Co-presentation by Collaborative Cataloging Japan, Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia Society of Greater Philadelphia, and cinéSPEAK, Hosted by Asian Arts Initiative
Video Letter Exchange:
Community of Images
©Nadia Hironaka
Performance & Screening
September 28th, 3—5pm
Asian Arts Initiative
1219 Vine Street, Philadelphia 19107
3:00pm Eiko Fan performance — Before the screening, Philadelphia-based Japanese-Taiwanese artist Eiko Fan will perform her Live Wood Sculpture.
3:30-5pm Screening
Video Letter Exchange, 2024, high-definition video
Yu Araki, Nadia Hironaka, Hikaru Suzuki, and Shinpei Takeda
Video Letter, 1983, 52:08, standard-definition video
Shuntarõ Tanikawa and Shūji Terayama
As a way to highlight the video letter exchange format that accompanied the rise of video discussed in the Community of Images exhibition, CCJ and JASGP commissioned a group of four contemporary video artists to produce today’s video letter exchange. The 2024 iteration of the video exchange is led by Philadelphia-based artist Nadia Hironaka, who organized an exchange with US and Japan-based artists Shinpei Takeda (San Diego), Hikaru Suzuki (Tokyo) and Yu Araki (Kyoto).
The work pays tribute to Video Letter (1983), a heartbreakingly beautiful 64-minute compilation exchange of video letters that took place between video artists Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in 1981—1982, the year when Terayama passed away.
Before the screening, Philadelphia-based Japanese-Taiwanese artist Eiko Fan will perform her Live Wood Sculpture.
A: Nadia Hironaka
B: Hikaru Suzuki (Tokyo)
C: Shinpei Takeda (San Diego)
D: Yu Araki (Tokyo)
Round 1
Artist A < Artist B
Artist B < Artist C
Artist C < Artist D
Artist D < Artist A
Round 2
Artist A < Artist D
Artist D < Artist C
Artist C < Artist B
Artist B < Artist A
The final 2024 piece by the four artists—which each videos were anonymized during the exchange that took place between February – May 2024—will be premiere as a single screening, accompanying the Video Letter (1983) .
Contemporary video artists’ exploration to the prompt question—what grounds you, where are you located, do you feel connected to your space, does your environment influence who you are and/or the work that you create, etc.—will present alongside Terayama (a playwright) and Tankikawa’s (a poet) exchange of highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior and occasionally flamboyant visuals.
Before the screening, Philadelphia-based Japanese-Taiwanese artist Eiko Fan will perform her Live Wood Sculpture.
Nadia Hironaka creates counter-mythologies and post-humanist fables that play out as moving images, immersive installations and environments, and public artworks. She, along with her collaborator, Matthew Suib are recipients of several honored awards including a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, CFEVA, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and are the 2024 Public Works Artists In Residence.Their work has been widely exhibited at venues including, Fondazione MAXXI (Rome), New Media Gallery (Vancouver), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), UCLA Hammer Museum, PS1/MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the American Philosophical Society. They have been artists-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Banff Centre, Marble House Project, Interlude, and the Millay Colony for Arts. Nadia Hironaka serves as a professor in the Studio Arts low residency graduate program and is the interim department chair of Animation and Game Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Yu Araki majored in sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis (USA) and furthered his studies at the Graduate School of Film and New Media Studies, Tokyo University of the Arts (Japan). As a failed English/Japanese interpreter, his central theme has been revolving around the idea of mistranslation and misunderstanding in intercultural contexts, in which he explores “difference” via reenactment, remake and reanimation. Recent exhibitions include venues such as Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2024), Towada Art Center (2023), C-LAB (Taipei, 2023), Pola Museum of Art (Kanagawa, 2020), Shiseido Gallery (Tokyo, 2019), and Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2019). His films have been screened at Institute of Contemporary Arts, FIDMarseille, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and many more. During 2017-18, he was a guest resident at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju as well as Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Araki was selected as one of the finalists for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019. He won the Special Prize in the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2023 Commission Project for his video installation “Unmasked (Bootleg)” about a Japanese KISS tribute band named WISS. http://yuaraki.com/
Hikaru Suzuki has been in the Doctoral Program of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts since 2023 and researches the Development of “Essay-Film“ in the Western and Non-Western Worlds. He participated in a video letter project initiated by Dir. Nele Wohlatz in Germany with an artist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during Covid 19 era in 2020. The video letter project between Buenos Aires and Fukushima, Yokohama" was selected for the "35th Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Buenos Aires)". Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, he has made it his life's work to film the people and transformation of Landscape of Fukushima, and continues to do it. He is currently working as an organizer and programmer for the Japanese screening organization "Experimental Film Culture in Japan" since 2019.
Shinpei Takeda works and lives in San Diego, CA; Tijuana, Mexico; and Düsseldorf, Germany. Takeda is an artist/filmmaker, focuses on highlighting marginalized memories and challenge dominant narratives and perceptions working with a wide array of mediums like installation, film, participatory projects, texts, sound, performance, and Virtual Reality.
Shinpei Takeda is a co-founder of The AJA Project, and has recently returned to the organization as the Executive Artistic Director. Since 2000, he has transformed an all-volunteer nonprofit working with refugee youth using photography to one of the only arts organization focusing on Social Justice in San Diego. He is also a co-founder of Antimonument e.V. another nonprofit in Düsseldorf, Germany, creating various XR projects on the intersections of technology, art and memory.
Filmmaker and wood sculptor Eiko Fan was born and raised in Tokyo, then came to Philadelphia at age 18 in 1970 to study at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where she continued wood sculpture in the tradition of Buddhist art. Eiko fell in love with wood in the Philadelphia area, where there are walnut and cherries easily picked up from the road. She began carving many styles of wood sculpture before discovering her signature chainsaw technique to cut wood faster and in higher volume.
One day she began slicing wood to make wood sculpture costumes and realizing some pieces looked like bird wings, she put her body inside to become a wood sculpture herself. In 1982 Eiko made a film with Rudy Burckhardt featuring herself and others wearing her wood sculptures in a sculpture creature world. Eiko started performing a live version with many performers and members of her own family participating as musicians to make Live Wood Sculpture come alive.
Live Wood Sculpture has been performed in many venues and the museums including the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Painted Bride Arts Center, Fleisher Art Memorial, and Edinburgh Scotland.
Eiko is a recipient of the Leeway Foundation Transformation Award and continues creating chainsaw sculptures in her backyard. She likes her audience to, “jump into fun” during her Live Wood Sculpture.
This program is co-organized by cinéSPEAK, Collaborative Cataloging Japan and the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia, and hosted by Asian Arts Initiative.
Major support for the Community of Images exhibition has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation, Pola Art Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s will be an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities.
This project is co-presented by Collaborative Cataloging Japan and the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia in partnership with Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts. Major support has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation, Pola Art Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.