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Greater Than A Wave: The Riseof Performance and Intervention
in Japanese Contemporary Art
By Johnny Magdaleno
Jul 15, 2014

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Finger Pointing Worker; video still of performance by Kota Takeuchi.

In the three years since a 9.0 magnitude earthquake tore apart infrastructures andlivelihoods throughout eastern Japan, there's been a surge of international interest in
any sign of the island country's recuperation. But Japan is no stranger to the process ofrecovery; its historical timeline is fractured by a variety of disasters. In the last hundredyears alone, there were more than 40 recorded earthquakes which surpassed a 6.0
reading on the Richter scale, in addition to 6 major military operations.

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This component of Japan's past is unfortunately, and often, mistaken as a componentof Japanese identity in part because of its recurrence in national art and pop culture.
Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave (c. 1833), a painting that depicts a frothingtsunami wave in the process of swallowing a row boat, is arguably the mostrecognizable piece of Japanese ﬁne art. In another medium, and arriving nearly 100
years later, is Ishiro Honda's Godzilla (1954), the monster cinema star often understoodas a metaphor for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Because of their central
quality of immense power and their appearance alongside Japanese disasters, both ofthese works are often regarded by the Western world as reﬂections on the peculiarities
of Japan's geological and political timeline, yet rarely as explorations of the kind ofnatural and man-made events any country is liable to experience at any moment.
(Especially signiﬁcant is the fact that both "Tsunami" and "Godzilla" are Japanesewords, transliterated to English only from their kanji and ateji phoneticizations,
respectively).

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Still from Ishiro Honda's Godzilla (1954).

In 2011, after the tripartite shockwave, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown now
known as the Fukushima disaster, a new international ﬁgure walked into the frame ofJapanese artistic identity. Although not as popular as these two preceding examples,
he's known as the Finger Pointing Worker.
Following the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, its operator,
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), installed cameras throughout thecompromised area in an attempt to transmit live feeds of the cleanup effort to viewers
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online. During one of these transmissions, someone dressed in a hazmat suitapproached a camera, pointed an accusatory ﬁnger at its lens, and held this stance,
motionless, for nearly 15 minutes. Recordings of the live feed eventually went viral in
Japan, and inspired both domestic and international press to speculate who the worker
was, and what his intentions were.
Using yet another Japanese tragedy as its backdrop, Finger Pointing Worker (which
turned out to be a performance piece by Japanese artist and temporary Fukushimaclean-up volunteer Kota Takeuchi) may only encourage Western audiences to continuecommenting on the crisis-art culture of Japan. Just a few months ago, veteran art critic
John McDonald used Takeuchi's piece as the foundation for his rather incendiary
reﬂection on the politics of Fukushima and Japanese art, which starts with the blanket
claim that "[d]isaster haunts the Japanese psyche."But to focus on the piece's immediate context more than its comment or medium is touse it as a lens for rubbernecking. It is to miss the fact that Finger Pointing Worker ispart of a bloom of young, contemporary Japanese artists who've developed a lust for
performance art that doubles as political intervention. Like Takeuchi's performance,these artists share a collective dissatisfaction with the Japanese government—who
many believe were decidedly underwhelming in their immediate response to the 2011
crises—and a non-violent aggression towards humanity's disavowal of nature.
Fukushima, to them, is a point of utmost concern, but not necessarily a ﬁnal port-ofcall.

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SearchStill from Chim↑Pom's REAL TIMES.

Takeuchi's performance is one of the most illustrative of this fresh league's MO, but theJapanese art collective Chim↑Pom is arguably the most internationally known. In April
2011, just barely a month after the tsunami hit, Chim↑Pom's members, each dressed inhazmat suits (some authentic, some makeshift), trespassed into high-security areas
around the Daiichi nuclear plant and hiked across fractured earth and roads towards alookout point above the Paciﬁc Ocean. Once at the peak, and with the still-smoldering
reactors within clear view, the collective planted a white ﬂag into the ground. The ﬂag
was initially unmarked, but before they hoisted it onto its pole, Chim↑Pom spray painted
a red circle in its middle to imitate the Japanese national ﬂag, and then added threedemarcations around the circle, to turn it into the universal symbol for nuclear radiation.

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Footage of this action is included in a video entitled REAL TIMES, which will be shownat MoMA PS1 in New York City later this year and has been featured by major news
outlets like CNN and PBS.
Chim↑Pom's leader, Ushiro Ryuta, visited New York a few weeks ago to oversee an
installation by his group at the Friedman Benda gallery in Chelsea. The installation ispart of a group showing of Japanese artists, entitled "Duality Of Existence PostFukushima." When I arrived at the gallery, he was standing on a ladder in the
middle of a narrow entryway, elevated between a few paintings by Kazuki Umezawa,taking photos of a room I couldn't see from my vantage point. We'd agreed to meet up
and discuss the recent conﬂux of young performance artists in Japan, and to unpack
the habit of associating their work with a national identity deﬁned by widespreadtragedy—as if being Japanese and experiencing disaster was necessitated by somephantom contract.
With these concepts looming over our meeting, it was a perfect coincidence that theexhibition was subtitled "PostFukushima." Before arriving, I was excited by the fantasy
of glimpsing a nascent movement; if post-modernism was theorized, by some, as partly
a response to World War II, it didn't feel far-fetched to assume there had already been a
successful effort to gather Japanese works which exemplify an emerging postFukushima consciousness.
But this wasn't necessarily the case. Chim↑Pom's installation had absolutely nothing to
do with Fukushima, and Ryuta was the ﬁrst person to admit it. Inside the room he wasphotographing, I came to ﬁnd disheveled bales of hay randomly placed throughout, acrate with "For Coyote" spray-painted across its front, a projector, and a laptop on afolding table looping a recorded Skype conversation between Ellie, one of Chim↑Pom's
members, and one of the gallery's employees. It was a nod to Joseph Beuys's 1974
performance piece I Like America and America Likes Me, in which he shared a room at
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René Block Gallery with a coyote for three days, but in this case, Chim↑Pom's "coyote"referred to those who smuggle people across borders. Ellie, it turns out, was prohibitedfrom entering the United States because she arrived on US soil with someone alreadyblacklisted from the country. During our meeting, she was traveling throughout Mexico.

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Bad day at the airport. via Ellie's Instagram.

I asked him and Kentaro Ikegami, our translator and one of Chim↑Pom's collaborators,
what exactly was going on.
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Why was this installation chosen for a "post-Fukushima" exhibition?
We had no idea that the theme was post-Fukushima. When the press release came out,
we were like "oh, shit!" Originally the curator told us it was called "Duality of Existence,"
and was about physical realities in relation to post-internet realities. But we didn't know
about it being "post-Fukushima" until the press release came out.
How do you feel about that?
We just want an opportunity to do the piece on account of Ellie's situation, because wethought this was the most interesting thing we could do. Her situation is more of apressing matter to us than doing something cohesively with the other artists.
Fukushima is just part of our art. We're usually identiﬁed as using "Fukushima" and"Hiroshima" as main talking points, but we're only doing what we want to do at a given
time. We are mostly driven by what we consider to be pressing issues of our time, suchas Ellie's immigration issue. Regardless, we do see all our topics as inter-related andnot isolated within those issues.
If you really look at the other installations in this exhibit, they don't look like they're
about Fukushima at all. We don't think most artists knew about this.
But that makes me curious, because there have been a number of Fukushima-related
exhibitions that you've been a part in. Like recently, at the National Museum of Modern
Art, Tokyo you participated in an exhibition called "After The Quake: Thinking About
Tohoku III."
Well, at least for this, I don't think most of the art here has to do with Fukushima as adeparture point. It's almost an ad-libbed group showing. There are only a few works
here that were actually made afterFukushima. A lot of those, like [Takahiro] Iwasaki's
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pieces, were started or originated before Fukushima. [The exhibition includes Iwasaki's
Reﬂection Models (2014), a series of miniature recreations of Japanese temples joinedwith their reﬂections; the related work Reﬂection Model (Perfect Bliss) was begun in2010. - Ed. ]They clearly have used the phrase "post-Fukushima" as a way to be taken seriously.
But we're not upset about it. We're not angry.
A lot of local residents in Fukushima, however, are pissed off by that kind of treatmentof Fukushima. When people who weren't affected by the tragedy use it as a topic for
their own beneﬁt or cause... I'm sure a lot of New Yorkers felt that way about 9/11.
Even then, and maybe this was happening at the time, I rarely see art in America
classiﬁed as "post-9/11." Inspired by 9/11, sure, but never with the nomenclature that
implies a collective movement. When I feel like I've seen, especially this year,
international museums and galleries hosting exhibitions beneath the banner ofFukushima when all that really means is "Japanese artists."
I agree with that observation. Although we don't want to make a category of "post9/11," we too were unconsciously and politically implicated by that event. We think
many artists feel that way even if they aren't explicitly categorized as such.
But there has to be a post-Fukushima set of artists. They just haven't been wellorganized yet. We don't think that category is actually useful, but regardless we think
there has been a shift in artists' geist,and that cannot be ignored. Much like what
happened everywhere after 9-11.

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Takahiro Iwasaki Reﬂection Models (2014). Image: Friedman Benda Gallery.

When asked to outline who he considered a post-Fukushima artist, Ryuta told me aboutanother collective, Kyun-Chome, who won one of Japan's most coveted art
recognitions, the Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art, in February this year.
Kyun-Chome's portfolio parallels Chim↑Pom's in a number of ways: performancepieces staged and recorded in restricted areas around Fukushima, interactive gallery
installations which temper with Japanese paradigms and cultural taboos, and thecentral focus on a female character, an "Ellie," who appears at the forefront of most of

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their video pieces staged after 2011. These similarities weren't surprising, however,considering Ryuta also said that Kyun-Chome were previous apprentices ofChim↑Pom's.
The most common thread throughout both collectives is a mischievous, sometimes
playful interpretation of dire circumstances, which blurs cultural boundaries and strikes
at political institutions. But is that what comprises the post-Fukushima ethos that Ryuta
said has to exist?

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You said that post-Fukushima artists have to exist. What makes Japan's postFukushima reality different from pre-Fukushima reality?
In Japan, grassroots things have changed, like protests, and demonstrations—overall,the conscience of young people. High schoolers of 2011, who were helpless to do
anything, and who couldn't do much of anything because of their youth—that
frustration, I think, will lead to a great change in the coming years.
Politically, though, nothing has changed.
But speciﬁcally in regards to Japanese art, are there any changes you've noticed at all,which you would attribute to Fukushima?
Domestically—although it's not represented by this exhibition—art has changed since2011. For example, Mr. [Motohiko] Odani was rather well-known before, but he told me(Ryuta) that after March 11th, he couldn't produce anymore. He froze, he said, because
he was in a state of chaos. I think something changed within him. That's not exclusive
to Mr. Odani, though. It was a feeling shared by most Japanese artists.
Overall, there's this feeling that contemporary art is powerless and there's nothing it cando. But in response to that, there's this notion of "So what?" We have to do something.
Many young Japanese artists are taking that "so what?" approach.
Is that how you'd describe post-Fukushima art? Art that takes that "So what?"approach?
Yes. I think it's important to make clear that art is physically powerless in the wake of anenormous disaster. Of course, it can't rescue lives; you can't eat it. But so what? Does
that mean we should do nothing? That's what I mean by "so what." This just levels any
assumption that it has power.
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Ultimately though we couldn't really give a correct deﬁnition of post-Fukushima rightnow. It's very difﬁcult. It's very early. But we think that young artists today know thepowerlessness, yet still keep going because if we stop, it truly means we are powerless.
The important thing is not to victimize the situation, or to make it seem like Fukushima
is a wound, or a departure point.
Yes. Not a wound, and no victimization.
The fact that Chim↑Pom weren't initially told about this exhibition's Fukushima slant
stuck with me long after our conversation. While Ryuta acknowledged that there is ayoung spring of "post-Fukushima" art welling up in Japan, it seemed that the gallery's
invocation of Fukushima was disconnected from his perception of its role in
Chim↑Pom's work. Subtitling the exhibition "Post Fukushima" was therefore evidence ofthe same Western misconception that inspires the blanket claim that all Japan ishaunted by past tragedy, and the very incarnation of what Ryuta did not want:
Fukushima seen as something crippling, a hole that every facet of contemporary
Japanese society had yet to climb out of.
But without Friedman Benda being aware of it, including Chim↑Pom's homage to Ellie'svisa troubles in an exhibition intended to showcase the aftermath of Fukushima also
undermined this fallacy. Their work pointed to the fact that contemporary Japanese art,with its preoccupation with performance, intervention, and political critique, addresses a
range of concerns that include but do not end with Fukushima.

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Chim↑Pom's installation at the Friedman Benda gallery. Image: Friedman Benda Gallery.

Chim↑Pom's work, like Honda's giant lizard, and Hokusai's wave, and Takeuchi's veiled
worker, gained international praise due to its ability to turn a gaping local disaster into auniversally relatable experience, only to be pigeonholed as quintessentially, tragicallyJapanese. In fact, Chim↑Pom's work is most valuable not as a response to a speciﬁc
event, but as a powerful statement in favor of taking action in the face of seemingly
unalterable conditions. Speciﬁcally, one part of Chim↑Pom's REAL TIMES piece comesto mind, in which the collective stands among ruins with youth from the crippled city of
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Soma, and shouts 100 ki-ai, an almost spiritual martial arts chant, to bring life back to
an otherwise lifeless scene. Like all of Chim↑Pom's work, it twists the face of an event
so many outsiders still refer to like a nation's cofﬁn.
What makes these young artists salient, and what makes the international and domestic
spotlight still interested in their work three years after Fukushima, is their universal
implications. They elicit a reminder that these types of widespread destruction are notmerely plausible, and not merely Japanese, but nascent and actual and generalizable;
they have the power to turn the land of even the most developed economic powers into
ruins. The Japanese are not the only people aware that nature can be destructive, butmuch like the erstwhile residents of Chernobyl, they are some of the only samplings ofpeople who've really seen how careless environmental management can rob any terrainof its life, even for decades after. Because of this, it's actually more logical to analyze
Japanese contemporary artists in terms of their resilience and resolve, and not in the
coincidence of living near the Paciﬁc Ocean's Ring of Fire.
During our dinner together that night, and at the cusp of extinguishing our hours-longconversation on the subject, Ikegami reﬂected on the power of language. "Disasters
create art," he said. "Fukushima is very strange, but it's not domestic. In the same way
Chernobyl was also a global problem. But it's funny that it is called the 'Fukushima'
nuclear accident. Not the 'Paciﬁc Ocean' nuclear accident. Not the 'TEPCO' nuclear
accident." By uniting its name with the disaster, the location, it seems, gets brandedwith that irreducible stigma we'd been dissecting in the gallery. It made me wonder how
successful the Godzilla franchise would have been in the United States if its name were
simply a direct translation from the word's origin "daikaiju": Giant Monster.
But what younger groups like Chim↑Pom and Kyun-Chome are doing is much larger
than Hollywood, or Tokyo, or any speciﬁc locale in between. It's the towering statementthat tragedy may seem to render art obsolete and nullify political agency, but never
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indelibly—or if it does, there is still strength to be found in making art and taking politicalaction. In other words: so what?

Johnny Magdaleno is a writer and freelance journalist based in New York. He frequently
contributes to VICE, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and other publications. You
can follow him on Twitter @johnny_mgdlno.

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