Back in Sweden

We have now left Japan after one very interesting month. Our greatest thanks to the persons that have met us, sent us information and supported the project in different ways.

Please check this site for SJCAGF-updates!

Dinner with Rebecca Jennison

We just came back to Tokyo after spending two days in Kyoto where we met with Rebecca Jennison, professor at Kyoto Seika University in the department of humanities, division of culture and arts. Jennison has, among other things, worked on publications concerning Japanese art that has a feminist standpoint. To name just one: Imagination without borders: Feminist artist Tomiyama Taeko and social responsibility (2010, co-edited with Laura Hein). The publication is also an example of the difficulties that seems to be attached to the concept of feminism. The insertion of the word "feminist" in the title was done after lengthy discussions between the editors and the artist. What happens when an artist is labelled feminist?

Over dinner we talked about how the situation for feminism is and has been in Kyoto for the last couple of decades. Jennison has lived in Japan for about 30 years and has been a part of the continuing discussion about what feminisms can and should be under that time. She talked about the last couple of years as a backlash but as many others that we have spoken to during our time here, she hopes that the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami of 2011 will bring new, creative thinking.

Meeting Yoshiko Shimada

SJCAGF met artist Yoshiko Shimada at her gallery Ota Fine Arts in Roppongi. Shimada just came back from London where she’s participating in the exhibition Art, Performance and Activism at the Pumphouse gallery, a show we mentioned earlier. The recent exhibiton stemmes from Art of Intervention, a cultural exchange program between Kyoto and London that was held in 2008-10.


Shimada is renowned for working on topics such as Japanese history, women, feminism, violence and nationalism. Her new works are based on East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front and are part of a larger project concerning alternative art education which she hope to launch at an exhibition in Europe in 2013. Shimada is, together with Alice Maude-Roxby, doing research on a project that will compare three different alternative art institutions, namely: the Intermedia Center at Iowa University (which was established by Hans Breder and Anna Mendieta),  Bigakko (established by publisher Gendai Shicho-sha in 1969, where Shimada has both studied and teached) and Experimental Skolen in Copenhagen. Since 2011, Shimada is a PhD candidate in the Art, Design and Architecture Department at Kingston University in UK. She is particularly interested in Japanese performance art from 1960's and -70's.


Shimada is one of the first Japanese artists that we have met since we started this project that actually calls herself a feminist. Our discussion with Shimada focused a lot on the situation for feminism in Japan, both from a historical and a contemporary context. We hope that we can present some of the issues that came up at a later stage of this project.

Meeting Minako Nishiyama

Right now Minako Nishiyama is presenting her work at 3331 Arts Syd. We sat down with the artist in the exhibition space and talked about her artistic practice. The exhibition includes a new installation consisting of photos from Akihabara, an area located not far from 3331 Arts Syd, that has close connotations with Japanese concepts like otaku and maiden cafes. This work impelled Nishiyama to include some of her earlier works in the exhibition. The geographical proximity to Akihabara gave rise to an artistic connection between her present work and parts of her oeuvre from the middle of the 1990s. During that period Nishiyama made works that in different ways dealt with the close visual resemblance between aesthetic expression directed to young girls and the kind of visual images that were used in the Japanese sex industry. Her present works shows a more subtle and architectural expression but clearly makes the viewer aware of that the desire for kawaii is not changing.

Meeting Kyongfa Che

This Saturday we went to meet Kyongfa Che who is a freelance curator based in Tokyo. Che has worked with various cultural institutions, for example: Singapore Art Musum, Contemporary Art Center of South Australia, Japan Foundation and Gwangju Biennale. Our conversation concerned both the role of feminism in Japan today but also what the contemporary art climate looks like in Tokyo and how the art scene is structured. Where does the conversations take place and what kind of art enters the institutions and galleries?

Here is one extract from Che's reflections regarding her own practice since she moved to Tokyo five years ago: "I've started working with a small group of people who are really hungry for discursive projects beacuse there was no base for that. I don't know if it's Japan or Tokyo but the art scene here has no base for critical thinking or critical discourse. When I first moved here I thought, is there anything I could do here? All the things that are going on here are spectacular and nicely packaged. I don't know, It's all about sensitivity. So I have been struggling a bit. But there are also people who are hungry for more discursive practices and philosophical thinking behind artistic practice so we have been organizing all sorts of things. These are the main things that I have been doing."

Che is one among many people we have met since we started working with this project that have expressed a surprised reaction to our aim of discussing the situation for feminism in Japan. Here is an extract from Che's thoughts regarding feminism: "The feminism here is not alive. People don't take it serious. The feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s was not as profound as in New York for example. Feminist have been viewed as uptight, hard-core and angry with men. The best strategy to practice the discourse is maybe not to talk about it and don't call it feminism?"

For us these short extracts seems to be connected in some way. If there is very small room for critical discourse in the art institutions, where should a critical conversation about feminist strategies take place? Who should present feminist art works and who should response to them?

Preparing for Atsuko Tanaka's retrospective

Right now we are preparing for a visit to the MOT this weekend and we decided to share some notes with you.


This winter, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (MOT) will hold simultaneous exhibitions on the three following keywords of Japanese contemporary art: ‘Gutai’, ‘Fluxus’ and ‘Experimental Workshop’. Being one of Japans most renowned avant-garde artists in 19th century, Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) is given a big retrospective called ‘TANAKA Atsuko - Art of Connecting‘ in February.


Atsuko Tanaka was born in Osaka, joined the Art Institute of Osaka Municipal Museum of Art in 1950 and the Department of Western Painting at Kyoto Municipal College of Art (now Kyoto City University of Arts) the following year. After having met the artist Akira Kanayama, Tanaka joined the avant-garde group Gutai Art Association (funded by artist Jiro Yoshihara) in 1955. Soon she got well known for her experimental drawings, sculptures and happenings.


In the recent years, her reputation has increased and in 2007 her works were exhibited at Documenta 12. The art critic Haruo Fukuzumi, editor-in-chief and founder of the Japanese art journal AIDA gave a talk on “TANAKA Atsuko and her environment – The position of female artists in Japan”. In the talk, he depicted the ambivalent position of women artists in Japanese society, which he meant had long been characterised by sexual discrimination. Find a review of it here.


Another voice on Tanakos works is Art historian Françoise Levaillant, here quoted by Yoko Hasegawa in “Performativity in the work of female Japanese artists”, Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, New York : Museum of Modern Art, 2010:

“In contrast to the approach of Tanaka’s male artist associates, who, when using their bodies in their artistic activities, did so in essentially energetic ways, often directly, expressionistically, or aggressively, Tanaka used the energy of the materials themselves to give the materials as much sculptural richness as possible. Paradoxically, by putting restriction on the female body, (Tanaka), liberated the female body from the terribly pumped up gestures that were a characteristic of the work of the group’s male artists when they used their bodies. All she did was pretend to exhibit/expose herself.”


The following text is an extract from the press release from the retrospective at the MOT:


"In 2012 the world’s eye turns its eye towards Japan’s avant-garde art of the fifties and sixties, such as ‘Gutai’ or ‘Experimental Workshop’. Stimulated by Western avant-garde art in the postwar years, Japanese artists decided that they wanted to create a form of art that ‘nobody had seen before’, and they set about it with a straightforward, yet fresh sensitivity and overflowing energy. Among them was TANAKA Atsuko who displayed an outstanding and unique talent as a woman member of the Gutai group. Unlike other Japanese avant-garde women artists of the time, such as ONO Yoko or KUSAMA Yayoi, she did not move to New York in search of expressional freedom and achieve fame there, instead TANAKA remained in Japan where she experimented with her own forms of expression. In the ‘Documenta 12’ exhibition in 2007 her ‘Electric Dress’ attracted great attention and then a large-scale work of hers, from the collection of MOMA, was featured in an exhibition in 2010, her reputation growing like a ‘late- blooming flower’."


Below is Tanaka's most famous work, Electric Dress from 1957. In this piece, where the traditional kimono is updated to a dress that consists of "approximately one hundred fluorescent tubes and approximately eighty light bulbs, painted in nine colors of enamel paint and worn like a garment" (the MOT press release), the old traditional Japanese society meets the new industrial, technological era. Tanaka costumed herself in the sculpture, as in the tradition of a Japanese marriage ceremony.

Trans-Asia

Don’t miss n.paradoxa’s recent new issue that focus on the Asian region in relation to feminist artistic practice. Though examples from Japan have been left out, the subject of “trans-Asia” and issues concerning the national, the diasporic and the global is of great concern for artists that are based in Japan.

"Trans-Asia", volume 29, Jan 2012, n.paradoxa international feminist art journal 

"The problematic definition of 'feminist' in relation to contemporary art in the region and to the invention or creation of a category of 'women's art' is discussed in each article or interview by artists and critics alongside the question of women's rights and the visibility of women artists in patriarchal and male-dominated cultures".
From editorial by Katy Deepwell