hana bi!!!

I always feel a twinge of disappointment when have to be in another country during the 4th of July, as I miss the relaxing revelry and the fireworks that go along with celebrating our country’s independence. This year was no exception, but I was comforted by the fact that Japan is known for hana bi, or fireworks shows, which happen throughout the summer in various locations.

No offense to the folks at home, but Japan’s take on fireworks kind of beats the pants off any such show I’ve seen anywhere else. Rather than a half-hour spectacle that starts with the 1812 Overture and builds to a grand finale, Japanese hana bi can go on for quite a while and tend to go full-blast all the way, pausing for short reloading intermissions throughout – a different narrative approach to the whole thing.

The hour-and-a-half-long Yokohama fireworks show last night was apparently one of the more spectacular in Japan this summer, and we inadvertently found ourselves with the perfect seats at BankART, where we were already spending some time in the studio showing around visitors and friends. The streets were packed with traffic and people dressed up in celebratory yukata. I don’t even want to imagine the crowded subway situation, but up at BankART we just pulled a few chairs out onto the back deck (which is a pretty excellent place to hang out anyway) and enjoyed a tremendous and stress-free view of the fireworks.

Some kimono-clad girls in front of us took a lot of cell-phone photos of each other and a few of the fireworks, too, and I put my own camera through the paces to try and catch a few good shots. Our fellow artists passed around plates of takoyaki and baked potatoes, cups of beer, and other festival snacks and we all had a pretty nice night of it.

2010 summer open at BankART NYK

I've been delaying this post because it's kind of impossible to pick just a few photos or a few aspects of the Summer Open to write about... but here's a taste.

Friday was the culminating event of BankART's 2010 Summer Open, which has been a two-month long intensive residency for 45 emerging and established artists including Andy and myself. It's still on view, for those of you in the Yokohama/Tokyo area... through August 5th. If you think you might visit, drop me a line, since there are several video components that sometimes travel with us.


The opening party for the 2010 Summer Open was a pretty spectacular multimedia experience, including a guy in an illuminated suit, giant soft-sculpture flowers, amazing video, performance, painting and installation, and lots of eating, laughing, drinking and celebrating. The experience here over the past two months has been a bit like grad school, with late-night studio time sometimes devolving into giggling youtube sessions with the artists in nearby studios, convenience-store meals (which in Japan at least manages to be a fairly decent thing) and a lot of trial and error in the studio.

The results are pretty spectacular, I must say. I'll be doing more posts soon (time willing) on some of my favorite artists and projects. In the meantime here are a few shots from the evening.

studio visit!

One of the amazing things about receiving a grant from the Asian Cultural Council is the way they connect current and former Asian Cultural Council recipients. I've been so fortunate to meet up with some really incredible people here and made some good friends in the process. Last week I spent the day with acclaimed artist and fellow enthusiast of medical/biological things Kaoru Motomiya last week to check out the science exhibits at Tokyo University Museum, and Andy and I both had a great time catching the tail end of the Tanabata Festival with incredible audio/installation artist Kianga Ford, who's been doing research through a residency at Tokyo Wondersite this summer.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to have a studio visit from Kenichi Yokono, who I mentioned in an earlier post: he makes incredible woodblock paintings that aren't printed, but inked and presented as physical objects in and of themselves, their format and imagery referencing both contemporary manga culture and traditional ukiyo-e prints. The axe at left is a nice example.

Yokono-san brought along his wife Makiko Inoya and their two-year-old daughter Ichiko, and the five of us ate lunch and had a lot of fun running around BankART to see some of the work that's up right now. Ichiko was especially fascinated by the earbuds attached to the Bunrui Bento that Andy and I collaborated on. The bento (below) includes insects, plants, shells, and a tiny embedded version of Andy's konyaku stingray-release video Back/Forth, is accompanied by the lovely (and apparently kid-addictive) music of biologist, musician, and friend Yui Suzuki.

resurrection: artists you should know about, part III

The evening before the public opening was a bit more dramatic one might hope. Our friend and studio neighbor Terada Shinobu has spent the past two months painstakingly constructing a delicate eight-foot wall made of thousands of gauze bandages. His work crosses over into a variety of media – video, performance, photography, installation, and painting… but it always incorporates gauze bandages because of their material and conceptual flexibility.

Terada-san’s installation this time was built to be the counterpoint for a big performance on opening night involving a rockstar-esque stage dive into the exquisite eight-foot tall wall, but things took an unexpected turn around 10pm the night before, when the cord from a vacuum he was using to clear the rest of the space caught the corner and pulled the whole thing down in about two seconds.

It was a pretty dire situation and most of us were at a loss for words. Everyone was working late that night for the event the next day, and soon a small crowd of artists and staff members gathered to assess the damage and help Terada figure out what to do.

It was decided that we’d resurrect the fallen wall as best we could, which seemed a bit impossible given the ephemeral nature of the whole thing... but ten or twelve people began to slide sheets of plywood underneath, caaaarefully pulled and pushed, and in an amazing feat of collaborative energy managed to get the whole thing back up! The end result was a bit more tousled than the original, but pretty great in its own sort of way – the delicacy of the layers was miraculously intact, with a tousled waterfall of bandages careening over the top.

The evening of the opening, the work included time-lapse video of the work in progress (which he’d been documenting during the residency) along with documentation of its destruction and resurrection. The unplanned bit from the night before created a strange loop of time travel, suggesting that the wall that had just been destroyed in performance might rise again after the performance, extending his gesture toward the themes of perfection, control and destruction beyond the theme of virtuoso guitar-smashing to something strangely hopeful. The dive went well and everyone cheered, and after the performance visitors were invited to take off their shoes and wade through the mounds of gauze on the floor, breaking it apart. The piece has since turned into a daily process of reconfiguration and metamorphosis.

one day till showtime...

The big open studio event for BankART NYK's Summer Open is this Friday, and I've still got a lot of work to do, as you may be able to tell from this photo. Andy and I are putting the finishing touches on a new video, and spent a good chunk of the day installing the hair waterfall drawing from the museum's ventilation system (hence the high vantage point of this messy-table photo). Now there's a lot of cleaning up to do!

To clear my head for a bit, I wandered around the 2nd and 3rd floors and checked out what other artists were up to. Some have their spaces gallery-ready, with everything hung and ready to go, others are setting up for live performances and events on opening night, and there are still a few more that reveal the same sort of frenetic energy I can relate to just about now. Perhaps some of you will recognize the fellow carefully arranging his photographs below. Can't wait to see how it all comes together!

beating the heat in Yokohama

It has been a hot few months in most parts of the world this year. In Japan, it's been blindingly, gaspingly hot. Apparently this is fairly normal here. During the sweltering rainy season, I laughed when I was told that summer season wouldn't officially start until Marine Day on July 19th. But as the moisture cleared and was replaced by a relentless, beating sunshine starting at 4am every morning (meaning that by 9am it's about 98 degrees Fahrenheit outside) the reality of the situation began to sink in.

It's been this way every summer for centuries here, and given the necessity of leaving air-conditioned spaces the Japanese have figured out a lot of additional ways to deal with the hot summer sun - some very old and some new. I'm surprised more of these devices haven't caught on in the Southern U.S. Here are a few:

* futuristic-looking, mist-emitting architecture on my local outdoor shopping street
* hand fans, folding and otherwise. Traditional, practical and portable. Also sometimes free, when emblazoned with ads.
* umbrellas and parasols - using your umbrella on a dry day may sound silly, but it makes a lot of sense when the temperature difference between shade and sunshine is vast.
* neck-cooling collars
* restaurants and shops that blast the AC into the street through open doors (??)
* covered walkways and shopping arcades (also crucial during rainy season)
* mentholated cooling shirt spray (here's one user's review)
* ice-cold beverage vending machines on every corner. And I mean every. corner.
* soft-serve ice cream in every flavor and combination you can possibly imagine: canteloupe, green tea, ramune soda, apricot, black sesame, and apparently even cuttlefish. Check out the Japanese Ice Cream blog for more.
* arcwelder-style full-face sun visors
* elbow-length gloves -- okay, so on a comfort level this has always baffled me, but it does help prevent sunburn.

There's a nice Japan Times piece on some more of the more newfangled heat-beating products you can find at your local Japanese convenience store. As I sit here in my muggy apartment covered in sweat I'm rather excited to try some of these out.

rural towns + contemporary art in Japan

I was in the midst of another post about beating the heat in Yokohama when our friend Stanley Murashige passed along this New York Times article about a small Japanese village's attempts to attract tourism by combining its rice paddies with a little genetic modification. The story's quite bittersweet, though the end result is pretty arresting.

Inakadate's plight is part of a larger national trend of rural depopulation as birthrates decline and young people flock to bigger cities for job opportunities. The interesting side of this otherwise unfortunate situation is that small towns have become the new alternative spaces for contemporary art, with residency programs and site-specific projects popping up all over the place. Japan's commercial gallery system - which usually requires artists to pay gallery rent and watch over the space during visiting hours - is too expensive for many artists here, and many are heading for the hills (literally) to make art where space is more plentiful, cost of living is cheap, and the towns are rich in local tradition and ancient history. Arts tourism has become the new hope for many small towns, even if terms like "sound art" or "social engagement" aren't part of the local vocabulary. One great example of this phenomenon is the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, which features installation by a host of internationally-acclaimed artists every three years, accompanied by experiential art hotels and innovative eateries that incorporate the talents and tastes of local residents. I really hope to get to visit one of these years. It's also the idea behind the Setouchi Art Festival I just returned from, which launched this year to much fanfare, and rightly so.

Will contemporary art help preserve rural Japan? Only time will tell. Either way, here's hoping that the village of Inakada manages to continue supporting its residents, with or without the rice-paddy graphics.

Inakadate image (above) borrowed from the NY Times; photo of Sue Pedley installation at Setouchi Festival (at right) taken by me.