Artists:
Yukiko Tasaki
Toshie Ise T
Miho Suganami
Media: Painting
Photography
Video installation
Sculpture
Venue:
Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent,
Staffordshire
tel:
01782-232323
fax:
01782-232500
e-mail:
museums@stoke.gov.uk
http://www.stoke.gov.uk/museums
Dates:
16th June 2001 - 2nd September 2001
Description
of the exhibition
1)
General Aims
The exhibition is to be part of the
event, Japan 2001, which is supported by the Japanese Embassy in London (for
details, please see the attached).
One of the main aims of Japan2001 is to
introduce the Japanese culture to the British audience to contribute to mutual
understandings between the two countries.
However, we must ask which type of the cultural event should take
place.
Most British people know about the
Japanese culture mainly through media coverages which are often very partial and
outdated. We believe that such
partial and outdated knowledge about the Japanese culture prevents us from
establishing productive Anglo-Japanese relationships. For this end, an art exhibition should
play an important role. We believe,
however, that there should be not only big cultural events in London, such as
the Japanese Film Festival, but also small cultural projects in other parts of
Britain. People who do not visit
London regularly should not thereby be deprived of the opportunity to get to
know the contemporary culture of Japan.
We therefore strongly feel that some of
the events of Japan 2001 should take
place outside of London. This is
why we chose the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, as the
venue. This Museum is close to
where Miho Suganami is and to the Visual Arts Department, Keele University,
Staffordshire, where Yukiko Tasaki conducted research. Moreover, through the potteries
industry, the region has a strong business connection with Japan. However, hardly any events to introduce
the contemporary culture of Japan have taken place in this region.
This project will contribute indirectly
towards building links between the two countries. However, more importantly, this project
shall be an important stepping stone for the future relationships between the
two peoples.
2)
The exhibition’s objectives
All three of us are interested in
overcoming the boundaries of ‘visual’ art.
As visual art is necessarily
>visual=, the space of the visual art exhibitions is organised around the
sense of sight. This is revealed by
the fact that one of the most common ‘exhibits’ in the visual art exhibitions is
the noticeboard, saying >please do not touch=.
However, we are agreed that dependence on the sense of sight in
the exhibition space at the exclusion of other senses delimits the audience’s
perceptions of the visual artworks to a considerable extent. All of us have been exploring
independently the possibility of opening up visual arts to other senses,
especially the sense of touch and hearing. We believe that, by exploiting the
sense of touch and hearing as well as sight, the audience can have deeper
understandings of the artworks, and the cultural code behind them. We believe that such understandings
might contribute towards better understanding between different peoples, in this
case, the Japanese and the British.
And we would like to take this
opportunity of participating in Japan 2001 as our first chance to exhibit our
works together.
3)
About the participating artists
Yukiko Tasaki’s works have been exhibited
extensively in Tokyo and New York, and received a number of prizes. She is currently a visiting fellow in
both Edinburgh Collage of Art, Edinburgh, and Keele University, Staffordshire,
supported by Overseas Study Programme for Artists by Ministry of Education,
Japan.
In recent years, through her experience
of working as an art teacher at the Setagaya Ward Centre for Disabled People,
Tokyo, Japan, she has been interested in the ability of artwork to make people
overcome their conventional views of others, disabled or otherwise. And, as a result, she hopes that art
transforms people.
Yukiko Tasaki’s series of photography
and her video installation, Translation (1999-), was made while she
was reading for her MA at Edinburgh Collage of Art. This project explores how she and her
subjects, including an old woman, a woman with learning difficulty, have been
transformed by cooperating in the making of artworks. Yukiko Tasaki says that, by working
together with these people, she now realizes that there are ways to >see= the
world other than by sight. This
experience, according to her, transformed her to a more five-senses-oriented
person from a sight-oriented one.
She will continue to develop this line of work for the
exhibition.
Toshie Ise T is an active artist in the
international arena. Her work has
been exhibited throughout the world, including Tokyo, London, Paris, Seoul, and
Zagreb. She is also a member of the
art group, Eggs of Moebius, whose main aim is to search the new relationship
between art and science.
Toshie Ise T is interested in
collaborating with a variety of people, e.g. philosophers, poets, scientists,
and musicians, to search a new form of art which will transcend the existing
frameworks of visual arts. She
believes that this new form of art will emancipate people’s minds from
conventionalism, and resurrect the power of imagination.
Moreover, through the experience as an
art teacher for children with special needs at a number of secondary schools in
Japan, she realized that it is important for the audience of the visual arts to
use all senses to experience, rather than simply to look at, the
artworks.
Most of her works are interactive art,
and the audience is asked to interact with her artworks by using all the
senses. Toshie Ise T says that
there is no particular way to read her work as a text. In other words, she is asking the
audience to act as an autonomous agent, free form the spellbinding of the
imagined social structure, to be the creator of the meaning of
artworks.
Miho Suganami is a PhD student of the
Visual Arts Department, Keele University.
However, her original academic training was in social
science.
After completing her MA in International
Relations, she started to feel the impenetrable boundaries of language, e.g.
boundaries between Japanese and English, and boundaries between the academic
English and everyday English. Then,
she studied visual arts which, she thought, could be a universal
language.
However, she realized that >art= was
not a universal language, either.
This is because the audience of the visual arts is, in most cases,
limited to sighted people. In other
words, ‘visionism’ is a dominant force in the visual arts field. To criticise this, she thought that the
sense other than sight has to be introduced in the art gallery, in particular,
the sense of touch.
Miho Suganami’s Rosetta Stone series (1998) was the
first set of the tactile sculptures she produced (Rosetta Stone II was exhibited in Open
Art =98, Potteries Museum and Art Gallery). After producing this series, she has
kept producing small-scale sculptures (dimensions between 20CM and 50CM), all of
which are to be touched rather than merely to be looked at. She says that, by touching some
sculptures, people will realize that, sometimes, their sight is not telling
everything about the art works.
Therefore, she is hoping that her works will tell the audience that
‘visionism’ is not only exclusionary but also inadequate.
Accompanying
Workshops
We would like to offer a variety of
workshops during the exhibition. At
least, one of the three artists will be present in every
workshop.
By
Shuji and Sugar Canes
The main participants of this workshop
are children, and this will be run by Shuji and Sugar Canes , San-shin players
from Japan.
In this workshop, participants will make
a simple model of San-shin (traditional musical instrument of Okinawa). Later, participants can join with Shuji
and Sugar Canes to play some traditional tunes of Okinawa.
The main aim of this workshop is to
provide a rare opportunity to enjoy traditional Japanese music in an interactive
way.
By Miho Suganami
This is a drop-in session to be run in
the first week of the exhibition.
In this workshop, the participants will have a cast of his/her hand. Miho Suganami will make two castings, in
fact. The attendants will keep one,
and, the other will be exhibited as a one of the exhibits in the gallery
space.
This
workshop aims to ‘defamiliarize’ part of our body by making it into a lifeless
object. Even though we can touch
one of our hands with the other, we can never feel either of our hands with our
two hands. By giving a chace to do
this, we hope that the participating audience will re-discover their body. We will allow those ‘hands’ exhibited to
be touched by visitors to the show.
Each hand will have a name of the original owner.
‘Kitunebi’
(The Fragmentary Recollection of Light)
By
Toshie Ise T
The main aim of this work is to provide a
space where the audience can build a communal memory by sharing the space and
time.
This work contains a
cloth screen, a light and a mirror object. The mirror object will irregularly
reflect the light onto the screens. No particular image will be projected, so
the audiences have to use their imagination to 'see'. The audiences are asked to
take an instant photo there, and to record any words, which happen to be on
their mind.
In a dimly lit
room, a cloth screens, a mirror object, a projector and a lot of photos are
installed there. The projector throws light on the ceiling, and the mirror
object will be placed between the light and the ceiling, like a revolving
lantern, but the pattern of the reflected light will be irregular since the
object itself has an asymmetrical form.
The
audiences are asked to participate to fulfil the purpose of the work in the
workshop, ‘Kitunebi’.
1.
The audiences take an instant-photo in the exhibition
2. They write down
whatever happens to be on their mind
3. They put it at the foot of the
work
The photos at the foot of the work will
represent the accumulating memories of the audience. The mirror object will keep reflecting a
lot of fragmentary light in every direction while revolving slowly with the
passage of time.
What will come
to mind when you see the fragment of the recorded light patterns?