We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which The Japan Foundation, Sydney now stands. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
July 29 2022 — Jan 28 2023
Foreword
Into the Intertextual Woods
Emily Wakeling
Storytelling and Artmaking for Multispecies Survival Mayako Murai
Exhibition images Works
Interview with Fuyuhiko Takata
Retelling the Uncanny: In Conversation with Yūichi Higashionna
List of works
Biographies
Acknowledgements
Storymakers in Contemporary Japanese Art delves into a world of fantasy and wonder through a selection of works by five contemporary artists from Japan. Storytelling has a strong presence in contemporary Japanese art, with the significance of sharing and reimagining both personal and communal stories becoming increasingly evident in the wake of major natural and human-caused events. The fairy tale, a genre of narrative that has long told stories about nonhuman beings and inanimate things, can enable us to imagine a more-than-human world that transforms the way people perceive and experience life.
Storymakers evokes imagery from traditional fairy tales across cultures including “The Little Match Girl” and stories of interspecies relationships and transformations. This exhibition features a newly created work by interdisciplinary artist Tomoko Kōnoike, videos by Yūichi Higashionna and Fuyuhiko Takata, paintings by Maki Ohkojima and a flip book animation by Masahiro Hasunuma.
Curated by Emily Wakeling and Mayako Murai, the artworks in this exhibition, with their re-workings of materials, formats and corporeal experiences, revisit old familiar stories in new forms to
transcend the anthropocentric worldview. It is this view that has made the modern world blind to vital connections humans hold with the earth and all its inhabitants.
We would like to extend our gratitude to all the participating artists, without whom this exhibition would have never been possible. In particular, we thank our co-curators Emily Wakeling and Mayako Murai, who created this beautifully considered exploration of the world of fairy tales in contemporary Japanese art.
We are also grateful to Tomoko Kōnoike, Naoko Mabon, Yūko Shoji and the Festival of the Fantastic in Australia and Japanese Arts team for the Stitching Wonder workshop, along with Haruka Komori and Natsumi Seo, who provided their thought-provoking film Double Layered Town for our screening.
Storymakers breathes new life into old familiar stories and invites our audience to listen carefully to the voices of all the things that create the world. The Japan Foundation, Sydney
While fairy tales are often considered of concern only to children, there is no finite end to when the myths they instil in younger folk stop offering powerful interpretations of humanity’s place within the world. As seen in the works of Storymakers in Contemporary Japanese Art, these are not just tales to share, but also subvert and confront, as the artists encourage viewers to accommodate a less human-centred perspective.
Working in collaboration with Dr Mayako Murai, a literature professor specialising in fairy tales, this exhibition concept came from our recurring observations and shared interest in contemporary Japanese artists who reference literature. As co-curators we were interested in what an exhibition of our combined curatorial and literary knowledge could produce on this topic.
Fairy tales are highly transmitted narratives consumed and carried on through the written word, picture books, moving image and oral practices. Inevitably, the exhibited works of art reveal a core connection to these formats. Masahiro Hasunuma, for example, is an artist who produces artworks in handcrafted book form. Maki Ohkojima’s sequential pencil and acrylic works on paper lend themselves as illustrations to an untold story. Meanwhile, Tomoko Kōnoike, a published writer as well as visual artist, has completed her contribution to the exhibition by including several re-translations of her illustrated book, Mimio, from Japanese to English.
The ancient oral storytelling traditions of Northeast Japan are channeled in Natsumi Seo and Haruka Komori’s feature film, Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Positions (2019), presented as a one-off screening event during the exhibition period. The film follows four young people who hear the survival stories of real-life residents of Rikuzentakata, a coastal town decimated by the March 2011 Northeast Japan earthquake and tsunami, as they decide what their role should be in keeping the stories alive.
Also present in Storymakers is the influence of moving image, a format that now dominates in transmitting traditional stories throughout contemporary digital societies. Stepping in to the exhibition space, Yūichi Higashionna’s bold black-and-white GIF projection stripes (in the forest) (2022) greets the visitor, and deeper in is the artist’s looped animation The Little Match Girl (2022), displayed on various digital and analogue televisions. Fuyuhiko Takata’s video, Dream Catcher (2018), parodies the Grimm Brothers’ tale, “Rapunzel”, by combining a Disney princess songstress with the earth-destroying powers of a Hindu goddess. Tomoko Kōnoike’s Moon Bear Goes Upstream (2017), presented as part of her Wedding Mountain (2021-22) installation, pictures a lone figure traveling through a remote snowy riverscape.
The first artworks in the exhibition place viewers in the woods—a classic opening scenario for many fairy tales. To the right, Higashionna’s aforementioned stripes (in the forest) recreates the visual impression of passing through the trees. Ohkojima’s sets of paintings focus on the forest floor. To the left, Kōnoike’s installation features glimpses of forest landscapes from the perspective of the small, furry, faceless character Mimio.
In the forest, the human protagonists of fairy tales are typically left vulnerable to monstrous predators. Similar to the woods of European fairy tales, Japan is also a land full of remote forests that are home to large predators, including once-endemic wolves of Honshu and Hokkaido (seen in miniature atop Kōnoike’s Wedding Mountain). Today, bears are still a common sight for hikers.
Masahiro Hasunuma’s drawing and bookmaking practices look to a tale closely associated with Japan’s sacred Tateyama. In this handmade, rudimentary animation style presented via flipbook, a black bear walks into view. It has an arrow stuck in its back, with a trail of red blood spots left in its path. In the original tale, the young hunter who struck the bear is a central part of the story, but in Hasunuma’s visual retelling, delivered in page after page of handdrawn images, the bear is the protagonist.
Maki Ohkojima’s artwork is inspired by an experience of becoming lost in the woods. Her drawings, paintings and murals are founded in biology and anthropology, with resulting imagery that decentres
people within a much vaster ecology of life. Ohkojima’s 2015 works on paper, The Forest Eats Me and The Forest Makes Me its Seedbed, respond to a key memory about the fresh, moist scent of the forest soil.1 She depicts the earth as a powerful force that would inevitably continue its cycle of life and death. A recent interview expanded on this thought; “similar to soil...our bodies are far from self-sufficient, relying on various other beings and existing in a web of interconnectedness.”2 The drawing series, featuring delicate fern life and forest layers enveloping a small skull, speak to the often forgotten relationship human bodies have to the natural world. Within fairy tales, there is often a message to be found about what is considered natural and what is not. Humans are often placed in their own, non-animal category, placed at odds with nature. For Tomoko Kōnoike, human/non-human partnerships are an ongoing motif within her practice. In Wedding Mountain, the artist has created a sculptural installation in the form of a multi-tiered wedding cake. Upon its surfaces, Kōnoike has integrated elements of nature, including a cascading waterfall, with tree trunks as supporting columns and a white tulle veil adorning its sides. Looking around the corner, viewers can see the cake literally transforming with the hint of a bushy, light-grey foxtail poking out from its side.
Accompanying the cake is a recorded scene of a heavily snowy landscape, with a lone figure paddling in a timber canoe on a flowing river. A large, black furry pelt covers the protagonist’s head and body. This is the artist’s homeland, Akita Prefecture, a region that has long been perceived as a wilder part of Japan, with many myths and legends associated with its remote rivers, mountains and valleys; many of which feature the moon bear (Asiatic black bear).3 The artist herself sings a traditional wedding song, performed by the father of the bride to send off his daughter into her new household. Here, the daughter is sent off, but her final destination seems to be outside of any human civilisation.
In Fuyuhiko Takata’s Dream Catcher, the fairy tale’s protagonist resists the romantic ending once again. Parodying a well-known song from an animated Disney movie, a young beauty with impossibly long braided hair sings about waiting for her prince to come and save her. She sings out of a window, looking from the
tall tower down onto a miniature film set recreation of a pastoral landscape. As the character dances and spins recklessly in her tower, young Rapunzel gets wrapped up in her own hair like a giant ball of yarn. In the miniature film set, the viewer can see that her braid stretches out of the window, all the way to the ground below, and as Rapunzel pulls more, the braid is shown to be in fact embedded within the ground below. As Rapunzel dances, the earth foundations come loose; forests are demolished, villages left in ruins and farms destroyed. She is not only Rapunzel, she is also the giant snake of destruction in the Hindu legend, Samudra Manthana.4
Broken down into light and shadow, Yūichi Higashionna’s stripes (in the forest) hides what might be lurking amid the tall tree trunks. Further inside the exhibition, Little Match Girl repetitively presents the silhouette of an empty dining table. In connection with the artwork’s title, the table refers to the final tragic scene in Hans Christian Andersen’s nineteenth century fairy tale in which a street urchin imagines the warmth of finally joining her family at the table for dinner. In the artwork, multiple moving screens of varying age and quality depict a floating, spinning dinner table, forever upholding an unattainable ideal. Higashionna’s practice is often concerned with modern consumerist life, with people’s presence reduced down to their light and shadow; moth light (1996, reproduced in 2022) recreates the inevitable domestic presence of creatures, specifically moths, fluttering about artificial light sources.
By channeling written, illustrated, moving image and oral platforms of storytelling, and wielding certain potent fairy tale iconography, the artworks of Storymakers quickly make their connections to familiar and loved narratives. In their use of well-known myths, these works speak to the ongoing importance these stories can carry right now, as humans reconsider their place within the natural world.
1. Communication with the artist, 25 September 2021.
2. Maki Ohkojima quoted in Maki Ohkojima, Japan Traffic Culture Association website, accessed 10 April 2022: https://jptca.org/en/interview/interviewwith-alumni-art-award-winner-4/
3. Knight, Catherine. “The moon bear as a symbol of yama: its significance in the folklore of upland hunting in Japan.” Asian Ethnology, vol. 67, no. 1, spring 2008, pp. 79+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A184852138/ AONE?u=anon~71a5efe4&sid=googleScholar&xid=205adcac. Accessed 27 July 2022.
4. Communication with the artist, July 2022.
Fairy tales have long been told and retold through various media in addition to purely verbal texts. The exhibition Storymakers in Contemporary Japanese Art aims to demonstrate the vital connection between storytelling and artmaking, which are two ancient forms of creative activity. It also emphasises the significance of recasting old familiar tales in new forms that would speak to various contemporary issues and challenges. The works by the artists selected for this exhibition, as my co-curator Emily Wakeling discusses in detail, address the need to reimagine human beings’ relationship with the environment, both natural and human-made. They recast traditional narratives in diverse media, such as video art, painting, mixed-media installation, light art, picture book illustration and an early motion picture device called the Kinora. These works converse and contrast with each other in the exhibition space, which is conceived as a forest of fairy tales being told today through various art forms.
Fairy tales are shared narrative resources and, as such, do not belong to individual storytellers. The survival of the fairy tale depends on its adaptability into forms that address social, cultural and aesthetic concerns of the time. Storytellers therefore work with stories that are not their own in a way that speaks to various concerns about both shared and individual realities. Although fairy tales with which we are familiar today have gone through—and are still going through—multifarious transformations, the essential structure of the fairy tale remains the same; it begins with a lack of some kind and, with the help of supernatural power, ends with the resolution of the conflict brought about by the initial lack. It can be said that fairy tales are informed by a human disposition to imagine a world more desirable than a given situation. This is why they focus on those whose voices tend to be suppressed or neglected in societies, such as the youngest siblings, the abused, the abandoned, the nonhuman and the not-quite-human. The protagonist typically goes into the realm of enchantment and comes out of it at the end of the story, and this movement in and out of enchantment usually
involves the transformation of the self as well as the surrounding world. We can therefore say that fairy tales offer us an alternative vision of the world and then bring us back to where we were, with a new awareness of the self and the world. It is for this reason that the fairy tale becomes an important means of reconfiguring our relationship with the world when radical change is needed.
For those living in Japan, the combined disaster of the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear power plant accident on March 11, 2011 was a pivotal experience that forced them to recognise the way society has been organised to fulfil the desire to own more, build more and consume more, thereby causing the depravation of the natural environment and ways of living based on the interdependence between humans and nature. The effect of this is not limited to the environmental problem but has also led to the oppression and the exploitation of those who are marginalised in society due to gender, class, ethnicity, age, disability, sexuality and other factors, creating various divides among people. The need to review such an economically driven, anthropocentric model of society has never been felt so urgently by the whole country since the beginning of modernisation in Japan in the late-nineteenth century. This awareness has affected many areas of society including humanities, sciences and creative practices, and projects dealing explicitly and implicitly with the issues raised by the disaster of 3.11 are still coming out today.
My own approach to fairy tale research has also been deeply affected by this combined natural and human-induced disaster, the aftermath of which continues to affect many people and the environment. What are the uses of stories for the survival of our own and other species, stories that have been handed down and shared among communities over generations, as well as stories that have been kept private as anonymous life stories of ordinary people? These basic questions about the role and value of folk narrative became an urgent question to me when the country’s highly developed socio-economic systems suddenly came to a standstill. Like many others working in various fields, this shock made me stop conducting research in the way I had done
previously, and urged me to review my research methodologies in order to be more meaningfully engaged with the societal changes triggered by the disaster. This experience changed my way of reading traditional fairy tales, especially those that seem to offer clues to imagining multispecies interactions that are not exclusively based on human privilege. It also urged me to go out into other fields to discover the stories being told today, and I came across people from other fields doing the same, attempting to find new modes of research and creative practice by stepping out of their own specialisation and developing common ground across fields. It was in the field of contemporary art that I came across one of the most illuminating uses of fairy tales for multispecies survival. Stories are not just made of words, and artists seem to know this. I am trying to know more about fairy tales by looking at artworks that tap into the shared repository of narrative imagination.
The fairy tale is a genre of narrative that deals with conflicting, inexplicable desires in a way that would appeal to people across time, cultures and generations. The conversations I have had with the artists, some of which are included in this catalogue, and the familiarity I have gained with their works during the process of making the exhibition with Emily Wakeling have revealed some important aspects of the visual arts that intersect with the aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions of the fairy tale. This intersection seems to be one reason why innovative storymaking is happening in the field of visual arts today. Particularly in Japan, the significance of sharing and reimagining both personal and communal stories has become increasingly evident in the wake of destruction, which is also a new beginning.
Yūichi Higashionna
Little Match Girl 2022 Video
Yūichi Higashionna moth light 1996, reproduced in 2022 LED light and other media Dia. 530 x 110 mm
K
noike
Bear Goes
Tomoko K
Mountain
3 pieces, each size 540 × 390 mm
Pencil and acrylic on paper
5 pieces, each size 767 x 573 mm
When I first read Tomoko Kōnoike’s picturebook Mimio, I immediately associated its protagonist with Little Red Riding Hood, who strays from the path and goes deeper and deeper into the forest, an archetypal space of enchantment. Unlike “Little Red Riding Hood,” however, Mimio’s story does not revolve around the confrontation between the human and the wolf. Instead, Mimio’s interactions with various nonhuman inhabitants of the forest, such as flowers, trees, insects, animals, earth, wind, fire, and water, are the focus of this picturebook.
Although the story is narrated from Mimio’s perspective, Mimio very rarely figures as a subject, and the narrative consists of isolated noun phrases describing Mimio’s perception of the surrounding nature. Mimio, who has no face and whose name contains mimi, the Japanese word for “ear,” functions as a sensory receptor open equally to various stimuli in its surroundings. Mimio is thus constantly defined and redefined by what it feels with its own body. Through Mimio’s senses, various natural elements of the forest begin to tell their own story.
It was years later that I realised the simple fact that Mimio may not be seeing what the reader is seeing on the pages of the picturebook. It seems so obvious now, but I had not noticed the possibility that the forest experienced by Mimio may be more than what we see on the pages. This blind spot intrigued me, and I wanted to find out what other people “see” when reading Mimio. So I chose three images that focus on different senses, sometimes in combination with each other, such as senses of smell, touch,
hearing, temperature, humidity, movement, and weight. To look at the text and its relationship to the image in a different light, I then asked five people to translate the text accompanying those three drawings and to reflect on how they felt in the process of translating it.
These different responses, in terms of word order, word choice, sound, rhythm, viewpoint, and the treatment of the missing subject in the original Japanese text, reveal how each person empathises with Mimio in their own unique way, which seems to be connected to the way each person takes pleasure in feeling the world around them.
A scent of a newborn flower; a carpet of moss.
The forest is a big, breathing lung.
Taking in the scent of spring. On a moss carpet. The forest takes its first breath.
Scent of new-born flowers Carpet of mosses The forest is a vast breathing lung
The fragrance of newly sprung flowers a carpet of moss forest is the lungs breathing deeply
Philip Brophy Yoshie Kikuchi Naoko Mabon Kinoe NemotoAh—I felt a paw touch, lighter than thread.
Feel the touch of legs lighter than a thread.
Oh I feel it Those delicate legs lighter than threads
Oh felt the touch of legs lighter than thread
Philip Brophy Yoshie Kikuchi
On the cool ground, waiting for the start of sweet mist.
I feel the cool dirt on my back as I lie and await. A sweet alluring fog steeps in.
Philip Brophy
Yoshie Kikuchi
Waiting on the cool soil The beginning of the luscious mist
Waiting on the cool ground for the beginning of a sweet mist
Naoko Mabon Yoshie KikuchiFirstly, I have to say I am embarrassed by my attempt to translate some lines from Mimio. My level of reading Japanese is JLPT Level 3 Lower Intermediate; it takes me a long time to read manga. But that time is not wasted, because I am always looking at the pictures to get a clue as to what is being said. So when I try my hand at translating some sentences from Mimio, I feel like a child who cannot read, but is entranced by looking at Tomoko’s drawings. Maybe I’m wrong in thinking that the words are in the head of Mimio—of how the character feels sensations of the world. Yet Mimio does not behave according to normative narration: Mimio exists, inhabits, traverses, becomes. Mimio’s world is a universe of swirling, patterned charcoal pencil, stroked upon the paper, and shaping its white void into a world of dark shadows and blinding light. It is simultaneously abstract and figurative—a binary which I feel is rarely enforced in Japanese image codes.
With my pale attempt at Mimio’s three sentences, I felt they were like waka variations. Less a matter of causal, linear or symbolic story-telling, and more lateral descriptions of sensations, floating without attribution of fixity. No character motivation, no narrative purpose, no heroic journey. Just Mimio appearing on paper, passing through dimensions with each turn of a page.
Mimio’s spring is similar to the new beginnings brought about with each spring. To me, Mimio appears to be a symbol of a new beginning, purity, and hope. Mimio’s lack of human features does not prevent him from observing the world around him. We human beings tend to believe in what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Our such senses can actually be deceiving as we grow up and have different experiences and expectations. In contrast, similar to a young child who is experiencing things for the first time, Mimio is taking every experience for face value. Each drawing is accompanied with a short text which I translated. As I translated each line, I tried to describe what I thought Mimio was doing on each drawing, with the text as a guide, instead of translating every word. By doing so, I hoped the readers would be able to experience and interpret Mimio’s world and do their own storytelling.
It is only in recent years that I learned Japanese is a predicative language. Tetsuji Yamamoto, a scholar specialising in various areas of study including pedagogy and political sociology, explains that the Japanese language does not use subjects such as I, you, she or they that one would find in English language, and has no subjective structure or conception. Yamamoto says that the Canada-based Japanese linguist Takehiro Kanaya once described the viewpoint in the English language as being set somewhere detached and high up, like the eyes of God looking down at a thing, whereas the viewpoint in the Japanese language is set somewhere low down on the ground, like the eyes of small insects. The insects are crawling on the earth, like worms, and viewing an object amongst its surrounding milieu. With the eyes of God, the subject is separated from the object, and both elements need to be precisely defined. On the other hand, with the position of a small worm, there is a place where there are diverse elements, including ourselves, as if that place is a vessel holding many different possibilities. The word “place” here has a subtle nuance when it is put in words in Japanese, which can also indicate a location, site, situation, ground, environment, locality or position. In the Japanese language, what matters is the place itself and how it is surrounding us, and how we share the experience or memory of the place, rather than who the speaker is or whose experience or action it is. I am not trying to say which language system is better. The point is that, when you are mediating and interpreting between different languages, Japanese and English in particular, this muddy ground, this worm eye view, this shared experience and memory of place, keeps haunting you—as a subject and action taker—who partially holds a deep desire to separate subject and object and name their actions. And so it should.
I am Japanese, teaching English. I teach my students how to put Japanese into English and correct their compositions every day. So, to me, translation is rather a systematic operation; replacement of languages in the rightful way. But when it comes to translating literary works, that is a totally different story. Since Mimio is a fully completed piece, changing it drastically is not desirable. Properness should be more emphasized than correctness to maintain the vital atmosphere of this book, which needs to be delivered to readers.
This experience of translating Mimio made me feel like I was given a perfume bottle from the author, which was filled with the essence of her book, standing in front of a forest of words, told to go into this forest to capture all the accurate words and suitable expressions, then put them in the bottle without having the volatile extract inside faded away. I hope people who read my translation can still smell and enjoy that essence the author entrusted to me.
Mimio, who exists softly on the boundary between existence and nonexistence
The world of forests and the world of humans
The sacred realm and everyday labours
The bounds dividing the two worlds quietly appear
Mimio, are you there?
Mimio, can you hear my voice?
Mimio, please tell me
About the secret, wonderful world shrouded in mystery
A Response to the Picturebook Mimio Kozue Handa (Translated by Mayako Murai)
Emily Wakeling: Your artwork stands out amongst your peers within the contemporary Japanese art scene. Not many artists go where you dare to go in your practice, in terms of sexual transgressions and bodily abjection. What has driven your art in these directions?
Fuyuhiko Takata: While it is true that expressions of sex and violence often appear in my works, as an artist I am not trying to do anything particularly grotesque. Rather, I am dealing with images that are universal to human beings. Even considering the theme of this exhibition—fairy tales—there are many that contain cruel, sexual, or vulgar scenes. These kinds of harsh or intense expressions do tend to be reworked into a safe, inoffensive manner in the modern age, however. In that sense, it could be said that one of my jobs is to shed light on the horrific desires that modern society seeks to keep concealed, but which are hidden deep within.
EW: The work displayed in Storymakers, titled Dream Catcher, is chosen for its connection to the fairy tale Rapunzel. Could you please talk about why you chose ”Rapunzel”?
FT: Fairy tales and myths are littered with motifs of princesses confined in small spaces: Danaë in Greek mythology, or “Sleeping Beauty”, for instance. “Rapunzel” is probably the best known example.
As an artist who has shut himself up in his apartment, creating works that are complete representations within the confines of that space, I have always been strongly attracted to this motif of ‘confinement’. In my own work, I wanted to transform Rapunzel’s passive attitude of waiting for the prince in her small room at the top of the tower into another image that is slightly wild and eerie (incidentally, the image connected to this in my mind at the time was that of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois’ work Spiral Woman). In doing so, I wanted to make her relate to the outside world in a new way.
EW: Many fairy tales teach about humans’ relationship with nature. I’m very interested in your version of Rapunzel. She is literally embedded in the earth and causes great destruction. What is ”Rapunzel” teaching us about nature?
FT: This work does not deal directly with ‘nature’ as a theme, so what follows might not be a very good answer, but I will write what came to my mind.
First of all, in Japan, where I live, large earthquakes occur repeatedly. Each time, the earth is destroyed and reset. I believe that the chaotic images of earthquakes that I have seen time and time again since my childhood are connected to the scenes of destruction in my work.
One of the sources for the ideas in this work is the famous Hindu creation myth, the Samudra Manthana, a story of destruction and rebirth in which the rotating motion of a giant serpent agitates the earth, causing new life to be born from the chaos. For some reason, I drew a connection in my mind between this myth and Rapunzel’s hair. I pictured her long hair transforming into a huge serpent and writhing around. And just like in the Hindu myth, the ruined Earth in the wake of the hair’s rampage harbours a positive meaning, of giving birth to new life.
EW: I’d like to go back to your previous answer. The confinement, isolation and boredom of one’s apartment, especially during the pandemic, is a very relatable experience for many people. Your Rapunzel sings a song about loneliness, as she wishes for a prince to come and find her. In Louise Bourgeois’ Spiral Woman, the spiral is a symbol of many things including chaos. Does your character of Rapunzel respond to her loneliness by being destructive and chaotic?
FT: Being confined to one’s room and isolation are often seen as negative (in Japan, the phenomenon of hikikomori, or shut-ins, is also a major social problem), but I think there is more to it than that. It seems to me that there is a certain sense of psychological uplift, strength, and a swirling feeling of desire that comes from being alone, and I have expressed these feelings not only in this work, but also several others.
EW: Dream Catcher also alludes to the unavoidable role Disney has had in retelling well known fairy tales. Can you speak about the role Disney has had in your creativity?
FT: I have watched Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast many times since I was a child, and I think I have been influenced by them in every way possible. While I might experience a strong attraction to stories of heterosexual love in which beautiful men and women in an ideal image become romantically united with each other, they also tend to leave me cold. These ambivalent feelings seem to have given rise to my creative process, in which I might harbour a love for Disney’s work, but actually distort the stories in strange ways because of that love.
EW: This sounds to me like you are interested in ‘queering’ Disney, or providing an alternative understanding of the world that doesn’t privilege heterosexuality and the gender binary. What is seen in Disney movies again and again are pictures of the so-called ‘natural order’, as you mention, where ideal men and women are romantically connected, and it also privileges humans over all other animals. But, through art, artists can challenge this so-called natural order. Is this important to your artworks?
FT: Yes, I would say so. As a non-heterosexual, non-Western artist, you could say that my distortions of these narratives serve, as you say, to challenge the ‘natural order’ created by Western culture. When considering these themes, however, I am careful not to think in terms that are too expository or schematic. What is important is that the images themselves are appealing. I believe that the sense of visual and auditory uplift that drives the audience’s imagination towards something else will have a ‘queering’ effect on the mind of the audience.
EW: Dream Catchers is not the only artwork you have created that is inspired by fairy tales. The video Cambrian Explosion features a mermaid, some cartoonish blood, and a song made famous in a Disney movie. What does the Little Mermaid story mean to you?
FT: What interests me is the evolution of this image of the mermaid. Originally, mermaids were monsters that would drag sailors down to the bottom of the ocean. Medieval paintings of two-tailed mermaids were horrifying. In the 19th century, however, Hans Christian Andersen created “The Little Mermaid”, which turned into a romantic image of tragic love. Then, in the late 20th century, Disney adapted it, turning it into a gaudy, sparkly image of a princess that circulates in consumer society, in the movie The Little Mermaid. In my video, the mermaid princess, played by myself, cuts her own tail open with a knife, causing bright red blood to splatter beautifully (but also horrifyingly). By cutting her tail, the mermaid reclaims her original image as a grotesque monster in a kind of reversion or throwback.
EW: The Cambrian explosion, a period that saw the emergence of multi-limbed animals about 540 million years ago, is referenced in that artwork’s title. Does the Cambrian explosion story also connect to a beautiful and violent origin of animal life on Earth?
FT: The original idea for that film was to have Anomalocaris, Hallucigenia, and other strange Cambrian creatures appear. I thought it would enhance the scene of the dramatic change (evolution?) of the mermaid princess who gets to have human legs. In the end, the idea got scrapped because the concept was messy and cluttered, and only the title remains as it was.
EW: The world of art provides a space for critiquing many things, but still must adhere to copyright. How do you navigate laws about intellectual property while still critiquing the dominance Disney wields over modern storytelling?
FT: This is a very important issue, but to be honest I have not found a solution to it myself. I think it is only natural for artists to appropriate or critique in their works the images that have become dominant forces in our time, such as those from Disney movies. It seems odd to me for such representations to be treated in the same way as mere pirated or bootlegged material.
Recorded on 13 June 2022 at heimlichkeit Nikai, Tokyo
Mayako Murai: The Little Match Girl is included in this exhibition. Why does this fairy tale intrigue you?
Yūichi Higashionna: I happened to use it as the title of that work because I was looking at a dining table that appeared in an image for an advertisement, and later realised that the dining table symbolised happiness and domestic affluence for a little girl.
Hans Christian Andersen wrote his stories more than 100 years ago. I thought it was interesting that our basic sense of happiness hasn’t changed much.
MM: That scene of familial joy and togetherness.
YH: That doesn’t seem to have changed much to me. Top it off with a sumptuous meal and everyone’s happy. So I was not inspired by Andersen’s story, but rather an interior design advertisement.
MM: It’s one of the functions of advertising to project a sense of happiness.
YH: Exactly. It wasn’t a very sophisticated ad, but the furniture ads in the newspaper that we subscribed to at my parents’ house always had a dining table and four chairs, and the picture was taken by shifting one of the chairs to project a natural look. I had seen that image again and again, as if it were some kind of standard template. While it’s a kind of cheap stereotype, it was clear to everyone that it alluded to this average image of a family or happy household. So I replaced that with a black silhouette, and turned it into a work.
I was seeing these kinds of images again and again, so I collected them for a while, and made a booklet of about 100 of them by myself by printing them in black and white. As I was doing this, I realised that it was just like Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl”, which was quite interesting to me. While the media is different, they share the same sense of happiness.
MM: They tell the same story.
YH: It didn’t occur to me to criticise it then, as I knew that I shared some of those views myself. It was such a stereotypical and cheap conception of happiness that I naturally felt uncomfortable when I was working on the piece, but it wasn’t something I couldn’t understand, so I had no desire at all to say that it was somehow wrong or mistaken.
MM: Not as some kind of critique of capitalism.
YH: I’m ambivalent about it, so it’s a bit of both. The critique is there, but there is also a part of me that is familiar with fluorescent lights, for example, so even though I might feel uncomfortable with them, it’s a sensation that has been internalised. I don’t simply dislike them, but I can’t say that I like them, either. It’s a vague feeling that is hard to explain, even for me. I later came to know about what Freud called the unheimlich, this paradoxical sense of the ‘uncanny’ surrounding what I find familiar but distasteful, which really resonated with me as an explanation.
MM: The sensation of being both uncanny and cute is something unique to fairy tales.
YH: In my case, though, I don’t really get the idea for my work from the story itself, although I sometimes arrive at a realisation that is similar to what the story is saying later on.
MM: When I come across a fairy tale, I also see in it something that has been made, something that people have made. It seems to me that this is a unique characteristic of fairy tales. We are not really conscious of them as such when we make something: they exist within us as a kind of format, or common language. Fairy tales are things that we absorbed as children. We grew up assuming that these are the stories, so they emerge without us being particularly aware of them. Fairy tales also appear in works other than those that are based on specific stories.
YH: They are archetypes, in short.
MM: Yes. I always wonder what these archetypes really are. There is a work by you on display on the second floor of the Play Double
exhibition venue where we are now, where small objects in a house are placed inside a cupboard and illuminated from the inside.
YH: This exhibition is being held in a regular house like this, so I’m using what was originally here. These objects were all on the shelves.
MM: These are things we all use on a daily basis. You can roughly guess what these objects are but can’t really tell for sure. By filtering them in this way, you find yourself unable to keep from staring at them.
YH: Walking down the street, though, you can see the shadows of things in people’s windows through the frosted glass. That kind of thing is quite interesting to me. I always find myself fascinated by these objects. People put all sorts of things in bay windows. They create a kind of ambiguous zone between the interior and the exterior. It seems to me that these people are putting things on display for passersby, and I often wonder why they do this. The shelves on the second floor are my lightbox works, but I think it would be interesting to remove the bay windows, take them straight to a gallery wall, and affix them there.
MM: That’s the kind of scene that The Little Match Girl saw from the outside.
YH: In that story, the walls become transparent, and you can see inside. The silhouettes reflected hazily in the windows prompt our fundamental desire to peek inside other people’s homes. When I see something like that, wild fantasies start to proliferate in my head.
MM: It’s like a mixture of what is visible to me and the images in my brain.
YH: I start to imagine what kind of people live there. The things I see are quite ordinary in and of themselves. So it’s as if I’m looking at something that I’m not supposed to see. There are many fairy tales like that, aren’t there?
MM: That’s exactly right. The taboo against looking. Like “Little Red Riding Hood”, the characters enter a place that they’re not
supposed to. There would be no story to tell if they didn’t go in though, so of course they do. And when you enter a house in the woods, the scariest thing of all is there. What’s inside the house is more frightening than the dark forest outside it.
YH: The forest itself is scary. You never know what’s out there: monsters, for example. It’s interesting to me how Heidegger says it’s both uncanny to regard the forest as just a timber source, and uncanny not to feel its uncanniness. Forests often appear in fairy tales, don’t they?
MM: Yes, and there is a house in the forest, with the light leaking out of it.
YH: A scene like that might coincide with the silhouette reflected in the window of someone’s house. There’s that old story about a traveller who asks to stay at the house of someone he doesn’t know, which is also sort of scary for the person who’s going to stay there. You don’t know what kind of house it would be, and you might be killed.
MM: Yamamba (a mountain witch) usually appears.
YH: Yamamba is also scary, very scary.
MM: The scariest part is the house that’s inhabited, from which the light leaks out.
YH: Freud’s term unheimlich is also derived from the word heim (German for ‘home’), and the duality of the house itself can also be found in fairy tales.
MM: In order to demonstrate the duality of this house clearly in a fairy tale, you would have to come across the light of the house once you enter the dark forest. It seems to me that the story would be structured so that the duality of the house would not be evident otherwise.
YH: I think there is always a kind of duality, or sense of contradiction, in a story. If there were only a single, stable kind of construction, nothing would happen, and the story would not unfold. I think the motivation that underlies my work is often based
on things that I neither like nor dislike, or things that are difficult to explain, even to myself. If I can explain it, then it would be something that has already been resolved.
MM: Stories also begin with that duality, so it is similar to artistic creation in that sense.
YH: Since the girl dies, “The Little Match Girl” doesn’t really have a happy ending, either. The story is written in a way that shows that redemption is possible, however. I think that kind of device is necessary. Rather than just ending with ‘happily ever after’, the story is written so that it is not really resolved, while still leaving the reader with a sense of salvation and allowing for a variety of interpretations.
MM: Otherwise, the story would not be told again.
YH: Exactly. Once everything is cleared up, that would be all there is to it.
MM: In that sense, I feel that the concept of duality is central to your works. Another characteristic that makes them unique is the fact that no humans appear in them. In “The Little Match Girl”, there is no girl, and no people sitting at the dining table, either.
YH: There are only signs and traces. In the image that appears in the photo for the advertisement, one of the four chairs has been pulled back slightly, which might have been intended to give the ad a sense of human presence or warmth. Since there are no people there, though, it actually makes the image rather uncanny. That was what caught my attention in the first place. While people usually felt the image was wonderful, I felt there was also something strange and mysterious about it. Later, I understood why I felt uncomfortable with it.
MM: That’s why The Little Match Girl has been turned into a work over and over again, in different forms. You might say that this is a process that allows you to gradually realise what it is about afterwards. This process is not repeated in the same form; rather, it’s the same motif that is repeated with variations. And the same is true of this exhibition in Sydney as well.
YH: Perhaps there is a parallel here with the fact that Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” has become a classic and continues to be retold.
MM: Yes, I think so.
YH: It’s a story that you can read over and over again, and never tire of. It feels as if the story is forever being told on repeat, as if the images in the work keep getting rotated, over and over again. At the same time, the dining table is a place of routine in our daily life, which is connected to these rotating images. The same scene plays out there every day. While advertising photos are still images, these are the same scenes that are being rotated over and over again.
MM: They play in a loop.
YH: It’s crazy to see the same image on five monitors, only slightly shifted, rotating all the time. Even a mundane, cliched image can start to look unfamiliar if you keep staring at it. That was my motivation for creating art in the first place, and I thought that this might be conveyed to those who saw the exhibition. I think a work of art needs a device that allows it to be shown, and this is an experiment in one particular way of doing that.
1. Masahiro Hasunuma Bear Climbing 2020
Hand-drawn animation flip book and kinora 280 x 230 x 350 mm
2. Yūichi Higashionna The Little Match Girl 2022 Video 15 minutes
3. Yūichi Higashionna moth light 1996, reproduced in 2022 LED light and other media Dia. 530 x 110 mm
4. Yūichi Higashionna stripes (in the forest) 2022 Video 15 minutes
5. Tomoko Kōnoike Moon Bear Goes Upstream 2017 Video 3 minutes 16 seconds
6. Tomoko Kōnoike Wedding Mountain 2021-2022
Mixed media Dia. 600 x 1,000 mm
7. Tomoko Kōnoike
Original illustrations for Mimio 2001
Pencil drawing 3 pieces, each size 540 × 390 mm
8. Maki Ohkojima The Forest Makes Me Its Seedbed 2015 Pencil and acrylic on paper 5 pieces, each size 767 x 573 mm
9. Maki Ohkojima The Forest Eats Me 2015 Pencil and acrylic on paper 10 pieces, each size 767 x 573 mm
10. Fuyuhiko Takata Dream Catcher 2018
Single channel video 4 minutes 30 seconds
Mayako Murai is professor of English and comparative literature at Kanagawa University, Japan. She is the author of From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West (2015) and co-editor of Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures (2020), both published by Wayne State University Press. She curated the exhibition Tomoko Konoike: Fur Story held at the Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University in 2018 and has been collaborating with Kōnoike on the ongoing art project Storytelling Table Runner since 2014. She is currently writing a book on fairy-tale animals in contemporary art and picturebook illustration.
Emily Wakeling is an Australia-based curator and art writer who specialises in contemporary Japanese art. She is the Curator of Rockhampton Museum of Art and was part of the curatorial team for the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Emily was based in Tokyo 2010-2016 and held several arts related roles in this time, including editor for Tokyo Art Beat, lecturer in cultural studies at Joshibi University of Art & Design and Kanagawa University, and author of Art & Society. She has independently delivered curatorial projects featuring contemporary Japanese artists in Australia including Compassionate Grounds: Ten Years on in Tohoku held in Brisbane and Melbourne in 2021.
Masahiro Hasunuma (b.1981, Tokyo) is an artist and documentary photographer. He earned a doctor’s degree at Tokyo University of the Arts Artistic Anatomy Laboratory in 2010 with a study on selfportraits. Hasunuma trained at the German Film Museum as part of the Agency of Cultural Affairs’ Program of Overseas Study in 2016. Recent exhibitions include the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial (Niigata, 2015),
Acquiring by counting (solo, gallery N, Aichi, 2019), and Prepare to prepare the story (solo, Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, 2020). He is currently based in Nagano Prefecture.
exhibitions include Large Interior (solo, Void +, 2021), Masked Portrait I & II (Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, 2011 & 2008), Glasstress (Fondazione Berengo, Venice, 2015 & 2011), The New Décor (Hayward Gallery, London) and, Roppongi Crossing (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2007).
Yūichi Higashionna (b. 1951, Tokyo) has continued to create works using commonplace objects from everyday life and surroundings as motifs. His works include the ‘“Chandelier’” series, in which round fluorescent lamps emitting pure white flat light are intertwined, and the ‘Flower’ series, an installation of paintings and objects moulded from artificial flowers and chain with spray paint. His major
Tomoko Kōnoike (b. 1960, Akita) was involved in the planning and design of toys, sundries, and furniture, and these activities have carried over into the present day after graduating from the Department of Painting (Japanese Painting) at Tokyo University of the Arts. She employs several kinds of media—animation, picturebooks, painting, sculpture, songs, photography, handcrafts, or fairy tales—she has participated in many interdisciplinary sessions with people in other fields, created site-specific works that incorporate descriptions of a region’s climate and terrain, and continued to address primordial questions about art. Her major exhibitions include Jam Session: Ishibashi Foundation Collection x Tomoko Konoike Tomoko Konoike FLIP” (ARTIZON MUSEUM, Tokyo, 2020), and Inter-Traveller
(Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, 2009).
Her major travelling exhibition The Birth of Seeing will open at Takamatsu Art Museum, Kagawa, in July 2022.
Maki Ohkojima (b.1987, Tokyo) creates paintings and murals on the theme of ‘The World of Living Things’, depicting the intricately intertwined natural world and the endless chain of life on walls, floors, and ceilings in every direction. She stands inbetween the contact zone of different things, and depicts the entangled aspects of life and death. Ohkojima internalises her own vision of animals, forests, fungi, and minerals, and seeks to tell a story through her paintings. Her major exhibitions include Bones, the solid sea inside of body.petrified plants (HARUKAITO, Tokyo, 2019).
Eye of whale (Aquarium de Paris, France, 2019) and Birds, sing the songs of the earth, through my bones (Dai-ichi Life Gallery, Tokyo, 2015).
Fuyuhiko Takata (b.1987, Hiroshima) creates video works in the field of contemporary art. He completed the doctoral course in oil painting at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2017. Takata creates pop and humorous video works that deal with diverse themes and images such as mythology, fairy tales, sex, gender, narcissism, and trauma. Most of his works are shot in the artist’s small apartment, and are characterised by a handmade feel and the occasional erotic expression. His major exhibitions include LOVE PHANTOM 2 (WAITINGROOM, Tokyo, 2021) and MAM Screen011: Takata Fuyuhiko (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2020).
The Japan Foundation, Sydney thanks the curators, exhibiting artists as well as contributing authors for their generous support and assistance with this project
Exhibition
The Japan Foundation Gallery
Storymakers in Contemporary Japanese Art
July 29, 2022 - January 28, 2023
Masahiro Hasunuma
Yūichi Higashionna
Tomoko Kōnoike
Maki Ohkojima
Fuyuhiko Takata
Curated by Mayako Murai Emily Wakeling Presented by Yurika Sugie
Susan Bui Simonne Goran Chiara Pallini Manisay Oudomvilay Design Daryl Prondoso Supported by
Yurika Sugie
Simonne Goran
Emily Wakeling
Mayako Murai Translation
Mayako Murai
Philip Brophy
Yoshie Kikuchi Naoko Mabon
Darryl Jingwen Wee
Design
Daryl Prondoso
Image Credits
Pages 28-32, 35-37 © The artist Pages 11-27, 42-44 © Docqment
Published by
The Japan Foundation, Sydney
Published on October 20, 2022
E-book ISBN 978-0-6451243-7-8