ART IN THE COUNTRYSIDE: SYMPOSIUM ON ART AND
REGIONAL REVITALIZATION THROUGH CASE STUDIES FROMJAPANBOOK OF ABSTRACTS

“NATURE” AS HYPOTHETICAL SPACE? ART AND NATURE ATECHIGO-TSUMARI ART TRIENNALE
GUNHILD BORGGREEN
ABSTRACT

Many of the rural art festivals in Japan feature “revitalization” as a goal for engaging local
communities in the countryside in art or performance projects. The attractiveness of cultural activities
plays a role in enticing young people to move to (or return to) rural areas and thus revitalize local
communities through demographic change. An additional attractive aspect is the notion of “nature,”
which is highlighted as an integrated part of the art festivals and often functions as a theme or concept
in the artworks themselves. Nature is closely connected to the overarching concept of the EchigoTsumari Art Triennale, as seen in the English title of a book by the festival’s artistic director,
Kitagawa Fram: Art Place Japan: The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Vision to Reconnect Art
and Nature (2015).
How is this notion of “nature” promoted? How is “nature” in art festivals related to the concept of the“global countryside” as a hypothetical space? In the case of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, there
are a number of discourses concerning “nature” and its contribution to revitalization. One is theaesthetic dimension of landscapes and the ability to unite communities through the appreciation ofnature experience. Another is the revitalization connected to maintaining traditional agriculture andthe experimentation with new formats of permaculture in transnational collaboration. This attention to
the revitalization of “nature” might not be connected to a specific local community alone but also ties
into broader discourses of social and environmental sustainability within the frames of global
interrelatedness.

BIOGRAPHY

Gunhild Borggreen is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies,
University of Copenhagen. Her research in Japanese visual culture and contemporary art focuses on
relations between visual art and social issues, including gender, national identity, disastermanagement, and robot technology. She is the principal investigator of the international research
network Collaboration and Community Building in Contemporary Art (CCCA), a platform forstudying socially engaged art in a globalized world. Her publications include “Autonomy andCollectivity at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan,” coauthored with Anemone Platz, inCultures of Participation: Arts, Digital Media and Cultural Institutions (Routledge 2020).

CONCEPTS OF ISLAND REVITALIZATION REFLECTED IN ART
TOURISMCAROLIN FUNCKABSTRACT

Revitalization of depopulating islands became a national policy with the introduction of the RemoteIsland Promotion Law in 1953. This influenced island research and policies in Japan, as islands wereframed as disadvantaged, less developed peripheral locations. Among the efforts to attract people andinvestment, tourism has played a less important role than might be expected. However, since the1990s, art tourism has come to be seen as a possible tool to showcase cultural and natural featuresunique to each island. The many islands dotting the Seto Inland Sea differ in their economic structure,
population, administrative structure, and access possibilities. This presentation will examine how
throughout the last 30 years a variety of approaches to art tourism developed that reflect concepts ofisland revitalization within the tensions of local, national and global, and peripheral and central
intervention and organic development.

BIOGRAPHY

Carolin Funck obtained her PhD from the Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg. She is Professor in
Human Geography at Hiroshima University (Japan), Graduate School of Humanities and Social
Sciences. Her research focuses on the development of tourism in Japan, sustainable island tourism,
and the rejuvenation of mature tourist destinations. She is the author of Tourismus und Peripherie inJapan and coauthor of Japanese Tourism.

A SMALL GLOBAL CITY IN THE MAKING? – THE TOYOOKATHEATER FESTIVAL IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL CULTURALFLOWS AND RURAL REVITALIZATIONBARBARA GEILHORNABSTRACTDuring the last decade, regional arts projects and festivals have grown in significance in Japan,
specifically in the context of the revitalization of rural areas. My presentation will focus on the
Kinosaki International Arts Center (KIAC), which was founded in 2014 by Hirata Oriza, a leading
figure in the Japanese cultural and theater world, in the rural city of Toyooka (Hyōgo Prefecture).
Providing a space for international artists to engage with the local community is a central aim of the
KIAC’s artists-in-residence program. KIAC is at the center of the emerging Toyooka Theater
Festival, which will further contribute to existing opportunities for transnational communication
mediated through performing arts. My paper will situate the festival in the recent trend to create new
types of social, cultural, and economic capital in rural areas to promote countryside lifestyles andenvironmental awareness. I will show that Toyooka’s endeavors go far beyond the engagement withdiscrete social issues or a quest for regional revitalization but extend to central issues in Japanesesociety.

BIOGRAPHY

Barbara Geilhorn is a Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo(DIJ) and an Adjunct Researcher at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University.
Recent publications include “Towards a Culture of Responsibility – Relating Fukushima, Chernobyl,
and the Atomic Bombings in Setoyama Misaki’s Theatre” (Japan Forum 2021) and the coedited
books Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre (with Peter Eckersall et al., Performance Research Books
2021) and Fukushima and the Arts (with Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, Routledge 2017).

THEORIZING ART AND POLITICS IN NON-URBAN LOCATIONSJUSTIN JESTY
ABSTRACTMy paper will explore the need for new theoretical approaches to contemporary art in non-urban
settings. Many theories of art’s spatial politics assume intensive market and demographic pressure on
space, making them less relevant to rural areas characterized by entropic dynamics such as populationand economic decline. Non-urban areas tend to have less media exposure and fewer public spaces
than urban areas, making performance and media intervention less powerful. Artists and activists inrural areas must often build trust with diverse, non-specialist collaborators and audiences over a long
period of time as a prerequisite to doing meaningful work, making disruptive, spectacular forms ofintervention inappropriate. On the other hand, non-urban settings may be more vibrant than cities forexperiments that involve long time frames, complex negotiations, and participants and audiences who
have no prior experience with contemporary art. Cities are becoming less diverse, economic
inequality is increasingly stark, and people around the world are seeking alternative lifestyles incommunes, through low impact living, and through sustainable primary production and food systems.
Contemporary art practices reveal and address these complicated cultural and political dynamics,
which do not fit most existing frameworks for understanding art and politics. My paper will addressthese issues and sketch out alternatives.

BIOGRAPHY

Justin Jesty researches the relationship between art and social movements in postwar Japan. He
recently published the book Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press
2018), which was awarded the 2019 ASAP Book Prize by the Association for the Study of Arts of the
Present. He is currently researching contemporary socially engaged art. In 2017 he edited a two-part
special issue on the topic in FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. He has also
published several articles on postwar social documentary.
https://washington.academia.edu/JustinJesty

WOODCUT PRINTS AS HYBRID MEDIA IN THE FORMATION OF
TRANSNATIONAL ANARCHISTIC COMMUNITIESAI KANO
ABSTRACT

Woodcut prints have been a commonly used medium in socio-cultural movements in many Asian
regions throughout history. First, the woodcut is an accessible medium of individual expression that
doesn’t require specific skills and techniques. Second, the woodcut’s mobility enables easy culturaland physical exchange. Third, woodcut printing is a reproduction that can disseminate politicalmessages and individual expression to the masses. Thus, woodcut prints can broadly function as “artfor the sake of people.”
The transnational network of woodblock art collectives has been expanding around the globe for the
past decade. It has spread throughout East and Southeast Asia, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, China,
Japan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Collaborative work and anarchism are key to this network and crucial
to understand to distinguish it from traditional woodcut arts movement. Each collective often
collaborates with the local community, minority groups, and other art collectives, both domesticallyand internationally, and it is through this collaboration that they incorporate both local and global
issues. Furthermore, many woodcut art collectives share an anarchist attitude influenced by punkmusic and DIY culture, which draw on ideas from cultural theories and social movements related toanti-capitalism, feminism, environmental issues, and migration.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, art collectives communicated with each other by following social
media accounts, which allowed them to know what was going on in real time. Social media stimulated
physical communication as well: online projects, collaborative exhibitions, online talks, zine-making,and so on. This paper will present how woodcuts can be regarded as a medium to explore physical,
political, and artistic spaces through art.

BIOGRAPHYAi Kano is Assistant Professor in the Department of Socio-Information Studies, Shizuoka University.
She researches art collectives, exploring the relationships between art and politics in the intersecting
fields of media, art, and activism within transnational movements. She is a member of the woodcut art
collective A3BC and currently researching with the Working Group for Inter-Asia Self-Organized
Woodcut Collectives Mapping Series. Her publications include “Trans Local Networking of DIY Art
Collectives from Asia to Europe—The Case of A3BC” in FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art
Criticism (2017). Kanō received her PhD in 2018 at Tokyo University of the Arts and completed an
MA in Culture Industry at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2012.

REDISCOVERING THE CULTURAL VALUE OF THE REGION AND
CONNECTING IT TO CULTURAL TOURISM
MARI KOBAYASHIABSTRACT

Art projects have been developed in rural areas of Japan since the beginning of the 2000s, though theylook different from the art biennales and triennales held in Europe and the United States. In Japan,
artistic techniques are used to solve regional issues. These projects have received a lot of attention,and many people have visited the areas, the most famous being the Earth Art Festival held in the
Tsumari area and the Setouchi Art Festival held on the islands of the Seto Inland Sea. These festivals
have also been popular with contemporary art fans from overseas. This method of developing art insync with the challenges of the region has led to a move to reassess the inherent cultural value of
traditional museums and galleries. For example, the Agency for Cultural Affairs is developing a
project to connect the cultural value of each region to cultural tourism. In 2020, the Cultural Tourism
Promotion Law was enacted, and 41 areas nationwide were certified as cultural tourism sites withprojects already in the implementation stage. These projects are still in their infancy, but I will
introduce further examples of regional promotion using art in the Japanese region.

BIOGRAPHY

Mari Kobayashi is Professor of Cultural Resources Studies, Course of Cultural Management in the
Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo. She is involved in theinstitutional design and operation of the cultural administration of local governments, and she sits on
cultural policy, museum, and cultural property protection subcommittees at the Agency for Cultural
Affairs.

CONSIDERING THE "SUBURBS": COMMUNITY ART PROJECTSINVOLVING UNIVERSITIESKUMAKURA SUMIKO
ABSTRACT

I lead an arts management laboratory at Tokyo University of the Arts, where we have been working
on cultural projects co-created with the local community, local government, art NPOs, along withothers. I will introduce several projects our group has been working on over the last 20 years. The firstare projects in Toride City, Ibaraki Prefecture, a bedroom community of 100,000 residents, an hour by
train from central Tokyo. Toride is a quiet agricultural town where commerce is declining rapidly,
especially in the commercial space around the train station due to motorization. Vacant stores areconspicuous. I will share some of the projects we are developing on our university campus and in thestation building.
The second case I will share is a project we are developing in the town of Senju, in the eastern
suburbs of Tokyo. This is one of the poorest areas in Tokyo, with issues of child poverty, andcommunity building between old and new residents is a challenge.
In my paper I will introduce these projects and use them as case studies to evaluate the effectivenessof community art projects.

BIOGRAPHY

Kumakura Sumiko is the Dean of the Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of theArts and Professor in Arts Management and Cultural Policy Studies. She has been a leading figure in
the field of arts management in Japan since launching the first arts management program in a nationalart university in Tokyo in 2002. She is actively involved in numerous community-based art projects
and works as an executive producer for the Toride Art Project and Art Access Adachi. She has served
as a national and municipal policy advisor numerous times.

TAKAYAMA AKIRA – PERFORMANCE-ENACTING MOBILITY
AND SHIFTING BORDERS
TOM LOOSER AND PETER ECKERSALL
ABSTRACTThis paper considers how performances by Takayama Akira (founder of Port B) are made to explore
and interrogate experiences of mobility and migration among people who traverse geographical andgeopolitical spaces in Japan and elsewhere. In making works that uncover submerged and hidden sites
connected to ways of forgetting and of diasporic and migratory passage, Takayama invites reflection
on questions of borders, zones, and regions, and the passages between them. From his early work One
Way Street (2006), named after Walter Benjamin’s compilation of texts of the same name, to his
recent McDonald’s Radio University (2021), Takayama’s performances are a form of expanded
traveling dramaturgy that pushes performance into contact with the everyday and remakes ourunderstanding of the borders and striations of space.
For example, several of Takayama’s early works took place in and around Sugamo’s Jizō dōri—alocation that evokes the memory of shitamachi, where, in Edo times, there was a northern gate to thecity that signified a liminal space and transactional border between city and countryside. Takayama’s
works made in response to the Fukushima disaster explore the reterritorialization of place. His
installation Happy Island (2015), about the farmer Yoshizawa Masami who refused to euthanize hisradiation-inflicted dairy cows and took them to Tokyo to protest the response to the nuclear disaster,shows the unfolding of place as a radioactive site and a geopolitical struggle. Referring to his conceptof the “tour performance” in his production of Elfriede Jelinek’s Kein Licht, Epilog (2012), Takayama
said that it aimed to explore the “the distance between Fukushima and Tokyo” (2015, 40).
Takayama’s work can be explored as a remapping of space that connects people who participate in his
performances to lived experiences, politics, nostalgia, multitudes, and cultural memory. In doing this,Takayama works across and between the tactics and experiences of documentary theater,
psychogeography, heterotopia, and diaspora, and he brings fragments of history into present-day
consideration.
Our paper will discuss how Takayama’s work is a form of placemaking. His tour performances andmobile ideas of theater create complexities around the meaning of place in terms of respatialized
institutional strata and civic designations. He is interested in figural and embodied pathways between
places, where participants become “‘evacuees,’ transferring their bodies as performers in a theater ofroutes connecting places” (Takayama 2015, 42). From this, we aim to explore how civic institutions
and designations such as “rural” and “city” are being broken and/or made liminal; they are linking,expanding, and decoupling, making the contemporary idea of space one of constant movement. Our
paper will outline how this spatial dramaturgy has ramifications for the “global countryside” (Woods)
as something both institutionalized and yet to be.

REFERENCES CITED

TAKAYAMA AKIRA AND PORT B. 2015. AKIRA TAKAYAMA/PORT B, PŌTO KANKŌ RISĀCHISENTĀSHUPPAN-KYOKU (PORT TOURISM RESEARCH CENTER PUBLISHING BUREAU).
https://bccks.jp/bcck/131906/info. ACCESSED APRIL 15, 2022.

BIOGRAPHIESPeter Eckersall teaches in the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center,
City University of New York. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of Culture
and Communication, University of Melbourne. His research interests include Japanese performance,
dramaturgy, and theater and politics. Recent publications include Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre(with Peter Eckersall et al., Performance Research Books 2021), Curating Dramaturgies (edited with
Bertie Ferdman 2021), and Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013). He is
cofounder/dramaturg of Not Yet It’s Difficult. Recent dramaturgy includes Sheep #1 (Sachiyo
Takahashi, Japan Society) and Phantom Sun/Northern Drift (Alexis Destoop, Beursschouwburg, Riga
Biennial).
Thomas Looser (PhD in Anthropology, U. of Chicago) is Chair and Associate Professor of East
Asian Studies at NYU. His areas of research include cultural anthropology and Japanese studies; art,architecture, and urban form; new media studies and animation; and critical theory and globalities.
Previously a senior editor for the journal Mechademia, and now an editor for Asiascape: Digital Asia,and editorial advisory board member of ADVA, he is the author of Visioning Eternity: Aesthetics,
Politics, and History in the Early Modern Noh Theater, and has published articles in a variety ofvenues including Boundary 2, Japan Forum, Mechademia, Shingenjitsu, Journal of PacificAsia, and Cultural Anthropology.

NEO-ENDOGENOUS REVITALIZATION: INCREASING
COMMUNITY RESILIENCE THROUGH SOCIALLY ENGAGED
ART AND CREATIVE IN-MIGRANT MICROENTREPRENEURSHIP
MENG QU
ABSTRACT

Rural revitalization and resilience have become the urgent objective of peripheral regions in Japanseeking to recover or re-create conditions to maintain their existence. Art and creativity are now
important drivers of rural resilience in the knowledge economy, and a variety of related projects havebeen launched with an explicit rural revitalization mission. One such project is the Setouchi Triennale,a large-scale art festival held on twelve small islands in the Seto Inland Sea, which promotes sociallyengaged art and festival tourism as a means to revitalize island communities. Studies indicate that the
decade-long festival development initiative has generated an increase of in-migrants who haveestablished creative micro-businesses on some of the islands.
The present study focuses on three islands involved in the Setouchi Triennale and shows that theopportunities brought by the exogenous art festival initiative have triggered endogenous community
responses in terms of increased entrepreneurship and social engagement, which has in turn facilitatedthe emergence of neo-endogenous co-revitalization processes. The findings show that successful neoendogenous revitalization through socially engaged art requires long-term creative and relational
engagement between exogenous art development and endogenous community activities. Exogenous,
endogenous, and neo-endogenous elements are therefore necessary to increase rural resilience.
Furthermore, although in all three case studies neo-endogenous processes were found to facilitaterural revitalization and increase community resilience, the three islands each displays different
response mechanisms despite starting from the same exogenous influence. These different
revitalization pathways and outcomes depend on the resources and conditions of each island
community.

BIOGRAPHY

Meng Qu is Assistant Professor at Hiroshima University, Visiting Research Fellow at Wakayama
University, co-convener at the Small Island Cultures Research Initiative (SICRI), and Research Director
at the Art Island Center (Naoshima). His research draws from interdisciplinary perspectives, especiallysocially engaged art in rural regions, creative/tourism geography, and island studies.

THE END OF ART TOURISM? THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND
THE TRANSFORMATION OF ART FESTIVALS IN THE
COUNTRYSIDE IN JAPANYOSHITAKA MŌRIABSTRACTThe COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe setbacks for most international art festivals held in theJapanese countryside. Prior to the emergence of the pandemic, international art festivals such as the
Echigo-Tsumari Triennale and the Setouchi Triennale had been developing as a new form of art
tourist industry, attracting not only domestic contemporary art fans but also overseas tourists whowanted to enjoy staying in the rural countryside of Japan. Due to COVID-19, however, most rural art
festivals have been forced to change their business strategy: they must now get more local residents
involved not only as hosts but also as attendees, as the return of overseas visitors is still uncertain.
This paper looks at the situation of international art festivals in the countryside during the COVID-19
pandemic and considers how they are changing their framework in relation to local communities.

BIOGRAPHY

Yoshitaka Mōri is Professor in Sociology and Cultural Studies at the Graduate School of Global
Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. His research interests are postmodern culture, media, art, the city,and transnationalism. He has published numerous books and essays in both Japanese and English,
including “New Collectivism, Participation and Politics after the East Japan Great Earthquake” inWorld Art (Routledge 2015).

THE RURAL AND THE EMPIRE: COLONIAL HISTORIES IN
TRANSCULTURAL EXCHANGEJESSICA NAKAMURA
ABSTRACTThe history of Okinawa as a colonial acquisition of Japan can illuminate some of the political andhistorical complexities of how we think of the rural in Japanese art. Okinawa is a region with a clear
identity that existed before annexation, and artists’ portrayals of the prefecture’s history can serve as
commentary on its ongoing status. By turning to Okinawa, I foreground the relationship between therural and the colonial, exploring questions that include: How might Okinawa’s regional identity makeitself known and potentially influence the global art scene of visual and performing arts? In contrast,
how might the arts reiterate imperial imaginings of the colonial rural state? And how might we as
scholars interpret the effects of such histories?
To explore these questions, I look to Okinawan artists operating in and through urban centers of Japanand beyond. I consider the ways in which these artists make the issues of their locales relevant tothose in the metropole, teasing out significances of exhibiting work in urban and global art markets. I
plan to use the video and performance artist Yamashiro Chikako as one of my main examples. Born in
Okinawa in 1976, Yamashiro has spent her career confronting her audiences with images of
Okinawa’s culture and colonial past. Her success in the Japanese art world, with exhibitions in Tokyoand internationally, provides an example of the ways in which artists may be able to negotiate therelationship between Okinawa and Japan through the global art world.

BIOGRAPHY

Jessica Nakamura is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at the Universityof California, Santa Barbara. Her current research project explores representations of the domestic in
20th-century Japanese theater, from the introduction of Western realism until the present.

AKIYA: FROM SCARY ABANDONED HOUSE TO SITE OFARTWORKANEMONE PLATZ
ABSTRACT

Akiya, or abandoned houses and buildings, have been perceived as threat agents to theirneighborhoods and as socio-political problems to local communities for several decades. However,recently positive images and reappraisals of forgotten qualities of the akiya have reemerged, and thebuildings are being reconsidered as sites of special character, suited for different types of cultural
events, particularly as spaces for art exhibits or as integrated parts of installations at art festivals.
This paper explores the implications of the usage of abandoned houses for rural communities inJapan, tracing the trajectory of change from irritating nuisance to local (touristic) attraction and art
site. Initiatives to reuse as well as rethink the use of these types of buildings are, on the one hand, topdown, steered undertakings aimed at the revitalization of peripheral regions. On the other hand, they
serve as places of interaction between local residents, artists, and visitors, influencing inside andoutside perceptions of the local community but also as boundaries of local citizens’ engagement andexternal involvement.
My presentation will center on these concepts and related aspects as perceived by the artists of two art
installation projects in akiya. It will shed light on their thoughts regarding the use of former dwellings
and the meaning of the site for their specific projects. Furthermore, it will focus on their experience of
exchange with the local neighborhood while working and interacting with the local community
before, during, and after the art event.

BIOGRAPHY

Anemone Platz is Associate Professor in the Department of Global and Area Studies, Japan Studies
Section, University of Aarhus. Her current research takes its starting point in changing life and livingstyles in contemporary Japan and focuses on how these influence individual choices of living spaces,such as imaginaries of home and its implementation. As a member of the international research
network Collaboration and Community Building in Contemporary Art (CCCA) led by Gunhild
Borggreen, she investigates the impact of communal revitalization activities on local residents interms of social engagement in their neighborhood and related issues of wellbeing.

PERFORMING ARTS UNDER MT. FUJI: SHIZUOKA'S WORLDTHEATRE FESTIVAL
CODY POULTONABSTRACT

Director Suzuki Tadashi was a forerunner of a “back to the land” movement in the Japanese arts when
he and his company, Waseda Shōgekijō, left Tokyo in 1976 and based themselves in the hamlet of
Toga, in Toyama Prefecture. In 1982 Suzuki established the annual Toga Festival for performing arts;
he founded the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) in 1984 and regularly hosts a theater version of the
Olympics in Toga. The Toga Art Park has since been a laboratory for native Japanese artists and amagnet for international theater artists during its annual summer festival. Suzuki was also
instrumental in establishing the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in 1997. Since that time
SPAC has hosted an annual World Theatre Festival every spring under its artistic director Miyagi
Satoshi, whose own work has been showcased in Avignon, Paris, and New York. My talk will focus
on how SPAC’s annual spring theater festival has weathered the pandemic over the past three years,
first by going totally online in 2020, then hosting a hybrid production in 2021 and again in 2022,
while increasingly inviting international artists to Japan to present their work.

BIOGRAPHY

M. Cody Poulton is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada. His most recent

monograph is A Beggar's Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama (University of Hawai'i Press
2010). Additionally, he served as editor and chief translator of Hirata Oriza's Citizens of Tokyo: Six
Plays (Seagull Books 2019). He is also coeditor, with Mitsuya Mori and J. Thomas Rimer, of The
Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (2014) and, with Peter Eckersall, Barbara Geilhorn,and Andreas Regelsberger, of Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre (Performance Research Books
2021).

TURNING INWARD AS A COPING MECHANISM: PHYSICALITY
AND PANDEMIC IN THE TŌHOKU REGIONKRISZTINA ROSNER
ABSTRACTMy presentation focuses on the Aomori-based dancer and choreographer Mari Osanai. Osanai gives
workshops in Japan and internationally, teaching a movement practice technique based on Noguchi
gymnastics. This technique was developed by Michizō Noguchi in the second half of the 20th century
and has been used by dancers, choreographers, and physical educators ever since. Noguchi’s approachto body awareness training includes turning the attention inwards, accepting the body as a fluid entity,
and working on the physical gravity rather than muscles.
These qualities emphasized by the concepts of Noguchi Taiso resonate surprisingly well with theconstraints of the pandemic. However, the pandemic situation has raised many practical questions
regarding regional revitalization: How has Osanai’s practical training format been coping with theshift to the online format? What kind of practical resources are available from local cultural
institutions for an artist/teacher living in a regional center? What kind of region-specific artistic
challenges has she been facing?
Since 2014 I have been working continuously with Osanai, taking private and group workshops led byher, and in 2016 creating together a performance at the Nabegen Theatre Group. I also published anoral history video interview with her in 2016.
This paper will be looking at her practice pre- and mid-pandemic.
It is a work-in-progress presentation.

BIOGRAPHY

Krisztina Rosner (Meiji University) is a Tokyo-based Hungarian researcher and practitioner ofcontemporary performing arts. Her PhD thesis was written on the actor’s presence and theperformative aspects of silence (University of Pecs, Hungary, 2011). Her current research focuses ontransmedia and technology, with a special emphasis on the nonhuman aspects of contemporary
Japanese performance: robots and animals. With her practice-as-research approach, she is also active
as an actor and director, leading workshops in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Grants include
UNESCO-Aschberg Bursary for Performing Artists (2006), “Eotvos” Hungarian State Research Grant(2008), Hungarian Academy of Science Book Publication Grant (2011), Japan Foundation
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Hosei University, Tokyo, 2014), Japan Society for the Promotionof Science (Waseda University 2015–2017). Homepage: www.tinarosner.com

ART FESTIVALS IN JAPAN: FUELING REVITALIZATION,TOURISM, AND SELF-CENSORSHIP?
EIMI TAGORE-ERWIN
ABSTRACTThis paper critically considers large-scale contemporary art festivals that have become a significant
force of art tourism in Japan. While many of these projects got their start in socially conscious
endeavors with a focus on machizukuri, or local community building, how has the increase ofgovernment-sponsored revitalization initiatives and heightened pressure from the tourism industry
shifted art production over the years? Recent incidents of state intervention within Japan’s art world
have created troubling new precedents for censorship and the use of art by the state for fulfillingcertain socio-political narratives. As such, this paper discusses some of the ways that artists and theirartwork may be subjected to instrumentalization by various festival stakeholders, as well as some of
the material repercussions of “festivalization” on rural locales. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic’s
adverse effect on foreign travel and shipping costs has impacted the art tourism industry, revealingthat the seasonal model may not be as sustainable as envisioned. This paper aims to situate such
festivals within their shifting genealogy and raise points of critique for audiences to consider aroundthe topic of rural revitalization, specifically focused on the challenges artists, curators, and organizers
face today.

BIOGRAPHY

Eimi Tagore-Erwin is a doctoral candidate of East Asian Studies at New York University. Her
research focus is contemporary Japanese art engaging with colonial history, memory, and transpacificpolitics. She is a curator at Alison Bradley Projects and a Curatorial Fellow at the Shigeko Kubota
Video Art Foundation. She was a 2021 Wikipedia Fellow for PoNJA-Genkon and Asia Art Archive in
America, where she focused on Japanese artists who have faced censorship.

EXPERIENCING ART FROM A FIELD OF RICE—HOW FARMERSRELATE TO RURAL REVITALIZATION AND ART AT THE

ECHIGO-TSUMARI ART TRIENNALE IN JAPANLINE MARIE THORSEN
ABSTRACTIn this paper I propose a novel mode of conceptualizing the role of art for rural revitalization, focusing
on the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennal (ETAT) in Niigata, Japan, and on how local farmers experienceart as a catalyst for social, cultural, and natural changes. While several social and cultural sciencescholars have researched the role of art in rural revitalization, this work is often focused on arts’problem-solving affordances (e.g., economic, demographic) or how rural engagements matter to thedevelopment of art (e.g., art world discussions on socially engaged art). Instead, I turn attention to the
middle-ground: what art as rural revitalization does as an intervention in the everyday life andpractices of farmers living in the festival area. Specifically, I explore how farmers relate to different
types of artworks presented at ETAF and how this art spurs farmers to consider their farming andlifeways anew. Based on qualitative interviews with farmers and ethnographic field work at ETAT I
draw on the art analysis by Japanese sociologist and cultural theorist Tsurumi Shunsuke as well as theaesthetic philosophy of American pragmatist John Dewey. Collectively they offer a set of broad andinclusive notions of “art” and “aesthetic experience” well equipped to grapple with the way art canspur farmers to reflect on their lives, their farming, and the environments they inhabit.

BIOGRAPHYLine Marie Thorsen is a Postdoc with the Independent Research Fund Denmark, based at Aarhus
University, Department of Anthropology and Centre for Environmental Humanities. She researches
the intersections of art, farming, and environmental activism in East Asia.