Exhibition
Tomiyama Taeko: A Tale of Sea Wanderers
18 Jan 2025 – 27 Apr 2025
Regular hours
- Monday
- Closed
- Tuesday
- Closed
- Wednesday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Thursday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Friday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Saturday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Sunday
- 12:00 – 17:00
Free admission
Address
- UC Santa Barbara
- Santa Barbara
California - CA 93106-7130
- United States
To celebrate the major gift of 28 works by Japanese artist Tomiyama Taeko (1921-2021) to the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, the museum will organize the exhibition Tomiyama Taeko: A Tale of Sea Wanderers.
About
Drawing on a rich vocabulary of images and techniques, Tomiyama Taeko has addressed issues around gender, imperialism, war responsibility, and environmental destruction through an unflinching feminist and activist lens throughout her career. Her subject for the last quarter-century has been Japan's colonial empire, its destructive wars in Asia, and the complicated emotional and social legacies left by both war and imperialism after 1945. This exhibition presents the series Hiruko and the Puppeteers: A Tale of Sea Wanderers consisting of oil paintings and collages produced in 2008 that depict a troupe of wandering minstrels, puppeteers, and musicians who travelled from the South Pacific to the waters of East Asia and beyond. Their stories range from ancient religious myth, to Japan's wartime colonial expansion, ultimately concluding in a cautionary tale of environmental catastrophe for our present day.
Hiruko and the Puppeteers: A Tale of Sea Wanderers is the one of the largest and most ambitious series by Tomiyama. It sustains her longstanding focus on transnational history, warfare, and Japan’s complicated relationship with Asia. The paintings and collages trace the journey of Asian masks, dolls, and puppets from Central Asia to the Chinese coast; then to Awaji, a Japanese island known for traditional puppetry and the homeland of Tomiyama’s parents; then to Taiwan and the waters of Southeast Asia and New Guinea—regions deeply affected by the Japanese Empire. In this journey, Japan is but one stop and neither the cultural originator nor the culmination of the journey. The series evokes an undersea world where puppets and folk gods, cast off by society, mirror the cultural and ecological remnants sacrificed to capitalism and imperial pursuits.
Tomiyama Taeko: A Tale of Sea Wanderers is the first exhibition of the Hiruko series in the United States, and the gift to the AD&A Museum represents the largest holding of Tomiyama's work outside of Asia.
Curated by Gabriel Ritter, AD&A Museum Director, with Hayate Murayama, Curatorial Research Fellow, the exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, January 18 with a public reception from 5:30pm to 7:30pm and will remain on view through April 27, 2025. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 12:00pm to 5:00pm. Free admission.