What would an artist-conceived “city” look like?

−Obayashi Foundation Research Program
PressRelease2024.02.26

Visions of the City - Obayashi Foundation Research Program

The 4th grant recipient, Minouk Lim, Hyper Yellow project details are finalized.

The Obayashi Foundation is pleased to announce the details of the project of Minouk Lim, the 4th
grant recipient of "Visions of the City," a biennial grant program that has been conducted by theObayashi Foundation since 2017. This project selects artists from Japan and abroad who have a strong
interest in urban planning, and suggests and proposes a new vision of the city from a different
perspective from conventional urban planning.
The recipient of this year's grant, Minouk Lim, an artist from Korea, is engaged in artistic practices
that use a diverse of methods to evoke forgotten and hidden voices and presences in contemporarysociety, crossing the boundaries between art and politics, past and present, the individual and thecommunity.
Minouk Lim will hold the exhibition Hyper Yellow at the Komagome SOKO in Tokyo fromThursday, February 29 to Tuesday, March 12, 2024, and the performance S.O.S - Run Shin Shin on
Saturday, March 2 and Sunday, March 3, 2024, which will take participants on a tour around theSumida River and Tokyo Bay on a Yakatabune (a Japanese style houseboat).
The exhibition title Hyper Yellow refers to something beyond a certain color or race; it invites us to a
critical zone that exists anywhere yet nowhere. It allows us to explore new possibilities of coexistence
and connectivity. Presented in the exhibition space are Portable Keepers, which are reinterpretations
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of Otaimatsu or the pinewood torches used for the Omizutori ceremony held at Todaiji temple inNara, Japan, every March. In the video where Eleven-Headed Guanyin appears as a tourist, a story
unfolds in a narrative of collisions and creations shown in Japan’s water and fire festivals, Shinto andBuddhist syncretism.
The performance S.O.S - Run Shin Shin invites the viewers to Yakatabune, which tours around
Sumida River and Tokyo Bay. Traveling by boat, the viewers encounter various events on theriverside and enter a world of inverted allusions, listening to stories and sounds suggested by the artist
at each location. The artist thus presents a reconstruction of history, nation, belief, and ecological andgeographical senses while focusing on the layered structure and fluid borders that appear in Japaneserituals.

| Project Outline
Title: Minouk Lim, Hyper Yellow
Exhibition Hyper Yellow
Preview: Thursday, February 29, 2024, 16:00 - *The artist will be in the gallery
Exhibition Dates: Friday, March 1 - Tuesday, March 12, 12:00 - 20:00 *open every day
Venue: Komagome SOKO (2-14-2 Komagome, Toshima-ku, Tokyo)
Admission: Free
Performance S.O.S - Run Shin Shin
Dates: Saturday, March 2 and Sunday, March 3, 2024 17:00-18:30
Venue: Sumida River and Tokyo Bay Yakatabune (a Japanese style house boat) (departing andarriving at “Etchujima Pier" in Etchujima Park, 1-chome, Etchujima, Koto-ku, Tokyo)
Admission: Free
Participation: Reservations required.
Advance reservations will be accepted from the Obayashi Foundation and Theater Commons website
from the end of January 2024.
Artist Talk
A talk by Minouk Lim will be held as part of the project.
Date: Monday, March 4, 2024 17:00-18:30 (doors open 16:30)
Venue: Obayashi Corporation 30th Floor Reception Room
Shinagawa Intercity Building B, 30th floor (2-15-2, Konan, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Admission: FreeReservations required.
Advance reservations will be accepted from the Obayashi Foundation and Theater Commons website
from the end of January 2024.
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| About the work Hyper Yellow"Yellow is in the air and in the oceans. Yellow comes in spring and it also comes on at night. City isyellow. Yellow protects us from danger and draws us into it. Yellow is between red and green light.
Where do we stand. Yellow overtakes me. Yellow is inescapable."
Tourists always travel through the city with a dual perspective. Hovering between sky and earth, theyoscillate between the near and the far, between the familiar and the unfamiliar. They have no politicalinterest and, like the divine, they arrive with the wind and scatter like clouds. The city always remains
at a distance for the tourist, as if it possessed a certain universality. This relationship is comparable
to that of the city and the river. In the midst of constant change and flow; they never tell the wholestory but only participate in its parts, transcending ideologies. This is the kind of orientation that
tourists perceive faintly between the past and the future, as they stand between different worlds tolook back on their lives and to seek a new leap forward.
S.O.S - Run Shin Shin penetrates through a world where Basho, Lovers in Paris, and the ElevenHeaded Guanin emerge. How are these related? This performance in voyage pays attention to thediscontinuity and transcendence of images, literature, and religion that are formed in the process ofmoving. Why are there always people running along the river? Whom do they wave at? Are theysaying goodbye to me?
Minouk Lim| Artist Biography
Minouk Lim (b. 1968) is an artist of many forms and has been creating works that are beyond theboundary of different genres and media, deepening the scope of questions while encompassing
writing, music, video, installation, and performance as her modes of artistic expression. Lim's practicerecalls historic losses, ruptures, and repressed traumas. Rooted in language, and specifically, thepolitics of expression, her work does not replay past events, rather, they elevate the experiences,memories, and feelings through the means of imagining or engaging structural beings of non-humanwitnesses in her performative sculptural objects and installations.

| Major Exhibitions
Solo Exhibitions:2015 Minouk Lim-The Promise of If, PLATEAU Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
2015 United Paradox_Minouk Lim solo exhibition, PORTIKUS, Frankfurt, Germany
2012 Minouk Lim: Heat of Shadows, Walker Art Center, Minnesota, U.S.A
2009 S.O.S-Adoptive Dissensus, Festival BOM, Seoul, Korea (theatrical site specific performance)
3Group Exhibitions:2023 The Shape of Time - Korean Art after 1989, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
2020 We Do Not Dream Alone, Asia Society Triennale, NewYork, U.S.A
2019 Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France
2019 Taming Y/Our Passion, Aichi Triennale 2019, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (8F Gallery),Nagoya, Japan
2016 Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future, The 10th Taipei Biennale
curated by Corinne Diserens, Taipei, Taiwan
2016 Setouchi Triennale 2016, Kagawa, Japan
2016 The Future is Already Here, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed, The 20th Biennale of Sydney,
Sydney, Australia
2015 The Time of Others, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
2014 Burning Down the House, The 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea
2012 Intense Proximity, Paris La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France| Awards
2016 Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD (Berlin,Germany)2012 Korea Artist Prize, SBS Foundation and MMCA (Korea)
2010 The 1st Media Art Korea Award (Seoul,Korea)
2007 The 7th Hermès Foundation Missulsang (Seoul,Korea)
2006 6th Gwangju Biennale Gwangju Bank Prize (Korea)| Public Collections
Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, LACMA, National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Pompidou Center, Walker Art Center,KADIST Foundation, Houston Museum of Art

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| Images of Past Works

S.O.S - Adoptive Dissensus (2009) ©the artist

Portable Keeper (2009) ©the artist

If you can see me, I can't see you (2019)
Biennale de Lyon installation view. ©the artist
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Portable Keeper_Sea (2020) ©the artist| About the grant program “Visions of the City – Obayashi Foundation Research Program"This foundation was established in September 1998 under the name Obayashi Foundation to Promote
Urban Studies. As the name suggests, we have worked to advance the development of urban researchin Japan by supporting those engaged in research activity to help actualize urban planning that will
enrich the lives of city residents. In September 2010 the foundation received accreditation fromJapan’s Cabinet Office as a public interest incorporated foundation. In September 2011 we changed
the name to our current name, Obayashi Foundation, while maintaining the same fundamental
philosophy.
Following the postwar reconstruction period, Japan achieved remarkable economic growth andbecame a materially wealthy nation while at the same time creating highly efficient and convenienturban environments. But even though these cities had come to be viewed as rich, it would be difficult
to say whether the inner lives of the people residing in them had truly become richer. Considering
that, for some time after the war, Japan was engaged in frantic efforts to revive its battle-scorched
land, as well as the fact that our country experiences an extraordinary number of natural disasters, it is
not surprising that the nation’s top priority for many years was to build a durable infrastructure toprotect the lives of its people.
On the other hand, there are many impoverished areas in the world where, for people who live there,the facilities in place are merely a means by which to go on living. The entire world, moreover, facescommon problems including excessive population concentration in cities, air pollution caused bywidespread automobile use and industrial agglomeration, depletion of the natural environment, andextreme weather conditions due to greenhouse gas emissions. In today’s Japan, where the decreasing
birth rate and the aging of society have led to population decline, there has also been an emergence ofvarious social problems such as the abandonment of vacant houses and the phenomenon of people
dying alone in their homes.
6Isn’t there some way to rethink urban development as a way to make people’s lives richer and more
fulfilling, and contribute to the study of cities in terms of interaction among human beings? Cities andpeople co-exist, and our idea was to support research on the various relationships between them in awide range of fields connected with cities and people, including the arts, the economy, theenvironment, and history.
Rather than call upon experts on cities or urban engineering, in this program we are asking artists
from Japan and overseas who have an abundance of creative ideas and a strong interest in cities toconsider various issues facing cities and conduct research on approaches to a city in which they would
like to live or to an innovative or ideal urban modality.
When I think about it, never before has there been an organization that provides support to an artist to
think about or study the topic of the city. The grant program “Visions of the City - Obayashi ResearchProgram” meets that need.
Takeo Obayashi
Chairman of the BoardThe Obayashi Foundation| Selection committeeChairperson: Nomura Shino (Senior Curator, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery)
Vice Chairperson: Hosaka Kenjiro (Director, Shiga Museum of Art)
Committee: Iida Shihoko (Curator)
Osaka Koichiro (Founder / Director, ASAKUSA)
Yabumae Tomoko (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)| Comments from the Chairperson of the Selection Committee
After the chaos of the pandemic, the selection process for the fourth round of grant recipients has
begun while society is gradually regaining its normalcy. This grant, which supports the independent
study and investigation of the state of cities by artists, is increasingly meaningful and potential when
we remember the various difficulties and restrictions we have experienced.
In this selection process, we focused on artists who face the city and society from a broader
perspective and have the potential to create a practice that is not limited to a single solution, whileremaining conscious of the fact that we are in the midst of a period of change. In addition, it was theconsensus of the committee members that we would like to select artists from regions that have been
nominated in the past but not yet selected. There was also a discussion preference for female artists(working independently) who had not yet been selected in the previous three rounds of selections, andthese discussions resulted in the selection of Minouk Lim, who is from and resides in Korea.
Since the beginning of her career, Lim has focused her work on the themes of community
fragmentation and loss of history brought about by rapid democratization, modernization, and urban
7development in her own country. Lim has sublimated the desire for solidarity and its potential, whichis still latent in people despite their difficulties, into a poetic and dynamic expression throughmeticulous researches and a wide variety of outputs.
Lim feels that Korea has lost the beliefs and traditions that were the spiritual pillars of its
communities. In contrast, Lim was interested in the fact that Japanese festivals have passed on these
traditions, and used them as a starting point for her research for this grant. In particular, byinvestigating ancient rituals related to water and fire, and by connecting the rivers of Tokyo to animaginary sea, it will illuminate the existence of frameworks and boundaries defined by history andsociety, as well as the ambiguity of what water, essentially free to roam, can show us. The proposal topresent the results of her research in the form of a participative performance tour and exhibition isimpressive in that it shows that there is more than one answer to the quest, and that her attitude of
accepting ambiguity is impressive, so we believe that she is an artist who will present a vision of thepath we should take to break free from the rigidity of contemporary society and to move forward into
the future.
Nomura Shino
Senior Curator, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery| Inquiries[Concerning the grant project]The Obayashi Foundation
Konwa Bldg. 13F 1-12-22 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0045
E-mail: obf-zaidan@obayashi.co.jp[Concerning press coverage or publicity images]
Arts Commons Tokyo
E-mail: artscommons.tokyo.inquiry@gmail.com
TEL: 050-5358-8561 / Available 10:00-18:00, Monday through Friday during the program

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