MIEKO SHIOMI, UEMATSU TAKUMA

Their collaboration for this exhibition was instigated by Takuma Uematsu, who first encountered the work of Mieko Shiomi at around the age of eight, when playing her Hoshi no katachi wo shita warutsu (Star-shaped waltzes) on piano. Over twenty years later, the two met when he took part in a performance organised by Shiomi for the exhibition Fluxus in Deutschland 1962-1994 at the National Museum of Art, Osaka in 2001.

This was also the year Uematsu launched his career as an artist, and the encounter with Shiomi was to be a major influence on his practice thereafter.

Mieko Shiomi began her artistic career while still at university, forming Group Ongaku, Japan’s first improv music group, with Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone among others, before meeting Nam June Paik in 1963 and through him learning about Fluxus. She headed to New York the following year, and took part in various Fluxus activities.

Fluxus ideas and actions—crossing genres, with no regard for form, constantly seeking continuous change, stepping away from the everyday, repeatedly flowing and fusing—coincided exactly with her own thoughts on music.

She then set about creating her own works, dubbed ‘events,’ which took as their subjects various phenomena found in nature and the everyday.

It is not the fulfilment of individual experience, but finding ways of communicating in order to share the world more widely with others and the outside that informs Shiomi’s works. Her mode of expression, with the planet as stage, and phenomena in nature and everyday life as subjects, deeming whatever emerges by chance from the conduct of these to be the work, was precisely what Uematsu was pursuing by ‘incorporating in the work something akin to the flow of nature, including human beings’ (*from their dialogue), as he attempted to create devices that would transcend time and dimension.

For Exploring the Stars these two artists have come together and moved apart, separated and connected over and over, all the while sharing their worldviews, to create the works on offer.

We hope you will enjoy experiencing for yourself what flows through the exhibition venue.