July 29 2022 — Jan 28 2023 The Japan Foundation Gallery
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ntroduction
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. This exhibition presents a selection of works by contemporary Japanese artists evoking images from traditional tales of wonder across cultures; including a journey through the enchanted forest, marriage between different species, and a princess dreaming in a secluded tower. The fairy-tale, a genre of narrative that has long told stories about nonhuman beings and non-living things as agents, can give us clues to imagining a more-than-human world that transforms the way people perceive and experience life. Tomoko Kōnoike (b. 1960, Akita) explores multispecies entanglements through her interdisciplinary art practice including painting, drawing, sculpture, video, handicrafts, and performance. Her picture book Mimio, 2001 depicts the furry, round and faceless creature Mimio’s interactions with living and nonliving things in the forest through the four seasons. Konoike’s video work, Moon Bear Goes Upstream, 2018
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set in deep winter, has the artist wearing a moon bear’s fur while rowing in a snowy Akita river. Wedding Mountain, 2022, newly created for this exhibition, is an installation inspired by traditional tales of humannonhuman marriage found across many cultures. Maki Ohkojima (b. 1987, Tokyo) engages in artistic investigations of biology and anthropology to enrich narratives in her drawings, paintings, murals, and ceramics. Her imagery is often inspired by origin mythologies that de-centre the role of humans within the vast ecology of life. Ohkojima’s 2015 series of drawings, The Forest Eats Me and The Forest Makes Me its Seedbed come from the artist’s experience hiking in the ancient forest of Yakushima. The fresh, moist scent of the forest soil, full of decaying trees and animals, was a key inspiration for her artistic consideration of the earth as a powerful force that will inevitably continue its cycle of life and death. Dream Catcher, 2018 by Fuyuhiko Takata (b. 1987, Hiroshima), meanwhile, is a digital video work concerned with the impact of human-induced disruptions on the natural world in his retelling of Rapunzel. As is
the story’s convention, a young woman is isolated in a tall tower. The fairy-tale princess’s extremely long hair, hanging out the tower’s window, has no apparent end. When Rapunzel begins winding up her plait, the hair is shown to be deeply embedded into the earth, and as she pulls her actions cause a greater and greater geological rupture to the crops, village and hills many metres below, eventually finishing with the tower sinking into the destroyed ground below. In his travels across the Northern Japan Alps, Masahiro Hasunuma (b. 1981, Tokyo) learned of Tateyama’s legend about a boy who encounters and shoots a bear with an arrow at the base of the mountain. He follows the wounded bear further and further up Tateyama, following its trail of blood, only to discover the bear has become the buddha Amitabha who carried an important message. Bear Climbing, 2020 tells the story but only through the bear’s final journey up the mountain. The brief, hand-drawn animation draws out empathy for the animal in a unique retelling.
new video work stripes (in the forest), 2022 invites the visitor to walk into a minimalist fairy-tale forest of black and white stripes. The Little Match Girl, 2022, the latest in his series of animation works based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of light and death, shows the phantasmagoric vision of a supposedly happy family dinner scene that the girl glimpses while the match is lit. Meanwhile, the theme of light and death is recast in his installation moth light, 1996 (reproduced in 2022), a cold electric light source that traps creatures driven towards its brightness. These artworks, with their re-workings of materials, formats and corporeal experiences, retell old familiar stories in new forms to move beyond 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.
Mayako Murai Emily Wakeling
Yuichi Higashionna (b. 1951, Tokyo) uses artificial light and animation to foreground the uncanny side of familiar fairy tales. His
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ist of works
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Masahiro Hasunuma Bear Climbing 2020 Hand-drawn animation flip book and kinora 280 x 230 x 350 mm
6. Tomoko Kōnoike Wedding Mountain 2021-2022 Mixed media Dia. 600 x 1,000 mm
2. Yūichi Higashionna The Little Match Girl 2022 Video 15 minutes
7. Tomoko Kōnoike Original illustrations for Mimio 2001 Pencil drawing 540 × 390 mm
3. Yūichi Higashionna moth light 1996, reproduced in 2022 LED light and other media Dia. 530 x 110 mm
8. Maki Ohkojima The Forest Makes Me Its Seedbed 2015 Pencil and acrylic on paper 5 pieces, each size 767 x 573 mm
4. Yūichi Higashionna stripes (in the forest) 2022 Video 15 minutes
9. Maki Ohkojima The Forest Eats Me 2015 Pencil and acrylic on paper 10 pieces, each size 767 x 573 mm
5. Tomoko Kōnoike Moon Bear Goes Upstream 2017 Video 3 minutes 16 seconds
10. Fuyuhiko Takata Dream Catcher 2018 Single channel video 4 minutes 30 seconds
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iographies
Curators Mayako Murai
Emily Wakeling
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.
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iographies
Artists Masahiro Hasunuma 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.
Yūichi Higashionna 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
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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).
Tomoko Kōnoike 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 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 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).
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The Japan Foundation Gallery
in Contemporary Japanese Art July 29 2022 — Jan 28 2023 The Japan Foundation Gallery 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.
Artists 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
Designer Daryl Prondoso
Supported by
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