit-il”, Collection Antoine de Galbert Group Exhibition, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. 427
“City-Net Asia 2011”, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea. “Inner Voices”, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. “Biennale Internationale d’Art Contemporain de Melle”, Melle. “Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art”, Japan Society Gallery, New York. “Experimenta Utopia”, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Australia. 2010 “On & On”, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, curated by Flora Fairbairn and Olivier Varenne. “Experience #1 -The Aura”, Christophe Gaillard Pop-up Gallery, Berlin. “Beyond Mediations”, Mediations Biennale, Poznan. “Arts and Cities”, Aichi Triennale 2010, Nagoya. “100-Day Art and Sea Adventure - Setouchi International Art Festival”, Teshima. “Tsubaki-kai 2010 Trans-Figurative”, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo. “On Bathing”, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. “In Transit”, Rotwand Gallery, Zurich. “HomeLessHome”, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem. 2009 “Chiharu Shiota / GEGO”, Goff + Rosenthal Gallery, New York. “Third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art”, Moscow. “The World is Yours”, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek. “Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial 2009”, Niigata Prefecture, Echigo-Tsumari. “Walking in My Mind”, Hayward Gallery, London. “Hundred Stories about Love”, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. “Tsubaki-kai 2009 Trans-Figurative”, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo. 2008 “Drawn in the Clouds”, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki. “Torstrasse 166-Das Haus der Vorstellung”, Berlin. “Platform”, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. “Heartquake”, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem. “Eurasia: Geographic Crossovers in Art”, MART-Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. “Kunsträume”, Museum Friedberg. “Tsubaki-kai 2008 Trans-Figurative”, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo. 2007 “Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves”, ZKM - Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. “Thread,” Koroska Gallery of Fine Arts, Slovenj Gradec. “The Body Sings of Life”, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa. “Fiction for the Real”, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. 2006 “Bathroom”, PI Performance Intermedia Festival, Szczecin. “Art and Object: Affinity of the Jomon and the Contemporary”, Aomori Museum of Art. “Sixth Gwangju Biennale 2006: Fever Variations”, Gwangju, South Korea. “The Joyful House”, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya.
“Berlin-Tokyo / Tokyo-Berlin: The Art of Two Cities”, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. “Imbenge Dreamhouse, In Transit 06”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. “March II”, Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya. “Absolutely Private: On Photography from 2000 to the Present”, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo. 2005 “Third Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2005: Parallel Realities-Asian Art Now”, Fukuoka. “Fairy Tales Forever”, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus. “Imbenge Dreamhouse”, Durban Cultural and Documentation Centre, Durban. “Dreaming Now”, The Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA. 2004 “Senatsstipendiaten”, Kunstbank, Berlin. “The Joy of My Dreams, First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville”, Seville. “Embroidered Action”, Herzliya Museum of Art, Herzliya. “Oogstrelend Schoon - Shining Beauty”, Apeldoorns Museum, Apeldoorn. 2003 “Rest in Space, Touring Exhibition”, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. “Walking on Art,” Kunstverein Ludwigsburg. “Paysages féminins et grondements du monde”, Institut franco-japonais Tokyo. “Eine Bilanz”, Kulturverein Zehntscheuer e.V., Rottenburg am Neckar. “First Steps: Emerging Artists from Japan”, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. 2002 “Translated Acts”, touring exhibition, Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen de Carrillo Gil, Mexico City. “A Need For Realism”, Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. “Miss You”, Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg. “Another World-Twelve Bedroom Stories”, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne. “De Waan, Manifestation of Art and Psychiatry”, Venray. “Some kind of Dream”, Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC. “The First Move”, Philip Morris K.K. Art Award 2002, Tokyo International Forum “Rest in Space”, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo. 2001 “Heimat Kunst”, touring exhibition, Kulturverein Zehntscheuer, Rottenburg am Neckar. “Kunst und Kur / Arte e Benessere”, Kunsthaus Meran, Merano. “Marking the Territory”, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. “Translated Acts”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. “MEGA-WAVE”, Yokohama Triennale 2001, Yokohama. “VIA Théâtre du Manége”, Maubeuge. “Translated Acts”, Queens Museum of Art, New York. “Exit 2001”, Maison des Arts Créteil, Paris. “Duitsland: Die Welt aus deutscher Sicht”, Tichting Odapark: Centrum voor hedendaagse kunst, Venray. 2000 “Yume no Ato”, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden / Haus am Waldsee, Berlin. 429
“Dorothea von Stetten-Kunstpreis”, Kunstmuseum Bonn. “Strange Home”, Historisches Museum and Kestner Museum, Hannover. “Continental Shift”, Ludwig Forum, Aachen; Bonnefanten-museum, Maastricht; Stadsgalerij Heerlen; Musée d‘Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporaine Liège “Heimat Kunst”, touring exhibition, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. 1999 “Open ‚99 -Second International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installations”, Venice-Lido. “Unfinished Business”, Marina Abramović and Students, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin. “Fresh Air”, E-Werk, Weimar. “...und ab die Post!”, Postfuhramt, Berlin.
Projects 2014 2011
“Tristan und Isolde”, stage design. Opera by Richard Wagner, director Daniel Karasek, musical direction Georg Fritzsch, costume Claudia Spielman. (Opera House Kiel, Germany). “Matsukaze”, stage design together with Pia Maier Schriever. Opera by Toshio Hosokawa. Directed and choreographed by Sasha Waltz (Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels, Polish National Opera, Warsaw and Staatsoper, Berlin).
2010 “Oedipus Rex”, stage design. Direction a nd choreography by Constanza Macras and Dorky Park (Hebbel Am Ufer, Berlin). 2009 “Oedipus Rex”, stage design. Direction and choreography by Constanza Macras and Dorky Park (European Center for the Arts, Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden). “Tattoo (Dea Loher)”, stage design. Directed by Toshiki Okada (New National Theatre, Tokyo). 2007 “From In Silence / Art Complex”, in collaboration with Dorky Park / Constanza Macras, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and young musicians Leipziger Streichquartett, Valery Afanassiev, Yoko Tawada and Aki Takase. (Kanagawa Arts Foundation, Kenmin Hall, Kanagawa). 2003 “Solitude”, stage design. Directed by Alex Novak, with producer Florian Vogel, by Kerstin Specht. (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart). “All Alone” stage design. In collaboration with Yoko Kaseki (Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw).
Awards, Nominations and Scholarships 2012 ARSENALE - The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art Audience Choice Award, Kiev. 2009 Distinguished Service Medal, Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto. Docks Art Fair - Montblanc Culture Award, Lyon. 2008 The Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists, Japan. Sakuya Kono Hana Prize, Osaka. 2005 Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunka-cho), scholarship, Japan. 2004 Arbeitsstipendium Bildende Kunst Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur, Berlin. 2003 Pola Art Foundation, scholarship, Japan. 2002 Philip Morris K.K Art Award 2002, New York. 2002-2003 Akademie Schloss Solitude, scholarship, Stuttgart. 2000 Dorothea von Stetten Kunstpreis 2000, shortlist, Bonn.
Collections (selection) 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Centre PasquArt, Biel/Bienne. Antoine de Galbert, Paris. The Hoffmann Collection, Berlin. Kiasma, Helsinki. KUNSTWERK - Sammlung Alison and Peter W. Klein, Nussdorf. Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg. Shiseido Art House, Kakegawa, Shizuoka. The National Museum of Art, Osaka. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. The Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka. 431