CURATED BY SIMON WU

‘Revolt of the Body’ explores conceptions of flesh, sexuality, and time that precede modern and contemporary ideas of identity and self, borrowing its name from the final solo performance of Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata (1926-86). Taking place at Tokyo’s Nihon Seihan hall in October 1968, “Revolt of the Body” was Hijikata’s most intense articulation of Ankoku Butoh, an avant-garde movement practice he founded nine years earlier, literally denoting ‘dance of darkness.’ Hijikata sought to re-invent the boundaries of art, life, and humanity in the shadow and devastation of World War II.

While the artists do not explicitly cite Hijikata, their works invoke alternative, rebellious bodies in line with Butoh’s historic provocations. The radically recombinant body is typefied in Dean Sameshima’s Erotic Dot Series––fields of connect-the-dot paintings that make images of gay sex when connected as prescribed, or something else alien, unrecognizable, if you choose your own paths. In Cole Lu’s sculptures, etchings and drawings, he produces mythic images of celestial and premodern lives. Flesh is reimagined as wirey, ghostly baskets in Maia Ruth Lee’s social sculptures––assembled as a singular column like an arm or a body––and as bruisable, photosensitive surfaces in Lotus L. Kang’s drawings. And as in Tosh Basco’s hand prayer drawings, each of them are a kind of flesh in themselves.

About the Curator

****Simon Wu is a curator and writer involved in collaborative art production and research. He has organized exhibitions and programs at David Zwirner, The Kitchen, MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum, among other places. In 2021 his art writing was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and he was featured in Cultured magazine’s 2021 Young Curators series. He was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and is currently in the PhD program in History of Art at Yale University. His first book, Dancing On My Own, is forthcoming from Harper Collins June 25, 2024