Shiga Lieko and Takeuchi Kota: Waiting for the Wind

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government and Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) has been presenting the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (TCAA) to mid-career artists in Japan since 2018. Two winners are selected for each award, and in the final year of a multi-year program of support provided to the artists, an award exhibition is held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

This exhibition featuring Shiga Lieko and Takeuchi Kota, winners of the third TCAA, is titled Waiting for the Wind. This term emerged from dialogue between Shiga and Takeuchi, and could be described as the only collaboration between the two artists featured in the exhibition, as well as an invocation of inner realms of the human experience.

Shiga reinterprets a colossal wave of restoration projects in diverse fields, which suddenly began after the March 2011 disaster, in terms of the basic human activity of walking, while Takeuchi presents new work based on his historical research into balloon bombs, a weapon used during World War II, conveying a “chain of possession” connecting past events, artists, and viewers. The works of these two artists, who are based in Miyagi and Fukushima—both of which suffered devastating and lasting damage in the Great East Japan Earthquake—take different creative directions, but they share a common understanding found through dialogue, and the exhibition layout is such that their works interact and resonate in some parts of the venue.

About the artists

Shiga Lieko
Born in Aichi in 1980. Lives and works in Miyagi. Shiga moved to Miyagi in 2008, and while getting to know the people of the region, she created works dealing with subjects such as the relationship between human society and nature, perspectives on life. The way society ceased to function after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and experiences governed by the harsh laws of nature, led to her being overwhelmed by déjà vu-like echoes of Japan’s reconstruction following World War II, and she has subsequently pursued the primal roots of the human spirit through a range of artistic endeavors.

Recent exhibitions: Collection Exhibition 2: BLUE, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2021; Compassionate Grounds: Ten Years on in Tohoku, Composite, Melbourne, Australia, 2021; Reborn-Art Festival 2021-22, Oshika Peninsula (Kozumi), Miyagi, 2021; solo exhibition Shiga Lieko: Human Spring, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2019; solo exhibition CANARY, Foam Museum, Amsterdam, 2013, etc.

Takeuchi Kota
Born in 1982. Lives and works in Fukushima. Takeuchi develops his practice across temporal and spatial divides, focusing on the themes of parallel bodies and possession. Engaging with people’s memories through buildings, monuments, sculptures, archives, and interviews with local historians and eyewitnesses, he explores the relationship between media and human beings from multiple perspectives.

Recent exhibitions: MOT Collection: Journals, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2021; solo exhibition Body is not Antibody, SNOW Contemporary, Tokyo, 2020, and as the Representative Agent of Finger Pointing Worker,* Weavers of Worlds -A Century of Flux in Japanese Modern / Contemporary Art-, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2019; Japanorama. A new vision on art since 1970, Centre Pompidou-Metz, France, 2017, etc.

*Finger Pointing Worker is a man who pointed at the public live camera in Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant after the disaster in 2011. Takeuchi Kota is the representative agent of him.

About the monographs
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 monographs are available in part as downloadable PDF files from the TCAA website around the end of March 2023. The monographs are not for sale.

For the press release, please visit here.

Organizers: Tokyo Metropolitan Government and Tokyo Arts and Space / Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo of the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture.