Exhibition Celebrating the Publication of “The Story of the Kaki Tree”
Talk Event No.1
~ Statement and Committment ~ A Struggling Artist’s Social Approach
Kenji Yanobe, Masaki Higuchi and Tatsuo Miyajima
We held the first talk event to discuss the theme of “Social nature of man and art.”
Mr. Yanobe has been approaching the nuclear issues since his visit to Chernobyl in 1997. He created work called “Sun Child” after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant to express his attitude that he would be unbeaten by the disaster. He is an artist who squarely struggles with society. Mr. Higuchi, on the other hand, works for the Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido and has planned and organized contemporary art exhibitions. When the Japanese art world almost ignored the Kaki Tree Project in its early stage, he was the one who wrote about the Project publicly for the first time and outlined it.
Miyajima told that there were taboos in the Japanese contemporary art world, such as nuclear and other social issues. He shared the “Kaki Tree Project” was also regarded as one of them at first and criticized. Then, Higuchi criticized that as people in the art community immersed themselves in the closed world called the “contemporary art village,” they have succumbed to the illness of becoming numb and losing touch with genuine feelings of the ordinary people. He analyzed that children and adults who participate in the “Kaki Tree Project” would never think of if “this is art or not,” but they simply feel “Oh, it is interesting, nice!” and enjoy it. That was why the Project had been attracting many people across the world for so long.
Yanobe shared that he first started his artistic activities with survival as the theme. However, after two major incidents, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, he wanted to take in more reality to himself and so went to Chernobyl. Then, he created a character called Torayan and began using it in his works with more serious themes. He told these works became very popular with the general public but hardly with the art world. He highly valued Miyajima’s attempt to exhibit his work and the “Kaki Tree Project” at the same time with the themes “survival” and “revival” at the Venice Biennale. Miyajima responded that while the Italian newspaper appreciated that was “the first Biennale where local children could play,” information was not conveyed to Japan at all. However, there they received more than 200 applications around the world to foster the kaki seedlings, and then felt that the Project could kick off.
The three affirmed their common understanding that artists have to engage in social themes with a sense of reality. They also shared that art could play a significant role in ways to peace.
Miyajima concluded the talk hoping the Project would become “a truly independent art project” in the future.
At the end, there was a Q and A session.
