Part of the Waiting for Spring project by 2026 artist fellow Yang Ikumi, Scratchpad is a series of public research events featuring invited experts from various fields.
The first session welcomes Kuraya Mika, director of the Yokohama Museum of Art.
Yang views performance as a form of landscape painting with people, creating situations where the audience, performers, city, moving image, and sound all overlap. In Waiting for Spring, she extends this practice into the urban environments of Harajuku and Shibuya, exploring the relationships surrounding society, the city, clothing, and the body.
In the Northern-Song painter Guo Xi’s Early Spring (1072), multiple modalities of representing perspective known as high, deep, and level distance coexist within a single composition. Rather than surveying the landscape from a single, fixed vantage point, the viewer encounters distances, locations, and moments in time that vary as their perspective shifts.
In the present day, where several locations and events exist simultaneously and constantly interconnect, how can we grasp the world? Is it possible to conceive of the individual not as an independent subject, but as something that emerges from within a web of others, environments, and various kinds of relationship?
For this public research event, the artist Yang Ikumi is joined by the Yokohama Museum of Art’s director, Kuraya Mika, who has a wealth of experience examining Japanese and international contemporary art, for a discussion that takes Guo Xi’s Early Spring as a starting point for considering the nature of looking/viewing and being in the world. Instead of aiming solely for a specialized art-historical analysis of Early Spring, the event opens up Guo Xi’s sense of multiple perspectives and distances as well as different temporalities and incidents all coexisting within a single space, and applies it to contemporary art and society.
Starting from these questions, the talk examines Yang’s work-in-progress for CCBT. By connecting with perspectives linking multiple positions, as well as with a sense of time that encompasses waiting for a spring that may or may not arrive, it explores ways of perceiving the world beyond a single point of view.
Image: National Palace Museum, Taipei, CC0
How to Watch
You can watch online or in person at the CCBT venue.
・CCBT
Registration is required to attend the event at CCBT. Please register via the form below.
・Online
No registration required. The event will be available to watch live online via the link below.
Project: Waiting for Spring
We believe fashion to be effective means of self-representation, but does the line between choice and being chosen for you still exist today? Taking that question as its starting point, this performance-installation projects the concept of the “three distances” (high, deep, and level) of perspective from Eastern painting onto urban space. Simultaneously emerging dispersive situations are rewoven in real time as a single event, and made public. Blurring the boundaries between performer and viewer, the project explores the landscape of early spring that awaits beyond the self languishing in the winter of discontent.
Art Incubation Program
One of CCBT’s core programs, the Art Incubation Program provides opportunities for creative talent to undertake new projects and makes those processes accessible to the public, facilitating forms of artistic expression, exploration, and action that change our city for the better. Selected through an open call, five artist fellows will act as CCBT partners, developing their projects, making the creative process public, exhibiting the results, and holding workshops and talks.
