Artists

Norimizu Ameya and his friends

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A production team, consisting of Norimizu Ameya, Aki Nishijima, Kurumi Miyoshi, Tomohito Wakui. Going backand forth between life and work, art and theater, they attempt to create a experience that break free from theboundaries between them.

Michiko Ishimure

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Novelist. Born in Amakusa, Kumamoto Prefecture.Throughout her life, she stood by the patients of Minamata disease, a neurological disease caused by severemercury poisoning. It is caused by the release of methyl- mercury in the industrial wastewater from a chemicalfactory owned by the Chisso Corporation, which continued from 1932 to 1968. Minamata disease is said to bethe origin of pollution-related diseases in postwar Japan. As symbolically shown by the sentence “EvenMinamata disease, seaweed is the taste of spring" in her novel “Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow" in 1969, MichikoIshimure poignantly questions intertwined relationship among Capitalism, polluted land, human activity, andnature. photo by 芥川仁

Eva & Franco Mattes

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Eva & Franco Mattes is Italian artist duos, based in New York. They are one of the pioneering artists, who beganusing the Internet as a medium for artworks. Through a combination of medium of videos, installations, andwebsites, their work has responded to the contemporary network condition, dissected thelandscape, always approaching the ethics and politics of the online lifestyle with a dark sense of humour. Theirartworks has been in the collections of SFMOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fotomuseum Winterthur, XMuseum, and Walker Art Center. Details of their projects/Media reviews can be found on their
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Photo by Louis De Belle

Korakrit ARUNANONDCHAI

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Born 1986 in Bangkok, Thailand. Based in New York and Bangkok. Critiquing Western-centricism,ARUNANONDCHAI investigates subculture, queer culture, and contemporary art. He has confronted theWestern art scene, where monotheistic worldviews remain central, with Asian animistic view of nature, whichconsists of spirits and myths, combined with technological advancement, and presents the vision of future yet tocome. His works underly a transcendental/essential ontology “everything that exists is queer”, and an anticipationof paradigm shift to the art scene in the 21st century. He is one of the most promising contemporary artists,presenting solo shows and participating in major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, Art SonjeCenter (Seoul), Singapore Museum of Art, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hong Kong K11, Palais de Tokyo (Paris),MoMA PS1 (New York) ) among other significant museums.
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This exhibition expected to be the premier of his video work “Natural God”(2017) in Japan; he made the workwhich reflects a relationship between “nature and spirits" while visiting Mt Osore and Mt. Fuji. during his stay inJapan.

Komiya Flower Shop

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A flower shop run by Lisa Komiya for about a year (2016~2017). Thinking the relationship between flowers andhumans in parallel, the flower shop was a project Komiya discreetly embarked on to have investigated her ownreproductive possibility within the shopping arcade where people engage in buying and selling of goods orservices. It was also her attempt to deconstruct the conventional format of exhibition and performance at thesame time.

Marina Lisa Komiya

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Risa Komiya is an artist who has worked in multiple mediums, and explored the theme of "a new way ofreproduction and breeding," which is derived from her interest in a new time theory thatemerges from a queer perspective. Her major projects include "Komiya Flower Shop”, and "ReproductiveGarden," a project to create a garden on land that cannot be legally reconstructed by overlapping the institutionalproblems of the same-sex marriage ban and the architectural law in Japan. Recent major solo exhibitions include“-ATCG” (TAV GALLERY, 2018), and group exhibitions such as “Reborn Art Festival 2019” (Ishinomaki City,Miyagi),

Root Beer Journey

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Yū Takada / THE ROOT BEER JOURNEY: A store specialising in root beer, a “medicinal carbonated beverage”made from herbal roots.Born in 1990. Yū Takada is an Island City Boy from Ishigaki. Representative of THE ROOT BEER JOURNEY, anunprecedented root beer specialty store that handles homemade barrel fresh root beer, and several types of rootbeer around the world. He prefer hanging out in art events than food events. Drinking root beers all over theworld and Ryukyu karate are his lifework.

Animal Shop “Dōbutsudō"

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Dōbutsudō is an animals pet shop in Higashi-Nakano, Tokyo which Ameya Norimizu opened in 1995. It was petshore per se, but a site where Ameya has explored the fundamental life through breeding and selling a widevariety of animals. The praxis of his search, despite seemingly far from art and making, had been carried out for8 years until 2003.

Pierre Huyghe

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Born in Paris, France in 1962. Since the 1990s, Huyghe has presented video works that deploy cinematicapparatus to explore the relationship between his fiction and reality, as well as projects which focus on thesystems hidden in museums, exhibitions, modern architecture, copyrights and festivals. Known for his diversestyles that transcend genres of photography, video, and performance, he is one of the leading artists of today,internationally acclaimed for push the boundary of contemporary art.Huyghe is one of the world's most significant artists in terms of ecology in the 21st century. His artistry resides onhis truly unique worldview, where Western contemporary philosophy meets his deep knowledge of orientalculture and thought, as evidently seen in "No Ghost Just a Shell" (1999-2003) and “Untitled (Human Mask)”(2014); Such quality of his works, an essential intersection of these two perspectives is rare to find in thecontemporary art scene. We believe, though Anthropocene has become too universal a term to grasp, presentinghis work would help interpreting its awareness of the issue local to the Far East in planetary way.

Mrs. Yuki

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An artist duo formed in 2009 by Rintaro Hiramine (b.1983), who was interested in genetic hybridization in thenatural world, and Tomomi Okubo (b.1982), who was fascinated by the shapes and colours of reptiles andinsects. Through breeding and raising ball pythons, they delve into the peculiarities of life, make biologicalobservation, and exercise moulding practice. Integrating biological observations and sculptural practices in theirworks, they explore the uniqueness and diversity of life in their art-making.
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For example, in their artwork “Life-Life” which breeding cases are incorporated into ready-made chairs andcabinets, the breeding of ball pythons is given to the work itself, and the skin patterns and mutants created bycrossbreeding are inherited. In their other work titled “Emblem", the protective colours and patterns of insects arerecombined like emblem designs, demonstrating the natural transformation of the artist's intervention as an insectspecimen. A similar interest is expressed in their digital collage “Fasciation”; based on Fasciation, a geneticmutation of a plant's growing tip, the abnormal growth phenomenon in the natural world is intentionallyreconfigured. These activities, which freely incorporate the energy-filled colours and geometric figures producedby the natural world and reveal the state of nature, reflect the various conditions under which new forms andseeds are born, and thus an attempt to posit the wonder and value of life within the genealogy of art.

Shiori Watanabe

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Born in 1984. Graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts, Graduate School of Fine Arts, majoring in Sculpturein 2017.Watanabe, with “totality” as her core concern focuses on collective phenomena of individualgatherings, and the boundaries [threshold] of the individual which body involved.Her installation “Sunroom” (2018-), in which fish, vegetables, objects, and microbeare randomly arranged in circulating water, is a signature work to date. It has yet tobe developed while grabbing audiences’ attention each time it is presented on the alternative spaces/scenes inTokyo; “Dyadic Stem” (curated by Yū Takagi, The 5th Floor, 2020), “Bebe” (solo exhibition, curated byChim↑Pom, White House, 2021), and “Water Ripple Exhibition 2021” (Mitake Branch, Office of Shibuya WardOffice, 2021). While Watanabe's works seemly deal with themes such as the ecosystem and the human body,she has never forget to penetrated a unique perspective on the Emperor system into herworks; She scooped up water from the Imperial Palace moat and used them into the circulating water in the earlydays of her making of installation “Sunroom”(2018-). She also explores ways of total ecology, including humansociety, by ways of connecting the notions of “reproduction” and “feminism” with issues such as “capitalism” and“globalism” lurking in individual species within ecosystems, such as native/ alien species.