Tokyo Contemporary Art Award
2020-2022 Exhibition
March 19 (Sat.) – June 19 (Sun.), 2022
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government and Tokyo Arts and Space established the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (TCAA) in 2018 as a contemporary art prize to encourage mid-career artists to make new breakthroughs in their work by providing them with several year of continuous support.
An award exhibition will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo featuring Fujii Hikaru and Yamashiro Chikako, the winners of the second edition of TCAA for 2020-2022.
The TCAA exhibition to be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo will display works by the winners, Fujii Hikaru and Yamashiro Chikako, in an individual exhibition format.
At the exhibition Fujii reuses waste materials produced during exhibitions and transportation of artworks, and recreates through an installation the exhibition of wartime records held for occupational force personnel at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum shortly after the end of World War II. Through the vacillation over how to deal with Japanese war paintings during the US occupation of Japan that surfaces from the material still kept in the US National Archives and Records Administration, the artist questions us, the modern-day viewers, about how we perceive wartime paintings produced in the midst of conflict as tools in information warfare.
Yamashiro exhibits two new and two old video works. The older works shown are A Woman in the Butcher Shop, which uses three-channel video projection for the first time in ten years, and Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family, which will be screened in a space made to look like a child’s room, with newly created sound installation intervals. Her new work, Anata, explores the memories of war survivors who have developed dementia, in which through forgetfulness the land once well-known appears afresh, and there is a sense of hope like stepping out towards new horizons and which can be described as Yamashiro’s new frontier. While her work is open to many interpretations, there is a single strand running through the exhibition that will force the viewer to think again about the passing down of wartime memories.
To download the exhibition handout, please click here.
＊Subject to alteration according to the state of the COVID-19 infection. Visitors guideline is available here.
FUJII Hikaru
Born in Tokyo in 1976. Lives and works in Tokyo.
His practice is based on the notion that artistic production implies a close relationship with society and history. Mainly in the form of video installation, he creates work that responds to contemporary social issues through detailed research and fieldwork on unique cultures and histories of various countries and regions.
The Anatomy Classroom, “Things Entangling” installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2020
Les nucléaires et les choses, 2019
Photo: SHIIGI Shizune
YAMASHIRO Chikako
ⓒRyudai Takano
Born in Okinawa in 1976.
With the geopolitical situation and history of Okinawa, her native place, as her starting point, Yamashiro explores the voices, bodies, and souls of people left in East Asia while taking identity, the boundary between life and death, and changing memories of history as her theme, working in photography and video. She continues to address the latent potential of images and their possibilities for performativity.
Artist Statement
Blessed with a newborn baby, I spent my time during the COVID-19 pandemic just watching my child, and was unable to conduct the overseas research that was supposed to be supported by TCAA. However, for me, it was more important and necessary than ever to remain in the same place without going somewhere. I was fortunate that I could take time to thoroughly experience a state of transformation and flux. As I have been moving around more this year, though, I have noticed that the frame that I use to perceive the world is shifting. Being sensitive to the newly constructed and generated world, I hope to contemplate further so that I can choose and connect each and every thing to the future without fear of how we will change.
A Woman of the Butcher Shop, 2012 version, 3-channel video installation
ⓒ Chikako Yamashiro, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates
Chinbin Western – Representation of the Family, 2019, Single-channel video and sound installation
ⓒ Chikako Yamashiro, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates
The artist talks are scheduled to be held as below.
We will invite experts who are associated with the artists to mainly talk about the works exhibited in this exhibition.
*Subject to alteration according to the state of the COVID-19 infection.
Please book from the booking form below.
Booking Form ＞＞ *The booking has been closed.
In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition, a monograph (in Japanese and English) is published for each artist that includes images of their works in addition to the artist’s own texts about their work and creative process, and contributions from experts. The PDF files are available to view on the publications’ page.
*The monographs are not for sale.
Photo:TAKAHASHI Kenji
The selection of the two winners receiving the Award was decided through a process of jointly using the open-call implemented from July to August 2019 and recommendations, research and review of documents by the Selection Committee, and studio visits etc.
International Selection Committee
KAMIYA Yukie (Gallery Director, Japan Society, New York)
SUMITOMO Fumihiko (Director, Arts Maebashi / Associate Professor, Graduate School of Tokyo University of the Arts)
Doryun CHONG (Deputy Director / Curatorial and Chief Curator, M+)
Maria LIND (Curator, Writer and Educator)
Carol Yinghua LU (Director, Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum)
KONDO Yuki (Program Director, Tokyo Arts and Space)
*Positions and titles current as of the time of the 2019 selection process.
Selection Secretariat
Arts Initiative Tokyo [AIT]
Artist Statement
I spend my days looking through a microscope at microfilms of United States official documents. From these severely damaged one-centimeter rectangles emerges, albeit somewhat obscure, an image of the leadership of the Allied occupation of Japan that took photographs of Japanese war art paintings and was then unable to decide what to do with those confiscated paintings. While the coronavirus pandemic forced me to give up my plan to take a TCAA-funded research trip to Southeast Asia, I am instead traveling mentally through the battlefields of Asia once depicted by Japanese painters.