Chikako Yamashiro: Shapeshifter

Chikako Yamashiro

Foreword

White Rainbow would like to thank the following for their invaluable contribution to the project Yumiko Chiba Yuki Miyanaka Chikako Yamashiro Stefi Orazi Isabella Maidment Claire Potter James Kelly ADI Audiovisual Taiyo Nagano Tamassy Creative Francis Lobo

White Rainbow is proud to present the first UK solo exhibition by the acclaimed Japanese video and performance artist Chikako Yamashiro, the winner of the Asian Art Award 2017.

Yamashiro’s exhibition inaugurates a new 12-month season of exhibitions and projects by leading contemporary Japanese artists Chikako Yamashiro, Chim↑Pom, Aki Sasamoto, Taro Izumi, Meiro Koizumi and Mari Katayama. The organisation’s new non-profit model supports artist development, championing the work of emerging and mid-career Japanese artists working in a range of media, with particular focus on performance, film and installation-based practices.

Published by White Rainbow on the occasion of the exhibition: Chikako Yamashiro Shapeshifter 15 March – 28 April 2018 Artworks © Chikako Yamashiro Installation photography © Damian Griffiths Texts © White Rainbow, Isabella Maidment and Claire Potter Catalogue © White Rainbow, 2018 Edited by Edward Ball Design by Stefi Orazi Studio Print by Push

Yamashiro dramatises the lesser-known aspects of Okinawa’s contemporary reality, while questioning dominant historical accounts of Japanese and American occupation of the islands. The site of fierce battles between the US and Japan at the end of World War Two, Okinawa still has a high concentration of American military bases, occupying around 20 per cent of the land — despite the wishes of many of its indigenous inhabitants.

Yamashiro’s practice engages with political and social histories of Okinawa to create provocative and haunting works, drawing on oral accounts and often utilising her own body.

White Rainbow staff: Edward Ball Jamie Carter Fumiko Yamazaki Keith Whittle Yukiko Ito White Rainbow 47 Mortimer Street London W1W 8HJ white-rainbow.art +44 (0)207 637 1050 ISBN 978-0-9934553-4-6

This exhibition draws together a range of work by Yamashiro: from the artist’s early performance work OKINAWA TOURIST (2004) through to her most recent film, Mud Man (2016). The title Shapeshifter highlights Yamashiro’s chameleon-like sensibility. Whether using her own body or directing a cast of performers, Yamashiro seeks to put herself in the shoes of the Okinawan people.

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Image credits: pp. 10–23 Photography Damian Griffiths pp. 26–29 Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates pp. 30–31 Photograph: Takuya Oshima

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OKINAWA TOURIST (2004) is a sequence of three short performances to camera: Trip to Japan, Graveyard Eisa and I Like Okinawa Sweet. Taking its name from a tourism operator on the island, the work amounts to a parody of a tour of Okinawa. Yamashiro’s deployment

‘I came from Okinawa’— the early

of cliché ridicules how such explorations of place can gloss over socio-political truths. Whether devouring ice creams in front of a military base, or staging a typical Okinawan dance in a graveyard, Yamashiro sought to show how the US military presence continues to permeate life on the island.

More recently Yamashiro has begun to shift from performing in her own works to featuring third party subjects. Her latest film Mud Man (2016) uses a male protagonist for the first time, and was filmed in South Korea’s Jeju and in Okinawa, with Japanese and Korean languages mixed, and the landscape of the two islands juxtaposed. The work continues Yamashiro’s interest in employing flesh and the earth as metaphors for the political body of Okinawa.

works of Chikako Yamashiro

Dressed in a white tennis skirt, t-shirt and sun visor, a young woman dances alone in a cemetery. Her choice of leisurewear and nonchalant choreography jars uncomfortably with the site in which she gyrates. The work is an early video by Chikako Yamashiro, a six minute long performance to camera titled Okinawa Graveyard Club (2004). For the past fifteen years Yamashiro has made photographs and videos that address the cultural contradictions of her place of origin, the Pacific island of Okinawa where she was born in 1976 and remains based.

Located south of mainland Japan, Okinawa is widely billed as ‘a tropical paradise’, the heart of an idyllic white sand archipelago situated in the East China Sea to which millions of tourists flock each year. The island is infamous as the site of the last major battle of World War II, which was also one of the bloodiest, when more than 180,000 US Army and Marine Corps troops invaded the Pacific island in a final push towards Japan in The Battle of Okinawa. Following Japan’s surrender to the Allied Forces, Okinawa remained under US administration until 1972. To this day the island plays host to several thousand US military personnel stationed at 32 military bases, amounting to almost one third of its land mass. The particularities of this conflicted island are central to Yamashiro’s work, which strategically addresses Okinawa’s dual status as both a tropical holiday destination and as home to a substantial US military presence.

Okinawa Graveyard Club, 2004 Video, 6'00"

Seaweed Woman (2008), comprises eight photographs and a short film. In the photographic series, Yamashiro is pictured covered in weeds, floating listlessly in the current, in the sea off Henoko. The area was known for its blue coral and population of dugongs, but was built over to construct a new American military base despite nearunanimous domestic opposition. Yamashiro mythologises herself as a creature of the sea; her own body comes to symbolise Okinawan subjugation at the hands of Japan and the United States. In the startling soundtrack to the film, Yamashiro stutters, chokes and gasps for air, forcing the viewer to feel those same suffocating effects.

Isabella Maidment

White Rainbow is honoured to stage the first significant survey of Chikako Yamashiro’s work outside of Japan, and could not have done so without the care and collaboration of Yumiko Chiba Associates. Our thanks go to Yumiko Chiba and to Yuki Miyanaka for their tireless efforts. We are also grateful to Isabella Maidment for her insightful essay, and to artist-writer Claire Potter for their exhibition response. Finally, we thank Chikako Yamashiro herself for her brave and committed works, which tirelessly dig beneath the surface of Okinawa, allowing forgotten stories to be told.

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A trio of video works made in 2004 addresses this duality explicitly, using the rhetoric of tourism and the leisure industry to parody Okinawa as the ‘tropical paradise’ the tourist board describes. Collectively titled OKINAWA TOURIST (2004), these short performances to camera – Trip to Japan, Graveyard Eisa and I Like Okinawa Sweet – were made in response to the fallout of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The ensuing widespread concern that the island

In Trip to Japan Yamashiro positions herself outside the gates of the National Diet Building, the stately building at the centre of Japanese politics in Tokyo where she boldly flanks a photograph of kikkobaka, tombstones unique to Okinawa held high above her head. Contrasting with this clear image of protest, the video’s voiceover is fluent tourism rhetoric effectively giving voice to lost souls who can now only speak in the language of advertising slogans.

The third work in the series Graveyard Eisa harks back to earlier history, appropriating the Eisa: a traditional Okinawan dance offered to commemorate the dead, which has since lost its original meaning and become a spectacle performed for tourists.

Seen together, the videos form a parodic critique of Okinawa and the way it is externally perceived.

The work is reminiscent in strategy of the practices of the 1960s and ’70s associated with so-called Institutional Critique, in particular Andrea Fraser’s scripted performances executed in the form of a museum docent tour.

The Graveyard Eisa, 2004 Video, 6'50"

I Like Okinawa Sweet, 2004 Video, 7'30"

Trip to Japan, I Like Okinawa Sweet and The Graveyard Eisa, from OKINAWA TOURIST (a three-part video)

The origins of Yamashiro’s interest in performance and politicised action can be traced back to the formative years she spent studying at Okinawa Prectural University of the Arts. While majoring in Painting she formed a women’s gymnastic team, which performed together for seven years (1997-2004). The Women’s Gymnastics team, as it was known – comprising eight women and one rogue man – gained a reputation for staging performances and underground club nights. After the team disbanded, Yamashiro made a series of solo actions in which she participated in civil protests against the building of a new military base at Henoko, and staged celebratory actions that ironically sought to bestow a festive atmosphere to the site of political protest.

Each year in April, Okinawan families gather from around the world to meet in the island’s graveyards and observe Seimei Sai – a ‘graveyard sweeping’ memorial ritual. They eat together in the graveyard gardens to pay respect to their ancestors and to celebrate family ties. It is a ceremony that resonates with Yamashiro’s symbolic actions. Her work is sitespecific: concerned not just with the stuff of the land but with the cultural rituals and psychic connotations that are so deeply embedded in Okinawa, the uniquely conflicted place to which she belongs. Yamashiro’s work mines the historic burdens of Okinawa, charting the way in which it reverberates still in the contemporary condition.

Describing the process behind the making of a later video Sinking Voices, Red Breath (2010), she commented: ‘I swallowed the echoes of those other people’s memories, and then disgorged them with my heated breath.’

Isabella Maidment is Assistant Curator, Performance at Tate Modern, London

Trip to Japan, 2004 Video, 6'00"

might be the target of a subsequent attack due to its high number of US military bases led to substantial loses for the local tourist industry. The prefecture of Okinawa responded by launching a promotional campaign to assure the public that Okinawa was a safe destination. Yamashiro set out to expose the everyday reality that the campaign attempted to conceal. In I Like Okinawa Sweet, the artist positioned herself in front of the high wired fences surrounding on American radio DJ’s intermittent overly-friendly interjections. The sweet relief offered by the ice cream is deliberately misleading: for what is at stake in this seemingly carefree action is tourism, and, by extension, US culture itself, unilaterally imposed. The camera frames Yamashiro’s head and shoulders tightly. Her body is backed against the border: the US military fence. With this work Yamashiro stages her own body as a symbolic site of contestation.

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Shapeshifter

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If I had a hammer Claire Potter Huge great big things poised outward looking over everything over all the things here. One is a capsized urn, they say an upturned bottle, I say capsized urn in the sea if these vast swells of pasture could be taken somehow not for drowning. The other of the two is grounded, toppled by some group suspicious of hocus-pocus and carryings-on. Here, in this place, Nan married Jack and they lived with their names Moor and Stone they lived in stone on moor and watched the weather shape their home name space. Hard to tell what was cut out and what’s warped slowly by the long hand. The Bridestones stand strange, made with abrasion, drama.

But turn the road, up, churn it, through past the cultivated parts with their domesticated labours, up to coal, dearth of colour, void, void—void toned differently still empty but not bereft, not even empty but full of ridiculous occasions now absent from here, this place. Men jigging about with cloths and bells arranged according to old acts, and other blundering clowns at once dancing and dawdling under their own weight, unsure what else is for doing beside the dance. This is contained in the black stretch: Merrie England.

Installation views at White Rainbow, London 2018 Page 10/11 OKINAWA TOURIST 2004 Three-part video Page 12–15 Seaweed Woman 2008 Video, 7'15" and set of 8 Lambda prints, 28=50cm each Page 16–23 Mud Man 2017 Single channel version 2017 In cooperation with Aichi Triennale 2016

The land isn’t here to make a friend from.

There are undertones and whispers, yes, sometimes around boulders, but they aren’t its voice; it hasn’t got one because it’s the ground, the dirt, or else it’s the stained curtain whole histories of loss play out in front of. If it’s foggy, figures come from the fog, if it’s misty they appear on the misted hill top, and with them come tales and myths I know the ends of. If I were born a thousand years ago it would still be: death comes when your eyes are closed so keep them open guard things watch for it.

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The only time of this timeless place is now because that’s the only time it can be and now is poor and full of misgivings. At the foot of this ever-since and ever-after is real din disquiet real fear because it’s felt in jerking fits on the brink on the brink of it but repetition dulls and stills and aids its sleep, appeased a while in a crummy house somewhere until damp waking stretch replays and, haul that drag that filthy body from its pen, up again, up. This is a kind of erosion.

Every moment is not newborn that’s not what’s meant by now. A person might rise from a buried place changed, coursing differently but they are not newly born in the black stretch of time where apparitions associate in gangs, their soul aim to append themselves to others’ experience. Figures decode phenomena toward a nodding head, yes, yes, this correlates. If I had a hammer I’d get myself up there now, and I’d help what’s left of it on its way. This would be my fieldwork: sacred stones in bits and from them I’d fashion some sort of hut, one that looked touched the long hand, really old and mystic.

Claire Potter is an artist writer who lives and works along the Todmorden Smash Belt.

Trip to Japan 2004 Video, 6'00" from OKINAWA TOURIST (a three-part video)

I Like Okinawa Sweet 2004 Video, 7'30" from OKINAWA TOURIST (a three-part video)

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The Graveyard Eisa 2004 Video, 6'50" from OKINAWA TOURIST (a three-part video)

Seaweed Woman 2008 Video, 7’15” and set of 8 Lambda prints, 28=50cm each

Mud Man 2017 Single channel version 2017 High-definition video, 26'00" In cooperation with Aichi Triennale 2016

Okinawa Graveyard Club 2004 Video, 6'00"

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Chikako Yamashiro

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Born in Okinawa Japan, 1976 Lives and works in Okinawa

2018 Shapeshifter, White Rainbow, London, UK

2016–17 From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, USA

2017 The Sea of Being, RENEMIA, Okinawa, Japan

SEVEN JAPANESE ROOMS, Fondazione Carispezia, La Spezia, Italy

2016 The Beginning of Creation: Abduction/A Child, Yumiko Chiba Associates viewing room Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan

2016 Aichi Triennale 2016, The former Meiji-ya Sakae Building, Nagoya, Japan2015-16 The 1st Asia Biennial/The 5th Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China

2012 The Body of Condonement, Yumiko Chiba Associates viewing room Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan 2010–11 Choros of a Song, Yumiko Chiba Associates viewing room Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan

The 8th Asian Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia 2015 Local Prospects: Time, Space and the Sea, Mitsubishi-jisho ARTIUM, Fukuoka, Japan East Asia Feminism: FANTasia, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea

2008 Virtual Inheritance, gallery rougheryet, Okinawa, Japan

MOMAT Collection, The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, Japan

2007 Garden Talk, KANDADA, Tokyo, Japan

Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed Wartime Memory, Performativity and the Documentary in Contemporary Japanese Photography and Video Art, The Genia Schreiber University Gallery, Tel Aviv University, Israel

2005 Anyway…, gallery rougheryet, Okinawa, Japan 2004 OKINAWA TOURIST, Maejima Art Center, Okinawa, Japan 2002 Woman at Graveyard, Maejima Art Center, Okinawa, Japan

Selected Group Exhibitions 2018 Okinawa Prefectural Museum 10th Anniversary Special Exhibition: A Reunion with the Sea: Realism as Modern Asian Thought, Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, Okinawa, Japan

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Move on Asia, Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, Korea

Asian Art Award 2017 supported

by Warehouse TERRADA. Grand Prize Exhibition at Art Stage Singapore 2018, Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre, Singapore

2012–13 MAM Project 018: Chikako Yamashiro, Mori Art Museum Gallery 1, Tokyo, Japan

The Songs of Mud Installation view at KYOTOGRAPHIE 2017, Kyoto, Japan

KYOTOGRAPHIE 2017, Horikawa Oike Gallery, Kyoto, Japan

2017 Asian Art Award 2017 supported

by Warehouse TERRADA, Finalists Exhibition, TERRADA ART COMPLEX, Tokyo, Japan

2014 The Spiritual World Collection Exhibition 2014, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan 2012–13 Women In Between: Asian Women Artists 1984–2012, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka/ Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, Okinawa/Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Tochigi/Mie Prefectural Art Museum, Mie, Japan 2012 ARTLINE KASHIWA 2012 ‘Kashiwa City Jack’ – Asia Pacific Contemporary Media Arts from Daisuke Miyatsu Collection, Kara de Ganal, Chiba, Japan

2011 Invisibleness is Visibleness, MOCA TAIPEI, Taipei, China Sightseeing – A Journey Into Okinawan Art, Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, Okinawa, Japan Body Talks?, SYMPOSIA Roppongi, AXIS Building, Tokyo, Japan Okinawa Art Action! Video & Performance, Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, Goza Z Spece, Okinawa, Japan 2010–11 Radiant Moment: The New Snapshot, Contemporary Japanese Photography, vol.9, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan Videozoom Japan: Re-framing the Everyday, Sala 1, Rome, Italy & Museo Pino Pascali, Bari, Italy 2010 Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions: Searching Songs, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan When I Love You and When I Hate You, Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, Okinawa, Japan 2009 Into the Circumstances, SAKATA Kiyoko and YAMASHIRO Chikako Exhibition, Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts, Okinawa, Japan Hiroshima Art Document 2009, Old Factory of Army Clothes, Hiroshima, Japan Into the Atomic Sunshine in Sakima, Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa, Japan Into the Atomic Sunshine in Okinawa, Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum Okinawa, Japan 2008 OKINAWA PRISMED 1872–2008, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan Hiroshima Art Document 2008, Former Hiroshima Branch of Nippon Ginko, Hiroshima, Tokyo

To-Lo video screening: TokyoLondon Artists’ Exchange, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London, England 2007 The Tracks of Okinawan Culture, 1872-2007, Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, Okinawa, Japan 0 Year of Photograph, Citizens Gallery, PALLET, Okinawa, Japan VOCA 2007 – The Vision of Contemporary Art 2007, The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, Japan 2005 Crossovers & Rewrites: BORDERS over ASIA, World Social Forum 2005, Museum of Contemporary Art, Porte Alegre, Brazil Kurashiki Contemporary Art Biennial Exhibition, The Western 2005, KAKE MUSEUM of ART, Okayama, Japan 2004 Asahi Art Festival, Okinawa Cafe ‘Kanasan’, Rice+, Tokyo, Japan

Selected Film Festivals/ Screenings 2017 Festival Film Dokumenter | Yogyakarta Documentary Film Festival 2017, Yogyakarta, Indonesia Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Forum Yamagata, Yamagata, Japan 2016 Aomori Museum of Art: 10th Anniversary Art Film Encounters, AOMORI MUSEUM OF ART THEATRE, Aomori, Japan AAS in ASIA 2016 HORIZONS OF HOPE, Film Screenings Islands – Across and Between, June 26, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan Event celebrating the publication of Circulating World – The Art of Chikako Yamashiro, D& DEPARTMENT OKINAWA by OKINAWA STANDARD, Ginowan, Japan Artists’ Film Biennial: Next Year I Will Be Somewhere Else, selected by Ming Wong, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England

30th Image Forum Festival, Theatre Image Foru, Tokyo Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto, Fukuoka City Public Library, Fukuoka, Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya, Yokohama Art Museum, Yokohama, Japan TEGAMI – Japanese Art - Tomoko Inagaki Video Evening: Melting Point, FRISE, Hamburg, Germany 2015 20th Aichi Art Film Festival, Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya, Japan 2014 Hiroshima Peace Festival 2015 – 16, Artist Talk: Chikako Yamashiro & Katsuya Okuma / Screening of Her New Film, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan 10th Anniversary Screening Event for Yamashiro’s Film Production, Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, Naha, Japan Roppongi Art Night 2013 Special Screenings of Chikako Yamashiro’s Film Work, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan Women In-Between: Asian Women Artists 1984–2012 ‘Video Feature Week’, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan 43rd Okayama Art Festival, Okayama Film Festival 2005, Eiga no Kioku [Memory of the Cinema], Okayama Oriental Museum, Okayama, Japan

Awards 2017 Grand Prix, Asian Art Award 2017 supported by Warehouse TERRADA 2005 Kurashiki Contemporary Art Biennial Exhibition, The Western

Public Collections Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art; Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum; Takahashi Collection; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo; Mori Art Museum; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum; Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Australia