Supervisor: Professor Yuko Hasegawa (Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of Arts)
Co-curators: Sophie Arni, Karen Karuna Shibuya, Shintaro Sumimoto, Seiya Yamagata, Yangyu Zhang (MA students, Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of Arts)
Venue: Chinretsukan Gallery, Tokyo University of the Arts
12-8 Ueno Park, Taito-ku, Tokyo, 110-8714
Exhibition Website
Organized by: Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts
Co-organized by: Culture Vision Japan Foundation Inc.
Sponsored by: Geidai Friends; The Chain Museum
Supported by: CLEAR GALLERY TOKYO; Hida Sangyo Co.,Ltd.
Count the Waves: Visualizing Invisibility
Under the supervision of Professor Yuko Hasegawa, this exhibition is a curricular project planned and conducted by five students majoring in curation at Graduate School of Global Arts (GA), Tokyo University of the Arts. The aim of the program is for the students to reflect on the various contemporary values which are constantly changing, to explore new perspectives and situate them in different contexts, and to learn from the on-site activities and the feedback from the audience. Titled Count the Waves: Visualizing Invisibility, the exhibition invites 14 artists and designer from in and outside Japan to investigate invisibility this year.
Courtesy of Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. Photo by Masataka Tanaka.
Curatorial Foreword
Globalization (or, more precisely, the notion of the global) has begat ambiguity. With increased reliance on digital communication as a conduit to mutual understanding —and the consequent growth of transnational connections— the "global" ideal has become a persistent presence in our collective consciousness. Yet as its hold over us grows, so does its enigmatic undefinability as a buzzword onto which one can project almost any conceivable motive, used in myriad contexts that arguably rob the term of any real meaning. Nevertheless, one way we can begin to define the "global" is as the invisible links that connect us all. These connections are rooted in, and derive power from both the physical and conceptual invisibilities inherent to "the global."
To have an online presence is to be both anonymous and hyper-visible. Yet even as the demarcations between physical and digital identity become blurred, the emotional, temporal (i.e. past/future/memory), and intangible (i.e. unmanifested) realities of human existence are often rendered invisible in both "real" and online realms.
In presenting artworks that visualize the invisible, this exhibition will explore where we see (or think we see) traces of the invisible in its paradoxically visible manifestations. The title Count the Waves, borrowed from Ono Yoko’s 1971 song Don’t Count the Waves, expresses an attempt grasp the invisible —waves that ceaselessly layer one over the other, only to dissipate— alluding not only to the unknowable depths of the sea, but to the forces that rule it. By interrogating how varying forms of invisibility have shifted how we relate to our surrounding environments, we aim to seek out what it truly means to "connect."
– Co-Curators: Sophie Mayuko Arni, Karen Karuna Shibuya, Shintaro Sumimoto, Seiya Yamagata, Yangyu Zhang (MA students, Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of Arts)
Under the supervision of Professor Yuko Hasegawa (Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of Arts)
Courtesy of Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. Photo by Masataka Tanaka.
Invisible Ties
I would like to reflect on my curatorial experience for ‘Count the Waves’ as an example cross-cultural curating practices, weaving invisible threads between concepts and people.
In fall 2018, we, a group of five curators, agreed on invisibility as the theme of the exhibition. My goal might have been contradictory: it was to meet young Japanese artists who work to break the categories of ‘fine’ and ‘street’ art, two worlds that seemed to collide with the popularization of graffiti and streetwear in contemporary art practices. I have been following this trend on Instagram and later with major exhibitions such as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s major retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and the then-upcoming Virgil Abloh solo show at Chicago’s MCA. In Japan, Takashi Murakami was growing his circle of street artists with his Kaikai Kiki gallery. Through the lens of invisibility, I wanted to show the balance between aesthetic sensitivity and hypervisibility required from an artist today.
Exploring the streets of Shibuya, I was very curious about the history of street art in Tokyo and eventually met the artist collective SIDE CORE, who has been a catalyst of exhibitions and programs of street art for a decade. BIEN was a young artist who collaborated with SIDE CORE for the Reborn Art Festival in Ishinomaki (2017). His work struck me for its abstract distillations of saturated media. I later went to visit his solo exhibition at BLOCK HOUSE and his mural specially commissioned by the Watari Art Museum and was impressed by his hard work, learning that he finished the ten-meter long mural in under a week.
While Shibuya represents street art, Roppongi represents Tokyo’s more institutional contemporary art scene with Mori Museum dominating its skyline. I found a small gallery on the upper floors of an office building, SNOW Contemporary with an exhibition title which caught my attention, Model Room - reminiscent of real estate advertising. This is the first time I met Rintaro Fuse. Model Room was also a metaphor for the bedroom of a lonely girl, living in a small room in Tokyo, feeling a sense of distance to her peers yet an extreme closeness to her own selfie reflections. Based on a black and white color palette with splashes of bright blue, the works represented blurred products of complex identity formations on social media (SNS).
Fast forward to the exhibition opening, in between BIEN’s specially commissioned wood panel and Fuse’s new series of Retina Paintings, I felt the joy to see the invisible connections come alive spatially. These parallels became even more apparent during the artist talk between the two artists, a portion of which is transcribed in this exhibition catalogue. During the talk, it became quite apparent that BIEN and Fuse, though both concerned with street art and digital identity, come from two different worlds: on one side, an artist who built his reputation outside the academic art world through graphic design and collaborations, and on the other, a doctorate student in Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Art, who previously studied Oil Painting. As an outsider, I looked beyond their differences and looked for similarities in their artistic practices. Our exhibition, like an intervention, brought these artists from disparate backgrounds to talk, exchange and exhibit their work in the same room. This created invisible ties beyond language and social barriers, and that moment of exchange - more than any material product - is in my eyes the exhibition’s main legacy.
– Sophie Mayuko Arni
Tokyo, March 2019
Courtesy of Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. Photo by Masataka Tanaka.