To Commune 11: Chikako Yamashiro, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Ho Tzu Nyen

OKINAWA 墓庭クラブ (OKINAWA Graveyard Club) | Chikako Yamashiro, Japan, 6 min, 2004

Captured in black and white, Chikako Yamashiro is in tennis wear dancing in frenzied fashion to club beats in front of a tombstone in broad daylight. As her miniskirt gleams in the dazzling sunlight, a sun visor casts a dark shadow over her face. The video bursts with a vitality that seems to brazenly declare “I will embrace even conflict and wounds and dead, and live with them all.” 

The Class | Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Thailand, 17 min, 2005

The Class is a video work in which Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook lectures corpses about death in what seems to be a kind of classroom. It was filmed in an actual hospital morgue in Chiang Mai, with unclaimed dead bodies playing the role of the six “students” in the class. The work is a performance in which the artist tries to understand death by lecturing the dead about death, with the lecture offering various definitions of death from different perspectives. Araya at times talks directly to the cadavers, encouraging them to share their own views and experiences, and communicating with them in the same way she would with living people. This attitude demonstrates her attempt to confront something that society has overlooked as well as social taboos and cultural discrimination, and the religious and cultural values that involve death (Mori Art Museum). 

Hotel Aporia | Ho Tzu Nyen, Singapore/Japan, 84 min, 2019

Ho Tzu Nyen’s Hotel Aporia features a cast of historical figures from Japan’s interwar period, including World War Two kamikaze pilots, philosophers of the Kyoto School, filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and animator Ryuichi Yokoyama. They were all caught up in the heady mix of Japan’s militant nationalism, anti-modernism, and cultural propaganda. Letters and correspondence between the artist and his Japanese collaborators, the writers Tomoyuki Arai and Yoko Nose, form the narrative basis of the work. Experimenting with the epistemological and affective capacities of animation, Ho rotoscopes images of featureless faces using found footage clips from Ozu’s fiction films and Ryuichi Yokoyama’s animation propaganda films.

This is a single-screen cinematic presentation of Hotel Aporia. Its original form, first presented at the Aichi Trienanle, is a video installation projecting layers of animation and hybrid-animation images onto multiple screens within a heritage building, the kirakutei (inn-restaurant) that had once been the place in which the group of Japanese kamikaze pilots featured in Hotel Aporia had feasted before their final flights.