Chikako Yamashiro

Born and raised in Okinawa, Chikako Yamashiro attended Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts and initially studied painting. It was during her year-long study in 2000 at the University of the Creative Arts (formerly Surrey institute of Art and Design) in the U.K. that she encountered moving image-based and performance art, particularly through the work of Gilbert & George. Her new interest in the body’s potential as the expressive medium of performance art led her to develop a desire to address the history and geopolitics of Okinawa, which she describes as something keenly felt and ingrained in the daily living of Okinawans.

In her single-channel video I Like Okinawa Sweet, from her three-part video series entitled OKINAWA TOURIST (2004), Yamashiro appears as an embodiment of the everyday situation of Okinawa—always in a state of subjugation and dependance. The artist faces the camera in close-up with the boundary fence of the U.S. military base behind. A person standing outside the frame hands her an endless supply of ice-cream cones which she obediently eats, one after another, with a facial expression of ecstasy mixed with pain. The economic dependency of Okinawa on the military and the tourism industries is succinctly allegorized in this tightly focused space between the military base and Yamashiro as an symbol of her hometown. Another single-channel video, Graveyard Eisa, also from the aforementioned trilogy, is shot in front of an Okinawan tomb and features a group of men with paper bags over their heads blindly dancing eisā, a traditional ritual mourning dance that has become a tourist attraction and as a result has lost its original context.

In HT22 Yamashiro is represented by the 26-minute-long video Mud Man (2016), one of the most significant works by the artist to date, and encapsulating the strength of various narrative experiments from earlier works. Created as a commission for the Aichi Triennial of that year, Mud Man was originally composed as a three-channel video in which a dreamlike—or nightmarish—story of awakening begins with a group of mud-covered people who rise from the ground, searching for the source of the indecipherable voices that echo all around them. Their journey is told in a style akin to magical realism, combining an air of mystery, fantasy, surrealism, and collaged historical footage of the Battle of Okinawa during World War II and of the Korean War. Shot in Okinawa and Jeju Island in South Korea—another island occupied by a large military base—the search for the source of the voices can be seen as a desire and difficulty to regain identity, autonomy, and an agency to recount one’s own story, history, and memories. The iteration presented for HT22 is a single-channel version in which the artist places additional importance in the communicative power of sound, carefully designing a surround-sound environment that literally engulfs the audience. The vibration and echoes enter each viewer’s body, creating a sensation of one’s subconscious emerging from within, trying to enter the world anew.