Vivian Ziherl: The late 1980s and early 1990s art scene in Kyoto was a dynamic and influential moment in recent Japanese art. You were a student there at the time. What is the importance of that scene as an original context for your work?
Tadasu Takamine: I had these big questions for art at the time. How art works: how it works in society, what kind of art will have an effect in society. And so I went to some galleries and had some conversations with artists to seek some answers. I was feeling, at the beginning, that most of the artwork is not direct enough. So the question was to be as direct as possible in what is called art.
VZ: To try to access that time, I’d like to share this (hands over a series of photocopied pages from the catalogue for Museum Performanceheld at Nagoya City Art Museum, Aichi, 28–29 March, 1992). Can you tell me something about it?
TT: Wow! This is from 1991, I think , no, 1992. This was my first performance piece that happened on a big scale, in a museum. It was with Kodai Nakahara. He was the main artist who had an installation and he invited me. I was living with Noriko Sunayama at the time (also in the catalogue). We were both in Dumb Type at that time, so I also invited her to be in the performance. The space was surrounded with Nakahara’s artworks, and then we created a wall of clay. We used a tonne of clay this big and this high (gestures with hands to demonstrate a set of dimensions approximately... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Kodai Nakahara, Untitled (Lego Monster), 1990. Lego blocks, 280 x 320 x 210cm.
