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Courtesy of MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo

An art fair in blue-blooded Chelsea might seem an odd place for Tokyo collectiveChim-Pom to have their first UK solo show. The group, which turned ten this year,
is better known for grappling with the grubby side of contemporary life in Japan,

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Taking Sex Toys into the VR Realmand its cosy seat on capitalism’s lap. Favourite motifs include rats and crows, andthey’ve blown up Louis Vuitton handbags with Cambodian landmines, a retort tothe plush charm of Superflat art movement and its Hirst-like leader Takashi
Murakami.
Even so, here they are – part of START, an art fair at the Saatchi Gallery with anemphasis on international, particularly Asian, contemporary artists, and asuggestion, perhaps, that the Japanese art market is set for a return.

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– Chim-Pom, Super Rat, 2006. Courtesy of MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo

The glassy gaze that greets you as you enter cheekily sums up their dissident stancetowards pop culture – meet “SUPER RAT”, a taxidermied rat trussed up likePikachu, a bizarre Frankenstein of Japanese consumerism, who gives the show itsname.
Painted a sickly yellow, the group originally caught it on a street in Shibuya,Center Gai, a popular haunt for local teenagers. The area is so riddled with rats,
pest control have now found them resistant to the poison they put down. Superrats – soldiering on in the face of chemical warfare.

– Chim-Pom, Making the sky of Hiroshima “PIKA!”, 2009.Courtesy of MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo

It’s this resilience that first brought the rats to the group’s attention. The longshadow of nuclear disaster is a peculiarity in Japanese existence Chim-Pom returnto over and over, and both Hiroshima and Fukushima loom large in their work. AtSTART, quite literally so. The main room is dominated by a large rainbow pile ofpeace cranes, symbols of hope in the wake of the atomic bomb. Like Felix
Gonzalez-Torres’ piles of brightly coloured candy, the installation, entitled “TheHistory of Humans”, invites an exchange with the viewer. One member of thecollective, Ellie, sits atop the pile of origami cranes hypnotically unfolding. Eachwas sent to the city of Hiroshima by well-wishers, and throughout the course ofthe show, visitors are asked to refold them. Only through this cycle, the worksuggests, can we begin to make sense of our trauma.

– Chim-Pom, Realtimes, 2011. Courtesy of MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo″

In the next room, “KI-AI 100 returns to this notion of healing, and perhaps mostpoignantly addresses this idea of coming to terms with the wounds left by nuclear

power. An improvised film shot in one take, it features a circle of teenagers, agroup of friends. Huddled in the Fukushima disaster zone that was once theirhome, a tight knot of survival amid the rubble, they shout 100 ki-ai, a Japanesefighting cry. Though their surroundings are disfigured beyond easy recognition,
their defiant shouts are immediately familiar. Let’s keep going, they yell, so we caneat tasty soba noodles, and look at cute girls in bikinis. In the middle of a gallery,alongside imagery of the region’s near total desolation, there are strikingly
quotidian statements – little snippets of what resistance might look like in the day
to day.
It’s details like these that make Chim-Pom’s work so refreshing. It’s politicalwithout earnestness, clever without elitism. Their film, “Black of Death”, is a fineexample. It doesn’t ask you to be a Hitchcock fan for you to find it unnerving,
simply showing the artists conducting a swarm of crows through a network ofdeserted streets. It’s effective art, not exclusive.

– Chim-Pom, Downtown Paradox, 2014. Courtesy of MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo

The art gallery, as its own exclusion zone, is treated explicitly in another central
work in the START show. In “It’s a wall world”, an ongoing project, the artists
extract puzzle pieces of white gallery walls and swap them with sections cut fromeveryday partitions – from shops, cafes, factories – all over the world. The

resulting puzzle, a patchwork of disparate pieces, confronts us with the problem ofthese two separate realities. Slotted together, they neatly embody art’s awkward
relationship with the real world. The two don’t always fit together and make abigger picture we can recognise.
It’s here, it feels, that you start to get to the heart of what Chim-Pom want to do as
interventionists, slotting art into real life, and real life into art. Through theirperformances and provocations, they make you look at life beyond the secluded
gallery walls. And while so much of contemporary art trades in obfuscation, ChimPom are here to make you understand.
Text by Imogen Greenhalgh
START art fair takes place in London from 10 to 13 September
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Imogen Greenhalgh– Imogen is a freelance arts and culture writer based in London,where she has lived for her entire life, except for an autumn she spentin Berlin. She has an MA from UCL ambiguously titled ‘Issues inModern Culture’, which probably pretty much covers the things shelikes to think about. Except for her cats – she thinks about them a lot,too.
#imogengreenhalgh

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