Date: 9th February – 8th March 2020
Venue: Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs (VBKÖ, Vienna Austria
With: Mai Endo, Dew Kim (aka HornyHoneydew), Ontayama, Fuyuhiko Takata, Simo Kellokumpu (in collaboration with Vincent Roumagnac and Nao Yazawa), Rosa Wiesauer
Curator: Multiple Spirits – Mika Maruyama
Designer: Aki Namba
Supported by: ARTS COUNCIL TOKYO (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
The exhibition When It Waxes and Wanes consists of works by contemporary artists and historical materials that have been related to art (and queer feminism) movements and popular but marginalized cultures, especially since the late 19th century up to the present. They feature interactive and affective expressions by means of re/appropriations of desires, gazes, aesthetics, dramas, sexualities, performativities and critical readings that have emerged from transcultural and socio-political encounters, occasionally involving misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misdeliveries resulting from recontexualizations away from their original contexts.
This research began thorough an examination of the historical but less known connections between Japanese feminism movements and Western art at the beginning of the 20th century. In this period, magazines in Japan promoted the social awareness of the conditions of being a woman particularly in relation to the internal and external forces of Westernisation, while in Austria VBKÖ lobbied for the artistic carriers of women artists. The examination has expanded from an interest in the invisible and regional narratives into interdisciplinary tropes of gender-related references, representations and issues as well as the budding power of queering normative histories and narrations alongside the exclusions and oppressions inherent in them.
The exhibition especially focuses on the role of distribution of printed material and the circulation of images and aesthetics through media technology, not only as cultural but also as socio-political and often economical apparatus of our societies. Employing visual and performative codes such as decorations, color transparencies and gradations, and non-linear temporal axes, it explores the interrelationships of art movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, the processes of modernization of non-Western cultures, Japanese girl’s culture after WW2, and the queer cultures under these influences. By doing so, it aims to elicit the parallel relationships dwelling in images and the potentialities of transcultural readings, as well as the genealogies that engender sensations and intensities that pass through bodies.
Photo by Claudia Sandoval Romero
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Matsura Choja / Matsurasayohimesekkonroku), 2019
Mai Endo is a Japanese artist and actor based in Tokyo. Her work materializes through multiple forms including performance, video, and photography. In her performance piece, “I Am Not a Feminist!” (2017, Goethe-Institut Tokyo), she used her own marriage contract, aiming at transforming the suppressed Japanese marriage system into a play. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Prof. Marina Gržinić as the exchange program in 2018, and currently, she is a doctoral student at Tokyo University of the Arts. In 2018, she started a queer art zine Multiple Spirits with Mika Maruyama.
http://maiendo.net/
Dew Kim (aka HornyHoneydew) creates fictional stories by collecting languages and images that proliferate on the Internet and flourish in queer subcultures. Through assemblages of physical and nonphysical objects like moving image and sound, Kim imagines new worlds and environments. He transforms his body into an object in order to visualize and describe what it means to be queer. Dew has had solo exhibitions at TEMI Artist Residency (Daejeon), Archive Bomm (Seoul), and Art Space Grove (Seoul). Also, he exhibited work at ICA (London), Camden Arts Centre (London), Haus am Lützowplatz (Berlin), and Grey Projects (Singapore). He graduated from Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture (2016), and completed the residency programme at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2015), and PILOTENKUECHE, Leipzig (2017). He is currently working at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Seoul.
www.hornyhoneydew.com
ONTAYAMA is an artist duo of Niwako Onta (Pyonnurira) and Takuya Yamashita, who have also been active, respectively, as manga artist and illustrator, and artist. Its solo exhibitions include ONTAYAMA (Maison Shintenchi, Nagoya, 2019) and ALL NIGHT HAPSTAMP (HAPS, Kyoto, 2019).
http://blog.pyonnu.com/
http://takuya-yamashita.com/
https://www.instagram.com/ontayama/
Fuyuhiko Takata has expressed themes as diverse as religion, myth, fairytales, gender, trauma, sex, and the BL (“Boys’ Love“) manga sub-genre, in humorous, occasionally erotic videos with a pop sensibility. Dissecting, commenting on, and exaggerating universal human themes in unconventional ways, Takata’s works look absurd but are in fact meticulously composed. Born in 1987, Hiroshima, Takata currently lives and works in Chiba. He was showcased solo at Art Center Ongoing (Tokyo, 2012, 2014 and 2017) as well as at Kodama Gallery (Kyoto, 2013 / Tokyo, 2016). He has also participated in Memento Mori – Eros and Thanatos (Shirokane Art Complex, Tokyo, 2013), MOT Annual 2016: Loose Lips Save Ships (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), Bodyscapes: New Film and Video from Japan (Royal College of Art London et al., 2018-2019), MAM Screen (Mori Art Museum, 2019), and more.
http://fuyuhikotakata.com/
Simo Kellokumpu is a Finnish (born in Lapland) artist, choreographer, and researcher based in Helsinki. He received his DfA (Doctor of Arts) from the Performing Arts Research Center, Theatre Academy Finland in 2019. His artistic works examine the choreographic relations between corporeality and materiality in various scales and contexts. His work operates in the entanglement of contemporary speculative fiction, interplanetary culture, and queer(ing) space. Kellokumpu has been collaborating with the French artist and researcher Vincent Roumagnac since 2010, and he is a founding member of the Q̶͈̬̿͝l̴̛̬̝̒o̵̰̍̔ǘ̴̼ḓ̷̟̓̅s̷̻̦̆Q̸̠̿͒u̷͓͚͊̽A̸̛̘͝r̷̖͈̀͝ṭ̶̏͘z̶̩̩͛ research cluster with Outi Condit and Vincent Roumagnac.
www.simokellokumpu.org
Vincent Roumagnac is a French-Basque theatre artist and researcher based in Helsinki and Paris. His work materializes through multiple forms such as installations, performances, and videoscenic acts. Roumagnac is interested in the way the notion and the practice of the “stage” evolve according to the change of climatic and techno-ecological conditions. He is involved in investigative and transdisciplinary processes that implement the connections between art and research. Since 2010 he collaborates with Finnish choreographer Simo Kellokumpu and since 2012 with French visual artist Aurélie Pétrel, with whom he is, in 2020, winner of the Villa Kujoyama Residency prize. From 2016 to 2018 he co-directs the weSANK research platform in collaboration with the architect, curator and researcher Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou. In 2019 he launches with Outi Condit and Simo Kellokumpu the artistic research cluster Q̶͈̬̿͝l̴̛̬̝̒o̵̰̍̔ǘ̴̼ḓ̷̟̓̅s̷̻̦̆Q̸̠̿͒u̷͓͚͊̽A̸̛̘͝r̷̖͈̀͝ṭ̶̏͘z̶̩̩͛. He is currently conducting a doctorate in artistic research at the Performing Arts Research Centre – Uniarts Helsinki.
www.vincentroumagnac.com/
Nao Yazawa is a Japanese manga-artist born in Tokyo, and living in Kawasaki City. Her career started with Korokoro –comic magazine as Shonen mangaka, and she has also worked with PyonPyon and Chao magazines. Her most notable series is shojyo-manga Wedding Peach (1994-1996, Concept by Sukehiro Tomita), which was made into an anime series of the same name, and was published worldwide. She is also known for her other manga-works, for example Nozomi (2003), Mizuki (2010), Moon and Blood (2011 – 2014) and Shinku Chitai/ The Isolated Zone (1988 – 2011). She works with various sorts of manga and has given many workshops in Europe and the US. She is currently also teaching Manga in English in Tokyo, at Manga School Nakano.
https://naoyazawa.deviantart.com/
Rosa Wiesauer is an artist, seamstress and art educator based in Vienna. Currently, she is finishing her Fine Arts studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna where she’s in the department for video and video installation supervised by Dorit Margreiter. In her performances and videos, as well as occasional curatorial practice, she deals with (trans)femininity, identity politics, witchcraft, dating and Japanese pop-culture. She is also part of the performance collective House of Empress, which explores queer, femme and transgender identities through drag aesthetics, theatre, dance and other performative techniques.