Meeting with Ayako Shimada

Ayako Shimada, curator based in Tokyo. Works at Yumiko Chiba Associates.

Born Yokohama and was brought up during the recession in Japan.  BA. in cultural anthropology. Shimada is interested in art from a sociological perspective, working around questions for how art could work in our daily life. Studied at the International Curators program in Stockholm.

SJCAJF met Shimada at a café in Shinagawa-ku and talked about her work and also her thoughts about feminisms in Japan. Here is an extract from her responses regarding feminisms.

“We have a difference between male and female, men and women in the society. And its true that we sometimes feel frustrated about it but it doesn’t create much energy to work around feminism in Japan. The way people react to their frustration is different than from how you deal with it in Europe. Especially younger people or people in my age - maybe in general- first try to accept something before making a change. It sometimes makes things more clear but also sometimes worse. It’s partly because of that that I suspect feminism is not that influential in Japan. We had women leading feminist movements during the 1960s- and 1970s and we achieved a certain amount of change.

I cannot see much feminism in contemporary Japanese art. It’s easier to find that kind of art in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. But a few examples could be mentioned. A few years ago the Japanese pavilion at Venice biennale was presenting photographer Ishiuchi Miyako and her works Mother’s. Another example from a year or two ago is Miwa Yanagi who presented her series with very lively grandmothers. For me individually, the reason why I don’t become active in feminism is that though there is a difference between men and women in the society, it is still not bothering me that much so I use my energy for doing other things rather than working for feminism. And I don’t know if that apply for other people as well, its only one individual example.”

The answers collected from this meeting seem to illustrate a perceived gap between the art that was produced from a feminist standpoint under the 1960s – 70s and a contemporary art production. Could this discrepancy suggest that feminism is perceived in singular and as a movement, connected with past times, rather than continuing political perspectives? This extract only gives us one perspective and we will continue to address these questions in forthcoming meetings.

Ayako Shimada at Mitsukuni Takimoto's solo exhibition "What i to curve, what is to be curved", BTAT - Tokyo Gallery+Beijing Tokyo Art Projects. 

At the library

One important aspect of our research in Tokyo is to visit libraries for the books and catalogues that are sometimes hard to find outside of Japan. Many of the best libraries belongs to Museums, as for example does the library at The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. It's a small but informative place with interesting and always up-to-date titles on art and photography. They also hold a big archive for older exhibition catalogues.


The TMMP Chief Curator Michiko Kasahara has had her post since 2006, coming directly from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT) where she among other shows organized the exhibition "Life Actually: The works of Contemporary Japanese Women" (2005). Before becoming the Chief Curator at the TMMP and working for the MOT, she was also a curator at the TMMP between 1989-2002.


Often focusing on contemporary Japanese photography, Kasahara has curated shows at the TMMP as "On Your Body" (2008), "On Landscape" (2002), and "Kiss in the Dark" (2001).


Among Kasaharas earlier shows that are of special interest to SJCAGF are: "Love's Body: Rethinking the Naked and the Nude in Photography" (1998), "Gender Beyond Memory: The Works of Contemporary Women Artists" (1996), both at TMMP.


Extra: During Kasaharas tenure at MOT, she was appointed as the commissioner for Japan at the fifty-first Venice Biennale (2005) to curate Ishiuchi Miyako — "Mother's 2000–2005: Traces of the Future", find the catalogue here.

For our readers in London!

Tonight at the Japan Foundation from 6.30pm "Art, Performace & Activism - in conversation: Yoshiko Shimada and Soni Kum" together with curators Professor Fran Lloyd, a Japan Foundation Fellow of Kingston University, London and Professor Rebecca Jennison of Kyoto Seika University in Kyoto

The exhibition Art, Performance and Activism in Contemporary Japan will run at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park from 19 January to 26 February 2012.

See the Japan Foundation London for more information. 

To the light

Right now there is an exhibition with Yoko Ono at the Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo. With hope as a guiding star, Ono's exhibition responds to the aftermath of the great earthquake. In the work TO THE LIGHT (see image) the visitor is invited to follow a dark and mysterious maze that eventually leads to a source of light.

Ono is an artist of great significance in the feminist art discourse in Japan, but of course also in an international context. In the literature surrounding both Japanese women artists as well as the feminist artists she takes a prominent position, often in company with artists like Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama, Mieko Shiomi, Shigeko Kubota and Mako Idemitsu.

Here is just one example for further reading:

Midori Yoshimoto, Into performance, Japanese women artists in New York, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutger University Press, 2005.

"Unusually courageous and self-determined, they were among the first Japanese women to leave their country-and its male-dominated, conservative art world-to explore the artistic possibilities in New York. They not only benefited from the New York art scene, however, they played a major role in the development of international performance and intermedia art by bridging avant garde movements in Tokyo and New York. This book traces the pioneering work of these five women artists and the socio-cultural issues that shaped their careers. Into Performance also explores the transformation of these artists' lifestyle from traditionally confined Japanese women to internationally active artists. Yoshimoto demonstrates how their work paved the way for younger Japanese women artists who continue to seek opportunities in the West today."
/Rutger University Press

Tokyo Wonder Site

Tokyo Wonder Site is the Institute of Contemporary Arts and International Cultural Exchange in Tokyo, an art center dedicated to the generation and promotion of new art and culture since 2001. TWS was first created by the Japanese Government as the Tokyo Wonder Wall in 2000, a new innovative exhibitionspace for emerging artists in Tokyo. The Government was dealing with the aftereffects of the economic bubble around the millennium where many artists lacked economic support and places to display their works. Tokyo Wonder Wall meant to discover and support these emerging artists, and has now grown til the big organization it is today, with three different locations around town: Hongo, Shibuya and Aoyama, each with a unique focus.

TWS Hongo works mainly with young talents and with the still-existing Tokyo Wonder Wall. TWS Shibuya is the global cultural network in Japan and abroad that functions as an international platform. TWS Aoyama opened the Creator-in-Residence program in 2006, an international program for all genres and nationalities with the aim to create a platform for shared processes. TWS also collaborates with IASPIS in Sweden.
 
TWS are arranging different programs and events throughout the year, from the ongoing Tokyo Experimental Festival - Sound, Art & Performance to the International Advisor Talk, organized together with the Open Studio day.

This year's first Open Studio took place on the 21st of January and included works by 15 artists, both from Japan and abroad. 
 

Visting Ryusuke Kido's studio. 

SJCAGF visited when the International Advisor was the wellknown curator David Elliott. Elliott is the Artistic Director of the Kyiv International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Ukraine) in 2012, former Director of Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), and former Director of the Modern Art Museum (Stockholm) between 1996-2001. Elliott gave a lecture on curating contemporary art with a focus on asian art. The talk was called "Looking for comparisons. Thoughts about curating contemporary art". 

Of particular interest for us was the part of the presentation thar concerned the exhibition Bye Bye Kitty - curated by Elliott - that was shown at the Japan Society in New York in 2011. Organized as an attempt to go beyond the stereotypes that has marked the view of contemporary Japanese culture from a Western perspective, Elliott's proposal departed from what he described as Japan's "five epic struggles" namely that; between the generations, between the sexes, with history and tradition, with the self and with nature. The question of the role of feminism in Japanese art was touched upon briefly, mainly through hasty examples of some of the works that were chosen for the exhibition. The catalogue that accompanied the exhibition includes a text by Elliott that supposedly should give some remarks on the subject.

 Elliott's presentation, translated into Japanese.

Triple Fantasy

An important aspect of our stay in Tokyo is to meet different artists that are based here. We went to the opening of the exhibition "triple fantasy" at Shashinkosha art print gallery in Kanda where Fumiko Imano, Kotori Kawashima and EikiMori presented new works. 

Fumiko Imano's works in the exhibition had funeral photographs as a starting point and was conceived in some aspects as a response to the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The photographs ultimately evolve around the possibility of self-presentation.    

Performance by Fumiko Imano. 

Fumiko Imano

Eiki Mori in front of one of his photographs. 

Galleries

Our first step here in Tokyo has been to get some idea of what the art map looks like and what kind of exhibitions that are shown at the moment. The contemporary art scene does not have an obvious centre and the galleries and museums for contemporary art are scattered around the enormous city. 

The Artcomplex Center of Tokyo in Shinjuku-ku. The complex was divided in several small rooms on the second floor where each artist had his/her own space. Our impression was that the Artcomplex works like a space for relatively unestablished artists.

http://www.gallerycomplex.com/

NADiff, a building in Ebisu Shibuya-ku, that contains several galleries. 

http://www.nadiff.com/

At the time of our visit, Japanese artist Ken Kitano's photographs from the series “our face project: Asia” was shown at Gallery MEM. With globalization and identity as subjects, Kitano has travelled the world and made an interesting kind of layered group portraits from each location.

More information about the project can be found on the artist's website: http://www.ourface.com/english/works/ourface.html

Industrial building in Kiyosumi that incorporates TomioKoyama Gallery, Taka Ishii Gallery, Hiromi Yoshii, and Shugoarts.

The same building, on our way to the galleries.