Chim↑Pom: Why Open?

Chim↑Pom

Published by White Rainbow on the occasion of the exhibition Chim↑Pom Why Open?

18 May – 7 July 2018 Artworks © Chim↑Pom Installation photography © Damian Griffiths Texts © White Rainbow, Joseph Constable and Bijutsu Techo Magazine Catalogue © White Rainbow, 2018 Edited by Edward Ball Design by Stefi Orazi Studio Print by Push 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) 20 7637 1050 ISBN 978-0-9934553-5-3 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing of the copyright holders and of the publishers.

Credits: pp. 9–11, 33–36 Courtesy the artists and MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo. p. 11 (top) Photography: Cactus Nakao. p. 11 (bottom) Photography: Osamu Matsuda. p. 12 Courtesy the artists and Yamamoto Gendai, Tokyo. Photography: Keizo Kioku. pp. 14–27 Photography: Damian Griffiths. p. 30 Installation commissioned by the 20th Biennale of Sydney.

Courtesy Don’t Follow the Wind Committee. p. 30 Courtesy Chim↑Pom Studio.

Photography: Kenji Morita. p. 32 Photography: Yu en Lin and jia-zhen Lee. p. 34 Photography: Yuki Maeda. pp. 29–37 Interview by Yuki Harada.

Edited by Ayako Konno.

Translation cooperation by Mio Iwakiri.

This interview was originally published in Bijutsu Techo Magazine, April & May, 2018.

English translation by Bethan Jones.

White Rainbow would like to thank the following for their invaluable contribution to the catalogue and exhibition

Contents

Chim↑Pom members: Ryuta Ushiro Yasutaka Hayashi Ellie Masataka Okada Motomu Inaoka Toshinori Mizuno MUJIN-TO Production Yamamoto Gendai SPACE Studios Bijutsu Techo Magazine ADI Audiovisual Hibiki Mizuno Rika Fujiki Yukiko Kakiuchi Yuko Yamamoto Jason Waite Lena Fritsch Ben Eastham Joseph Constable Nicola Wright Stefi Orazi James Kelly Yuki Harada Ayako Konno Mio Iwakiri Chris Larner Persilia Caton Ashley Smaje Bethan Jones

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Foreword

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Chim↑Pom and the Embrace of Precarity Joseph Constable

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Why Open?

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Report on Chim↑Pom’s 道 [Street] Project in Taiwan Interview with Ryuta Ushiro and Yasutaka Hayashi

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The Influence of Chim↑Pom’s 道 [Street] Interview with Hsiao-Yu Lin

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CV

Foreword

White Rainbow is proud to present Why Open? – a solo exhibition by the renowned artist collective Chim↑Pom (formed 2005, Tokyo, Japan).

Comprising Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Ellie, Masataka Okada, Motomu Inaoka, and Toshinori Mizuno, Chim↑Pom’s work includes interventions through performance, video, painting, installation, curating and organising events. Sharp social critique underpins the group’s work, and the collective is unafraid to cause controversy in the service of their message. As Christopher Y. Lew, Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum, New York, has stated: the group negotiates a difficult line – they do not make the direct assertions of activists but rather offer an ambiguous voice that is both complicit and critical.

To date, some of the collective’s actions have included: in 2008, skywriting the word ‘PIKA’ – a mimetic word in Japanese for ‘flash’ – over Hiroshima where the atomic bomb was dropped; in 2011, a guerrilla-style ‘updating’ of Taro Okamoto’s mural depicting the history of nuclear exposure in Japan, in order to better reflect Japan’s postFukushima nuclear reality; in 2012, as part of the collective Don’t Follow The Wind, the group entered the Fukushima Nuclear Zone and installed an exhibition across abandoned properties in the area – the exhibition remains inaccessible while radiation levels remain.

In recent years, the group has realised projects in cities around the world, reflecting on the role of public space and borders. Why Open? brings together a selection of work from projects in the Fukushima Nuclear Zone, the U.S.-Mexico border, in Tokyo and in Taiwan.

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White Rainbow’s doorbell hosts the first work in the exhibition: Silent Bells (2017) is activated when a visitor presses the entry buzzer, which connects directly to an abandoned house in Fukushima, still unsafe to visit due

to radiation. Pushing White Rainbow’s doorbell causes the inaccessible doorbell in Fukushima to ring, reverberating in the gallery space.

Chim↑Pom’s new street asked: ‘Who owns national institutions?’ ‘What is the public?’ The work functioned as an alternative public space: the group invited people to contribute ideas for how the space was used. The graffiti present on the slab of asphalt is a contribution by a Taiwanese artist, which critiques the Taiwanese government’s efforts to crack down on artistic exchange.

Chim↑Pom held a block party on the street, using this to subvert the rules of assembly and public protest, in turn creating a space subject to its own rules and regulations, distinct from the museum and from the public street outside. White Rainbow’s cinema space becomes an installation archive of this project, incorporating an architectural model, banners, objects and photographs, alongside video documentation of Ellie’s speech inaugurating the street.

Barely visible in the darkened main gallery is The Grounds (2016), which comprises a video and a plaster cast sculpture of Chim↑Pom member Ellie’s footprints. The work is part of a wider project called The Other Side (2016). In response to Ellie being denied entry to the U.S., the group went to the Tijuana border and discovered a maze of unofficial and illegal tunnels there. Inspired by this, the group dug a tunnel and Ellie planted her feet on soil below the border, from which they created the plaster cast sculpture. Additionally, the collective spent time with a Tijuana family, and built a tree house in their garden.

The group humorously titled the house USA Visitor Center, which only served to highlight how inaccessible the country is to many, including Ellie herself. A new work, Asshole of Tokyo (2018), is a film projection. The group opened a manhole cover in Tokyo and filmed what they saw. The idea of a whole network of underground tunnels connects back to the Tijuana tunnels, but also to inaccessible Fukushima. Chim↑Pom ask: why not reach Fukushima by underground tunnel?

The group recently opened up their studio in Tokyo to the public, removing the doors to create a new kind of public space. They called the project Chim↑Pom Street (2017).

This work led to one of their most ambitious projects to date: 道 [Street] (2018) at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. This project is represented in the main gallery space by a three-metre slab of asphalt. Titled Is Artistic Exchange a Crime? (2018), the work is a physical relic of an ambitious social project. Inspired by the Sunflower Movement in 2014 – a student movement in which participants took over the Taiwanese parliament for one month – Chim↑Pom constructed a new 200m long street, which extended from the museum entrance out into a public street. Chim↑Pom conducted interviews with these students, and were struck by one person’s story. The student in question simply tried to open a door in the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s Parliament building) and was stunned to find it unlocked. They asked: ‘Why was it open?’

The rest of the students flooded in and occupied the building. This account gave rise to Chim↑Pom’s project at the museum.

Why Open? testifies to the group’s openness to the world around them – in their 13 years as a collective, Chim↑Pom have continually placed themselves in complex situations and contested territories, in order to ask those difficult questions that others might not.

White Rainbow is honoured to stage such an ambitious solo exhibition by Chim↑Pom, and could not have done so without the collaboration and enthusiasm of the collective’s long-term gallery, MUJIN-TO Production, who have championed the group since their very beginning in 2005. Our thanks also go to Yuko Yamamoto of Yamamoto Gendai gallery, and to Joseph Constable for his insightful new text on the collective’s work. Finally, our biggest thanks go to Chim↑Pom themselves, who challenge us to imagine the world differently.

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Chim↑Pom and the Embrace of Precarity Joseph Constable Since 2005, the actions of the Japanese collective Chim↑Pom have taken form through performances, video works, sculptures and exhibitions. Their work is fervently of the present, encompassing insurgent acts within public space that frequently use the body as a tool of intervention and exposure in order to defamiliarise our everyday environments. A temporal and spatial precarity haunts each of Chim↑Pom’s projects, whether they are constructing a new street with its own rules and regulations, digging a hole beneath the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, breaking into the exclusion zones around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station or driving through the streets of Tokyo summoning a parade of crows. An activist position may initiate their many actions, however what unites the diversity of Chim↑Pom’s work is a pointed embrace and transformation of the precariousness that characterises our contemporary life.

Theorist and activist Franco Bifo Berardi states that precariousness is the predominant condition of our age.

It is: the fragmentation of the social body, the fracturing of self-perception and of the perception of time.

Time no longer belongs to the individual, and the capitalist no longer buys the personal life of individuals; instead, people are erased from the space of work, and time is turned into a vortex of depersonalised, fragmentary substance that can be acquired by the capitalist and recombined by the network-machine.1

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In Berardi’s eyes, time, and the value that we place in past, present and future frames, becomes confused. Our bodies are continuously co-opted and dispersed through labour and capital, such that we become part of a network, part of a machine. The fragmentation referred to by Berardi leads to an overriding precariousness and lack of control; we become subject to and victim of ‘official’ society, of forces with the capability of swallowing our individual sense of time and space. Through their actions,

Real Times, 2011 Video

USA Visitor Center, 2016

‘And now, a new street is born’.2 This proclamation by Ellie, one sixth of Chim↑Pom, is simultaneously embedded with energy of the present and the future. The present was 29 September 2017, during the Asian Art Biennale, when the collective opened a street that merged the boundaries of inside and outside via a 200-metre-long asphalt street extending outwards from the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. The future was indicated by the symbolic emergence of this temporary structure and its potential to exist outside the original regulations that have come to frame our understanding of public space. As Ellie goes on to say: ‘Streets are without any rules in the first place’.3 Her words are marked by a desire to reclaim our spaces, and in doing so, give birth not just to a new street, but also to a new conception of what ‘public’ can be.

This work, titled 道 [Street], is Chim↑Pom’s most recent project that tackles the troubled relationship between individual bodies and collective spaces. In previous projects, this tension has been explored within more politicised realms, such as the history of nuclear destruction in their home country. In 2011, Chim↑Pom made a series of works in response to The Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent nuclear disaster in Fukushima by trespassing into the exclusion zone.

The context in which they found themselves was one of collective powerlessness, where the tension between the individual body and public space is accelerated to such a degree that only a void remains. It was within this gap that Chim↑Pom responded: they stretched out a white flag, sprayed a red circle on it resembling the Japanese flag, then altered it further into a radiation symbol and raised the flag in the air. It was two years earlier that Chim↑Pom had been

criticised for the guerrilla act of skywriting the word ‘PIKA!’, a mimetic word in Japanese meaning ‘FLASH!’, over the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima. Labelled at the time as an insensitive, flippant act, the meeting point between this and their later work in Fukushima demonstrates the potential ricochet of an ostensibly minor act against the gravity of the calamitous events themselves. While flippancy is a rather shallow reading that suggests a lack of seriousness, Chim↑Pom’s actions may often be small, yet they represent a powerful, temporal spasm that intervenes into the realities of disaster, everyday life and historical memory.

Making the sky of Hiroshima ‘PIKA!’, 2009 Video, Lambda print

Chim↑Pom reject this potential loss of self, while also providing opportunities for the public to participate in collective deviations that attempt to take back control of our prevailing precarity by subverting the network from within.

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This framing of Chim↑Pom’s actions as intervening spasms turns our attention back to the body. A spasm is a sudden, abnormal, involuntary muscular contraction, or a series of alternating muscular contractions and relaxation. The body often features as a politicised site of exploration within Chim↑Pom’s practice: from early performances and happenings, such as Kurukuru Party (2009), Erigero (2005) and Becoming Friends, Eating Each Other or Falling Down Together (2008), the nexus of power and desire is centred upon bodies that party, expose themselves, are dirtied, or placed under duress and endurance. Both playful and violent, the anarchic impulse that is embedded within these earlier performances anticipates more recent activist and community-based pieces, such as 道 [Street] and The Other Side (2016).

The latter is a series of works made in response to Ellie being denied entry to the U.S., which involved digging a hole beneath the Mexican side of the border and building the USA Visitor Center, a treehouse perched atop the border wall that separates Tijuana from San Diego, California.

By responding to perhaps the most explicit example of how the contemporary body is contained, restricted and excluded, Chim↑Pom come full circle in order to liberate the body, this time from the ground down.

Installation view Good to be human Yamamoto Gendai, Tokyo, 2009

As Julian Worrall comments, such actions are a search for a psychophysical space: or play, for spontaneity, open to chance and improvisation, that is liberating and empowering.

A struggle for a space that is truly public.4 From the individual body to the streets of the city to spaces of nuclear disaster, the energy with which Chim↑Pom’s activities oscillate is by nature spasmodic and precarious, yet in the process, they imagine, perform and propose radical visions for the future. The strategies through which they enact these potentials are temporal – looping in and out of past, present and future consciousness – but also firmly rooted in an ability to imagine freely. This freedom is fuelled by an embrace of precarity and the unruliness of individual and collective bodies. In the artists’ own words: ‘we believe imagination is the very possibility for ground zero, and the most fundamental power to create the future’.5

Joseph Constable is Assistant Curator at Serpentine Galleries, London, and an independent writer.

1 B erardi, Franco ‘Bifo’, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso, 2015: 49-50.

2 Speech by Ellie at the inauguration of 道 [Street], National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 29 September 2017.

3 Ibid.

4 Worrall, Julian, ‘Chim↑Pom’s Spatial Tactics: An Art of Public Space’ in Chim↑Pom: Super Rat, ed. Abe Kenichi. Tokyo, Japan: PARCO CO., LTD, 2012: 223.

5 Chim↑Pom, 2011 in Chim↑Pom: Super Rat, ed.

Abe Kenichi. Tokyo, Japan: PARCO CO., LTD, 2012: 31.

Why Open?

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Report on Chim↑Pom’s 道 [Street] Project in Taiwan: A public domain born from a sense of complicity

Interview with Ryuta Ushiro and Yasutaka Hayashi BIJUTSU TECHO MAGAZINE Looking at Chim↑Pom’s recent activities, it struck me that from your artist-run space Garter in Koenji to your large scale project in Kabukicho, Tokyo, a lot of your activity has been self-managed.

RYUTA USHIRO Though we’ve only recently started publicly declaring them ‘DIY projects’, our style hasn’t actually changed since the early days. We’ve self-funded a lot of our projects, and the idea of being ‘complicit’ with local people has been our way of working for a long time now. I suppose it’s a way of taking responsibility for our own work.

YASUTAKA HAYASHI Our fundamental premise is that we just want to do what we want to do; our aim isn’t to win freedom of expression, and we don’t set out to antagonise anyone.

All the same, the industry as it stands is boring. In which case, we realised, we should use our own projects to create an alternative art scene. There was a particularly strong element of that in Don’t Follow the Wind. Putting together a team of curators, choosing artists, setting up an organising committee involving gallerists and local people. The very process of putting together a small collective like that was kind of an attempt to create an alternative, ideal art scene.

RU

Installation views at White Rainbow, London 2018 Pages 14–21 Archival installation of 道 [Street] 2017–18 Pages 22/23 Foreground: Is Artistic Exchange a Crime? 2018 Spray paint and paper on asphalt Background: The Grounds 2016 Plaster cast and video (5′28′′) Pages 24/25 The Grounds 2016 Plaster cast and video (5′28′′) Pages 26/27 Foreground: Is Artistic Exchange a Crime? 2018 Spray paint and paper on asphalt Background: Asshole of Tokyo 2018 Film installation

YH The reason we set up the artist-run space in Koenji was because our activities are based in Tokyo, so we needed a space where everyone could get together in Tokyo.

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RU We’d also always had the issue of how to relate to existing institutions. One aspect of creating a new art scene was that it would enable us to act as curators and introduce interesting people who would never be featured in art galleries. I think it was our Kabukicho project So see you again tomorrow, too? (2016) that started us using the word DIY. After all, we used Ellie’s savings to produce it, and then ran it using money from entry fees [laughs]. One important aspect of it was the way you could directly sense this organic feeling arising from all the people from different walks of life who had been involved with that place.

Historically speaking, Kabukicho was a burnt-out wasteland after the war until people got together to plan a city and a mixture of different businesses started to spring up. Using the Kabukicho Promotion Association building, a symbol of that time, allowed us to internalise the context of the public space.

The Promotion Association’s stance of not casting judgment as to whether something was good or bad, however shady it might be, but instead acting as a buffer against the authorities and accepting all-comers, was a kind of new invention.

And that attitude ended up creating a really unique district. With unique people.

YH

RU By embodying through exhibitions and events the notion of ‘public’ implemented by this semi-private, semi-public organisation, the site-specificity of the work ended up becoming the work itself. That’s why with 道 [Street] we wanted to keep exploring the possibilities brought to the notion of ‘public’ by the involvement of large numbers of anonymous people.

Connecting road and museum Could you tell us how 道 [Street], the project that opened at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts last September as part of the Asian Art Biennale 2017, came about?

BT

RU The theme of the exhibition was ‘Negotiating the Future’, and a lot of the participating artists were quite political.

One of the curators, Kenji Kubota, got in touch, and we went over to Taiwan to do some research. The theme got us interested in the Sunflower Student Movement (a 2014 protest movement that occupied the Legislative Yuan), and when we met and spoke to some of the young people who had actually been involved, it was seriously fascinating. What made a particular impression on us was the unbelievable fact that when the first protest group got to the Legislative Yuan (the equivalent of the Houses of Parliament), for some reason the last door was unlocked.

YH This thick, heavy door, which it would have been impossible to kick down, was open, so apparently they were able to occupy the building without being arrested.

Top Don’t Follow the Wind, A Walk in Fukushima installation view at Carriageworks, 2016 360 degree video, headsets, cafe furniture from Fukushima, Australian uranium, maps Above So See You Again Tomorrow, Too? Installation view at Kabukicho Promotion Association Building, Tokyo, 2016 Right Chim↑Pom Street installation view, Tokyo, 2017 Waste material from previous project locations

RU We’re talking about the door to the hub of the nation that should normally be locked. Naturally, they were asking themselves ‘Why open?’ and we thought that was a good question. During their month-long occupation of the Legislative Yuan they sent out daily updates via social media, had parties, and came up with a campaign song. Meeting Betty Apple, a musician who was involved in producing the song, was also significant for us. At any rate, people outside were receiving their updates about the movement, and the whole thing connected inside and outside, state and individuals.

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YH We thought maybe 道 [Street] could connect something inside with something outside, just like the last door at the Legislative Yuan.

RU We’d just made Chim↑Pom Street at the Kitakore Building, so we had no problem coming up with the idea for the piece.

Chim↑Pom Street is another Why Open? domain that’s open to everyone 24 hours a day [laughs]. So in the end we decided to use 道 [Street] to connect the inside of Taiwan’s only National Museum of Fine Arts with the public highway outside. In that way, it would connect the Biennale right the way up to the Legislative Yuan, and also pose once again the questions asked by the Sunflower Student Movement: what are national institutions for, and who does the ‘public’ belong to?

BT At the same time as being a work of art, Chim↑Pom Street is also an actual public space and an event space. There are gigs, drunk people come in to use the toilet; I’m surprised how far it’s expanded whilst retaining the concept of a ‘work of art’.

RU The weekly conversations we had with the architect Takashi Suo as we worked on the idea had a lot to do with it. When he suggested we free the closed atmosphere of the Kitakore Building and create a space inside where people could get together, we thought a ‘street’ would be the way to go. It didn’t feel like a square would be as chaotic.

Regulating 道 [Street] BT Could you tell us about the reaction to your having created a new ‘street’ in Taiwan?

RU Firstly, even if you manage to connect inside and outside using a load of asphalt, the concept of ‘creating a street’ involves it actually being used as a public space,

道 [Street] 2017–18 Site-specific installation

ART is in the pARTy 2018 Block party on 道 [Street]

you know? And when we imagined how it might be used, we came up against the fact that 道 [Street] was still part of the art museum and as such was subject to various restrictions.

No alcohol or smoking. But how about demonstrations? How about sleeping?

YH

RU Every public realm has its own unique rules. But when we thought about it, the difference between each of them was intriguing. For example, in Taiwan you can drink and smoke on a public highway, but inside the public art museum you can’t, even though they’re both in the public realm. Extreme art is allowed in the museum, but not on the public highway.

So how about on the street that connects the two [laughs]? The solution we reached was to negotiate with the gallery and come up with a set of independent regulations for 道 [Street] as a third type of public space.

BT How did you come up with the regulations?

RU We started by writing a draft and then negotiated each individual regulation with the museum. For example, graffiti isn’t allowed inside the museum, but materially speaking 道 [Street] is our work, so it was permitted there. When we said that since it’s on the road, people should have the right to demonstrate, they said they wouldn’t permit any kind of demonstration within the museum. After negotiating, though, they said that as long as it was under the auspices of Chim↑Pom, people would be allowed to ‘express themselves’.

In a reversal that could only happen in art, if the museum were to interfere they would be guilty of censorship. When we put up a poster in the exhibition space asking for ways to use the street, we received several suggestions by email.

Our next strategy was to hold a block party,

as a showcase for different activities, and as an opportunity for Taiwanese people to really use it as they saw fit.

We asked the musician I mentioned, Betty Apple, to come and curate the party.

She’d been involved in the Sunflower Student Movement and the anti-nuclear movement, and had various connections with subculture in the form of art spaces and collectives, so we wanted her to come up with a line-up that would let the Taiwanese people create ‘the street’ for themselves.

As a result we even got the go-ahead to have food and drink, which we’d been told weren’t allowed, as long as they were for the purposes of artistic expression [laughs]! The event itself was amazing: bursting with energy, as though we’d put on an alternative performance biennale [laughs]! Another thing we did was to put theatre style seating around the part of 道 [Street] that was inside the museum, so

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that visitors could watch the party.

We wanted to make people aware of the border between inside and out, so we created another layer outside of the party, in the form of a spectator zone.

道 [Street] as a medium for new connections One of the most memorable things about the Biennale was meeting Xiganggogreen: a collective from Tainan.

Two days before the party one of the collective, who was in his twenties, came to see us and made a proposal for what they wanted to do on 道 [Street]. It ended up being a special moment in my life as an artist. The collective was based in rural Tainan, and was the type of collective that shared a cultural way of life with its neighbours, surrounded by nature. At the time, a certain street in their village was being targeted for redevelopment and RU

道 [Street] 2017–18 (detail) Site-specific installation

they were involved in protest activities. The street still housed the railway tracks that had been used to transport sugarcane during the period of Japanese rule, and for the people of the village it had historical and cultural significance. They weren’t city types, and weren’t used to the spotlight, but they wanted more people to know what was going on. They’d visited the Biennale several times, and seen our work, and realised that if they used 道 [Street] as a medium, they could make their case in the public space that was the National Museum of Fine Arts. Maybe they also felt that Chim↑Pom might sympathise as a fellow collective. Their approach was to hold an unplugged party and a ten-minute silent demonstration on 道 [Street], followed by a press conference. I thought a press conference was a smart idea, and I really felt that they needed the museum and our art, so I agreed wholeheartedly, and then the guy burst into tears! I guess he was really invested in the idea, and it was a big moment for us, as well, because it showed us that this piece was powerful in a way that was different from traditional works of art.

YH We realised that without us even noticing, it was now the only place of its kind in the whole of Taiwan.

RU We’ve been involved with a lot of groups and individuals in the past, but the series of encounters we’ve had through 道 [Street] has been completely different from any of them. The work itself became the medium that gave rise to new art scenes and organic movements from amongst the audience. The creation of a piece of art that has turned audience members into conscious practitioners has been an important turning point not just for the museum, but maybe even for art itself.

Xiganggogreen collective, 2017

BT I thought it was wonderful that your intervention in the system didn’t stop at the usual criticism, but went on to mediate

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between people and practices that had nowhere left to go and the existing system, and what’s more that it all took place within the framework of art.

YH We’ve always put a lot of thought into the question of how to face up to common sense and logic, and how to balance that with art. Because if you don’t get that right your art won’t work.

The concept of ‘public’ is one of the most easily influenced by our changing notions of logic and values over time. You can see extreme examples of that in cities; for example our concept of ‘public’ in the 90s when Masato Nakamura of Command N created The Ginburart and Shinjuku Shonen Art was completely different from what it is now, and people’s reactions would have been different. The continual challenge of artists is to attempt to introduce an outside element to the times they live in. Chim↑Pom is known for producing that kind of work in the street, but somehow we’ve now ended up making our own piece of city infrastructure: our own ‘street’ [laughs]! And as both a stage and in terms of its relationship with the audience it’s ended up being something completely different from an alternative space, or relational art. It’s not something we expected. So now we feel that this project has even more potential. We could take this method anywhere, and it would have the ability to tangibly express each country’s own rules around public highways and art museums, so I think we could do it in different countries.

RU

BT Just as the extreme Japanese art of the 1960s led to the introduction of restrictions around the exhibition of art in museums that are still adhered to today, there’s a sense in which the avant-garde work of the past ended up actually limiting our expressive possibilities. 道 [Street], on the other hand, is expanding the scope of what’s possible in an art gallery.

The influence of Chim↑Pom’s 道 [Street]

Interview with Hsiao-Yu Lin What did you think when you first heard the idea for their piece?

BIJUTSU TECHO MAGAZINE

Level 7 feat. ‘Myth of Tomorrow’ 2011 Video documentation, 4′32′′

RU You’re right that avant-garde art back then took to the streets to escape from the art galleries. And the art galleries responded by getting stricter.

Maybe 道 [Street] has managed to repair the connection between the public highways and the galleries.

Chim↑Pom is often seen in an avantgarde context, but I think this project has broadened the role of the gallery and the concept of art for us. I also think, though, that the way avant-garde art pioneered art literacy is also important in thinking about the notion of ‘public’. For example, our piece Level 7 Feat. Myth of Tomorrow was widely debated based on the artistic interpretation that Taro Okamoto would have welcomed it. Even though popular logic was enraged by it. Which is to say that because of public art, there is clearly a double standard when it comes to the concept of ‘public’ [laughs]. There were two contact points

for 道 [Street]: the art museum, and Chim↑Pom. If 道 [Street] were Myth of Tomorrow, then Xiganggogreen who ‘attacked’ it would be in the position Chim↑Pom were in back then, and the art museum would be ‘popular logic’, and the artist, Chim↑Pom, would be Taro Okamoto, right? Hence their interpretation of the situation was that Chim↑Pom would be fine with what they wanted to do, and out of the two doors available to them they chose to approach us. But actually, an art museum is a place that has accumulated a vast store of art DNA. Which means that rather than deifying these stiff regulations and shutting themselves off, I think they ought to be able to pull out some of the rich diversity of art from their stores and open themselves up as a grey zone: an alternative public space.

HSIAO-YU LIN At first I thought they were joking. To be honest, it was such a challenging concept that we had a lot of trouble deciding whether to accept it or not, but the curatorial team talked about the fact that the museum ought to have the courage to support this ambitious project, and we decided to go for it. It actually turned out to be quite tricky and difficult. Through the project, and through the reaction of the artists, the museum, and the public, we realised how difficult ‘negotiation’ can be; it really made us think about the role of the art museum, the definition of contemporary art, and the responsibility of the curator.

BT What did you feel was the biggest challenge for you in the process of negotiating with the artists?

HL As the in-house curator of the National Museum of Fine Arts, I found it complicated, psychologically. The essence of this project was to challenge the Art Museum as a symbol of power: the very thing that I rely on. As we were working with them, I found myself constantly questioning whether we ought to accept the artists’ demands. Of course, it would have been possible to say ‘no’, but that would have robbed the art of its meaning.

But if we said ‘yes’, the museum risked losing its power. Making that call was the biggest challenge for me.

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BT What was the audience response like in Taiwan?

HL The response to the piece was split down the middle. It went down well in the art world, where they said the concept was an excellent response to the theme of ‘Negotiating the Future’, but some of the pubic were critical because they think art should be beautiful to look at and don’t like political statements in art. But the block party was a success. I think it brought a breath of fresh, energetic, youthful, air to the museum.

Hsiao-Yu Lin is Curator at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and co-curator of the 2016 Taiwan Biennale.

Chim↑Pom

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Publications

Formed 2005, Tokyo, Japan

2018 Why Open?, White Rainbow, London, UK

Why Can’t We Make the Sky of Hiroshima ‘PIKA!’? co-edited with Kenichi Abe, Tokyo: MUJIN-TO Production, 2009

Members: Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Ellie, Masataka Okada, Motomu Inaoka and Toshinori Mizuno.

2017 Non-Burnable, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, USA The other side, MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo, Japan

GeijutsuJikkohan [Art as Action], Tokyo: Asahi Press, 2012

2016 So see you again tomorrow, too?, Kabukicho Shinko-Kumiai Building, Tokyo, Japan

Super Rat, Tokyo: Parco, 2012

2015 SUPER RAT, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK 2013 Hiroshima!!!!!, Former Bank of Japan Hiroshima Branch, Hiroshima, Japan 2012 Chim↑Pom, Parco Museum, Tokyo, Japan 2011 Chim↑Pom, MoMA PS1, New York, USA Selected Group Exhibitions 2017 Negotiating the Future: 2017 Asian Art Biennale, Taichung, Taiwan Mondes Flottants: 14th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France 2016 20th Biennale of Sydney (Don’t Follow the Wind), Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia Busan Biennale 2016, Busan Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea 2015 Don’t Follow the Wind, inside the radioactive exclusion zone, Fukushima, Japan 2014 Zero Tolerance, MoMA PS1, New York, USA 2012 The 9th Shanghai Biennale – REACTIVATION, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China

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Chim↑Pom, Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2010

2010 The 29th São Paulo Biennial – There is always a cup of sea to sail in, Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, Brazil

Ellie Wa Itsumo Kimochi Warui, Tokyo: Asahi Press, 2014 Don’t Follow the Wind, official exhibition catalogue, co-edited with Noi Sawaragi, Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2015 The City as its People: Sukurappu ando Birudo Project, Tokyo: LIXIL Publishing, 2017