A Gift to Those who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling 

Erika Tan: from Made in Japan: The Ghost in the Machine, video and inject prints, 2008

Mio Shirai
Erika Tan

BankART 1929, Yokohama, Japan

The exhibition ‘A Gift to Those…’ is the result of an exchange of two artists between the UK and Japan, undertaken to celebrate the 150th anniversary of formal links between the two countries. Tokyo-based artist Mio Shirai and London-based Erika Tan, each spent the summer of 2008 in the others country of residence, undertaking a journey of discovery to unpick what cultural connections exist between Japan and Britain, and what separates them. Shirai was resident with /sLab, formally directed by Keith Whittle, International Projects, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, who created and co-curated the project; and Tan was resident with BankART 1929 and the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts, creating new bodies of work.

‘A Gift to Those… ’ takes its title from the life-story of one of the earliest known explorers, Ibn Battuta. In 1325 the Moroccan Battuta began exploring the limits of the known world, and spent 30 years travelling some 75,000 miles, gathering knowledge about cultures and countries other than his own. Battuta dictated the story of his travels to a fellow scholar, which took the title ‘A Gift to Those…’ and also known as simply ‘The Journey’. The two artists follow in the footsteps of the Iwakura Mission from Japan which arrived in England 1872 to gather information on education, technology, culture, and military, social and economic structures of Europe. The artists have created works that combine observation with speculation, whilst examining our ability to comprehend the world through travel, exploration, and cross-cultural comparison.

Mio Shirai’s short films and installations draw upon traditional folklore and myths, and popular stories that we all learn as children. Her films retell these stories and myths for an adult audience, imbuing them with a sense of the uncanny and absurd – a feeling of being “out of step”, in her own words. Shirai’s new short film, ‘Forever Afternoon’, re-creates a section of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’. ‘Alice’ is a story known worldwide and re-learned by each generation, but thoroughly Victorian and English, and indeed inspired in parts by the North-East of England. Shirai allows us to re-read ‘Alice’ in a new way, as a parable of how we experience and assimilate alien cultures and places. Here, Alice – played by Shirai – has to learn the rules of engagement of a strange yet familiar place, rules which are logical, and yet different to our own. The film was shot entirely in locations which Carroll knew and visited in the North East. Mio Shirai is a rising star in Tokyo’s art world, having recently shown in the city’s largest public gallery, the National Art Centre and having show extensively in New York.

Erika Tan’s new works are presented under the collective heading ‘Made in Japan’. The works explore the expectations that travellers bring; the iconic images associated with Japan; the different assumptions that Japanese culture is based upon; and the physical and psychological mechanisms that allow it to function. Her opening work, ‘The Syntactical Impossibility of Approaching with a Pure Heart’ is an array of reworked and new images of Mount Fuji – arguably the best-known pictorial symbol of Japan. The mountain has been the subject matter for Japanese landscape painters for centuries; it is also one of the most photographed sights in the country. Here, Tan creates an inventory of the different ways it has been portrayed, to ask whether we can see past others’ representations of a place. Are we always tied to seeing the world through our predecessors’ eyes, and to their prior perceptions? How far is it possible, moreover, to fully inhabit a worldview other than our own? Tan originally trained as an anthropologist, and her work asks what we can readily ‘import’ into our own experience from other cultures, what can be slowly assimilated, and what must remain alien.

‘A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling’ is a /sLab project produced in partnership with Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, BankART 1929, and in association with P3 art and environment and The Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts.

Project staged at Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art in 2008. Part of UK-Japan 2008

BankART 1929 staging supported by Fountain and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Part of Japan-UK 150

Supported by Arts Council England, Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, British Embassy in Tokyo, British Council Japan and Embassy of Japan in the UK

Mio Shirai and Erika Tan works commissioned, curated and produced by /sLab and Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art.


http://www.bankart1929.com