Mirai Nikki was an exchange exhibition and events series between New Zealand and Japan, with events taking place in Wellington and Kumamoto, respectively.
The purpose of the project was to explore cultural difference through perspectives on the future, and to better understand our (respective) relationships to the future by being exposed to a variety of perspectives.
As far as the project was concerned, the location of exhibition and artwork is ultimately not the gallery, but the mind. What happens in the space is secondary to the way material and meaning land in the perception, psyche and memory of the audiences. Ideas only become real when they are transmitted into action. So the real medium of Mirai Nikki is in the decisions and effects that result from artists and audiences' engagement with the content.
Both cities hosted a participatory, experimental event where anyone from the public could come and contribute their perspective to a collaborative, snowballing, exploded scrapbook. The outcomes from these events were included in the other country's exhibition alongside artists' work.
The series also expanded to include two more events, a community Hangi in Japan, and a Silent Tea Session in New Zealand. These simple gestures invited the public from each side to share in something specific from the other side. These provided an opportunity to engage on a much more fundamental, material level with the mechanisms that carry us into the future: relationships, resources, social and economic dynamics on the ground level. I.e. what is most essential to human or even biological existence.
In a sense, Mirai Nikki engaged with art in the gallery almost reluctantly, using the space of the gallery as an incubator to brew ideas for how we might act in order to shift the course we're taking into the future. It attempted to use the stage of the gallery to stimulate conversation, and expose participants and audiences to perspectives that might inspire new ideas, new possibilities for action and lifestyle. This was further grounded in the more engaged, participatory events, but remains only a scrapbook for what we might do to further spread awareness and proactively problem solve our way into an open and balanced future.
The next phase of the project includes developing the content and outcomes of Mirai Nikki into a book, including artist and audience interviews, to increase the reach of the conversation, and stimulate new solutions and innovation as we head contintually toward the future. More expanded, socially, culturally and economically engaged versions of the exchange are also in the works.
Big special thanks to Tui Tuia for their support in helping get this project off the ground.
Amami Oshima - weaving travels through the Ryukyu islands 2023 NZJEP grant recipient Deb Donnelly
Away from Japan’s densely populated main cites is the sub-tropical Ryukyu islands off Kyushu, the southern-most island of Japan. Amami island home to unique cultural practices, plant and wildlife is bordered by the Pacific Ocean and East China Sea. I stayed at Naze port city Amami, as a base to study the famous Amami tsumugi luxury woven textiles. This cultural background study supported my textile display content for this year’s Hutt Japan Day space at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, organized by Hutt Minoh Friendship Trust.
Amami island environment, Ohama beach, Naze port city at sunset
Image 2. Sup-tropical Tatsugo. Deb Donnelly in Amami tsumugi mura in front of Amami tsumugi kasuri design.
This was my first visit to Amami Oshima island, Kagoshima prefecture, which lies between Okinawa and Kagoshima in Kyushu. Here I discovered some great cultural natural dyeing and design practices. The Amami environment is remote, with unspoilt beaches, laurel forests and mangrove terrain accessed by a network of tunnels and roads over the main island. Amami Oshima since 2021, also hosts UNESCO world natural heritage sites for endangered wildlife and plant species which are now closely monitored.
Amami tsumugi (pongee) raw silk woven cloth is celebrated as one of the world’s three great textiles due to its history traced back to the Nara period 1300 years ago. The woven silk cloth symbolizes Amami’s history and luxury folk craft culture. For men, tortoiseshell and cross patterns are popular, women enjoy an array of design patterns for special uses.
Image: Skilled kasurimushiro weavers at Amami Tsumugi mura complex.
The final product involves over 40 different processes and markets through Japan at matching high prices. Skilled weavers can produce 30 cm of loomed kasurimushiro cloth per day; a labour intense operation, that takes about 2 months to produce one roll of fabric using the simebata tightening machine process. Other fibres that were used in oshima tsumugi method include abaca cloth grown on the islands including Okinawa, linen and cotton.
L-R Dorozome mud dyed silk woven coaste, buttons and case with flowers and asanoha hemp leaf kasuri patterns.
Such was Amami tsumugi’s recognized quality and value that the ruling Satsuma feudal clan datng from the 1700s Edo period were paid in Oshima Tsumugi cloth as part of the annual taxes. The people of the Amami islands have worked as dyers and weavers, making cultural textles since the Meiji period or late 1800s when the cloth became available for public sales and dorozome mud dyeing increased in practice.
Kanai kogei gallery space, Tatsugo cho features natural dyed shibori resist art works and reworked kimono into fashion and craft
Artists and visitors find Amami island a haven for making works and is a home to multiple generations of tsumugi producers such as Kanai kogei in Tatsugo town, who have built their natural dyeing business to make some of the finest Amami tsumugi raw silk textiles using woven splash patterns or kasuri, in natural materials sourced from the island; Sharinbai bark and teichigi wood dyeing methods, iron rich mud or dorozome dyed repeated times to create a deep rich black on silk and coloured pigments. The finely woven cloth uses the kasuri pattern method to stunning effect. Indigo is some,mes added to this mud dyed process.
Image: Kanai kogei, tatsugo. Dorozome deep black silk mud dyeing, indigo over dyed on natural fibres and colour tests on silk weaves.
Visitors can also create their own dorozome mud dyed t-shirts in a few hours by pre-booking a workshop.
More information and Asian art textile workshop details: Instagram: Debdonnelly1
Thanks to Sue Lytollis, Hutt Minoh Friendship Trust, Mutsumi Kanazawa, Helen Donnelly, Yukihito Kanai at Kanai Kogei, Amami Tsumugi mura, Tatsugo, Toyomi Harada and Aikuma Dyes in Asakusa, Tokyo for their valued support, knowledge and translations. All images taken by Deb Donnelly, May-November, 2023
Mo, Flo and the Pot that Broke
2023 NZJEP grant recipient Scarlett Kean
Illustration as a practice has such deeply rooted whakapapa in Japan. After the trade embargo was lifted in the early 1800s, and trade between Japan and the rest of the world resumed, we were able to see the glory of Japanese woodblock illustration - and it was unlike any type of making Europe had been exposed to. This event was a huge push that leading to illustrators, like me, making in the way we do today!
What a joy it has been to contribute to this hearty illustration whakapapa, with a picture book all the way across the ocean in Aotearoa.
Not only is there a distinct intertextual connection between Japanese history and illustration, there are also distinct connections between Japanese and Kiwi craft philosophies. As high brow as that sounds, really all it means is we Kiwis, especially within te āo Māori and pasifika, have similar love of craft practices as Japanese sensibilities.
To see the value in the handmade, in mistakes that come from the human touch. To always carry our tīpuna with us. To cherish everyday objects and the stories they hold. To collaborate, share craft knowledge and practices, there is not 1 maker, but a group of makers. If you can’t tell, this is something I hold very close to my heart. I could talk about it for hours and hours, so to be able to make my own object, a picture book for our tamariki, where I get to teach them all about the beauty of everyday objects, is so joyful.
Mo, Flo and the Pot that Broke is a story following two sisters, Flo and Mo, who break a cherished family heirloom. Terrified of what their parents will think, they run away from home into the forest, taking any evidence of the broken bowl with them. Flo and Mo stumble into another world, where they meet long lost ancestors who share their knowledge of craft, and their stories they each have around the smashed pot. Through the sharing of skills and knowledge, the reunited whānau repair the pot. The sisters return home, now having added their own story to the many the pot holds.
Ngā mihi nui Tui Tuia!
The Making Friends Between Creative Practitioners in Aotearoa and Japan Project
2023 NZJEP grant recipient Chris Berthelsen
The Making Friends Between Creative Practitioners in Aotearoa and Japan project aimed to foster connections and knowledge transformation between creative community practitioners in Japan and Aotearoa through a series of public talks and accompanying publications. It presented four talks (online, in English) with four Japanese creative practitioners working in areas which address the challenge of developing sustainable and creative ways of living together.
Akira Tsukakoshi shared insights (and his Philosophy of 余 - yo) from a decade of running a successful play-focused business and community. We also shared ideas and possibilities about play in Aotearoa and Japan and how we might collaborate. The recorded talk is accompanied by a pamphlet which explains his Philosophy of 余 – yo in more depth based on a private conversation we had.
Azumi Tamura talked about her book "Post-Fukushima Activism Politics and Knowledge in the Age of Precarity" and her related work since. Her work looks at the politics and activism of everyday people after the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown in Fukushima - "...the activism provided a space for each body to encounter others who forced them to feel and think.” In the discussion that followed the participants engaged in a hearty conversation about “what can be done in times of crisis”. The recorded talk is accompanied by a Google document which is an edited transcription of Azumi’s presentation and the following discussion. It is shared so that anyone can comment on it and continue the discussion.
Ryoko Kose arrived in Melbourne in 2014 as a voluntary evacuee from the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster accompanying with her two young children before her third delivery. Her artwork draws on her own experience of the forced displacement derived from Fukushima nuclear disaster which occurred in Japan in 2011. Ryoko introduced the radical practice of tojisha-kenkyu and shared her adaptation of it through “daradara” research. The recorded talk is accompanied by a pamphlet of screenshots from our discussion in the “batabata” style, which we developed collaboratively during the discussion. It combines screenshots with addled AI-transcriptions which add a sense of “the strange and unexpected”.
Aya Yamashita / Aya Francis held an open discussion about experiencing the city with your body, starting from revisiting her iconic book "Sense Pleasures", where she explored the city of Tāmaki Makaurau in an explosion of joy which included marmite toothpaste among many other experiments and reflections. The recorded talk is accompanied by an online archive of Aya’s art works.
The recorded and edited talks are available online, along with three pamphlets and one artist archive based on the talks, at the project website http://small-workshop.info/NZJEP2023/ .
This project was supported by by New Zealand Japan Exchange Programme Grant and Activities and Research in Environments for Creativity Trust (http://arecreative.org).
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2023 NZJEP Newsletter Articles
Mirai Nikki (Future Diary)
2023 NZJEP grant receipient Max Trevor Edmond
Mirai Nikki was an exchange exhibition and events series between New Zealand and Japan, with events taking place in Wellington and Kumamoto, respectively.
The purpose of the project was to explore cultural difference through perspectives on the future, and to better understand our (respective) relationships to the future by being exposed to a variety of perspectives.
As far as the project was concerned, the location of exhibition and artwork is ultimately not the gallery, but the mind. What happens in the space is secondary to the way material and meaning land in the perception, psyche and memory of the audiences. Ideas only become real when they are transmitted into action. So the real medium of Mirai Nikki is in the decisions and effects that result from artists and audiences' engagement with the content.
Both cities hosted a participatory, experimental event where anyone from the public could come and contribute their perspective to a collaborative, snowballing, exploded scrapbook. The outcomes from these events were included in the other country's exhibition alongside artists' work.
The series also expanded to include two more events, a community Hangi in Japan, and a Silent Tea Session in New Zealand. These simple gestures invited the public from each side to share in something specific from the other side. These provided an opportunity to engage on a much more fundamental, material level with the mechanisms that carry us into the future: relationships, resources, social and economic dynamics on the ground level. I.e. what is most essential to human or even biological existence.
In a sense, Mirai Nikki engaged with art in the gallery almost reluctantly, using the space of the gallery as an incubator to brew ideas for how we might act in order to shift the course we're taking into the future. It attempted to use the stage of the gallery to stimulate conversation, and expose participants and audiences to perspectives that might inspire new ideas, new possibilities for action and lifestyle. This was further grounded in the more engaged, participatory events, but remains only a scrapbook for what we might do to further spread awareness and proactively problem solve our way into an open and balanced future.
The next phase of the project includes developing the content and outcomes of Mirai Nikki into a book, including artist and audience interviews, to increase the reach of the conversation, and stimulate new solutions and innovation as we head contintually toward the future. More expanded, socially, culturally and economically engaged versions of the exchange are also in the works.
Big special thanks to Tui Tuia for their support in helping get this project off the ground.
Amami Oshima - weaving travels through the Ryukyu islands 2023 NZJEP grant recipient Deb Donnelly
Away from Japan’s densely populated main cites is the sub-tropical Ryukyu islands off Kyushu, the southern-most island of Japan. Amami island home to unique cultural practices, plant and wildlife is bordered by the Pacific Ocean and East China Sea. I stayed at Naze port city Amami, as a base to study the famous Amami tsumugi luxury woven textiles. This cultural background study supported my textile display content for this year’s Hutt Japan Day space at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, organized by Hutt Minoh Friendship Trust.
Amami island environment, Ohama beach, Naze port city at sunset
Image 2. Sup-tropical Tatsugo. Deb Donnelly in Amami tsumugi mura in front of Amami tsumugi kasuri design.
This was my first visit to Amami Oshima island, Kagoshima prefecture, which lies between Okinawa and Kagoshima in Kyushu. Here I discovered some great cultural natural dyeing and design practices. The Amami environment is remote, with unspoilt beaches, laurel forests and mangrove terrain accessed by a network of tunnels and roads over the main island. Amami Oshima since 2021, also hosts UNESCO world natural heritage sites for endangered wildlife and plant species which are now closely monitored.
Amami tsumugi (pongee) raw silk woven cloth is celebrated as one of the world’s three great textiles due to its history traced back to the Nara period 1300 years ago. The woven silk cloth symbolizes Amami’s history and luxury folk craft culture. For men, tortoiseshell and cross patterns are popular, women enjoy an array of design patterns for special uses.
Image: Skilled kasurimushiro weavers at Amami Tsumugi mura complex.
The final product involves over 40 different processes and markets through Japan at matching high prices. Skilled weavers can produce 30 cm of loomed kasurimushiro cloth per day; a labour intense operation, that takes about 2 months to produce one roll of fabric using the simebata tightening machine process. Other fibres that were used in oshima tsumugi method include abaca cloth grown on the islands including Okinawa, linen and cotton.
L-R Dorozome mud dyed silk woven coaste, buttons and case with flowers and asanoha hemp leaf kasuri patterns.
Such was Amami tsumugi’s recognized quality and value that the ruling Satsuma feudal clan datng from the 1700s Edo period were paid in Oshima Tsumugi cloth as part of the annual taxes. The people of the Amami islands have worked as dyers and weavers, making cultural textles since the Meiji period or late 1800s when the cloth became available for public sales and dorozome mud dyeing increased in practice.
Kanai kogei gallery space, Tatsugo cho features natural dyed shibori resist art works and reworked kimono into fashion and craft
Artists and visitors find Amami island a haven for making works and is a home to multiple generations of tsumugi producers such as Kanai kogei in Tatsugo town, who have built their natural dyeing business to make some of the finest Amami tsumugi raw silk textiles using woven splash patterns or kasuri, in natural materials sourced from the island; Sharinbai bark and teichigi wood dyeing methods, iron rich mud or dorozome dyed repeated times to create a deep rich black on silk and coloured pigments. The finely woven cloth uses the kasuri pattern method to stunning effect. Indigo is some,mes added to this mud dyed process.
Image: Kanai kogei, tatsugo. Dorozome deep black silk mud dyeing, indigo over dyed on natural fibres and colour tests on silk weaves.
Visitors can also create their own dorozome mud dyed t-shirts in a few hours by pre-booking a workshop.
More information and Asian art textile workshop details: Instagram: Debdonnelly1
Thanks to Sue Lytollis, Hutt Minoh Friendship Trust, Mutsumi Kanazawa, Helen Donnelly, Yukihito Kanai at Kanai Kogei, Amami Tsumugi mura, Tatsugo, Toyomi Harada and Aikuma Dyes in Asakusa, Tokyo for their valued support, knowledge and translations. All images taken by Deb Donnelly, May-November, 2023
Mo, Flo and the Pot that Broke
2023 NZJEP grant recipient Scarlett Kean
Illustration as a practice has such deeply rooted whakapapa in Japan. After the trade embargo was lifted in the early 1800s, and trade between Japan and the rest of the world resumed, we were able to see the glory of Japanese woodblock illustration - and it was unlike any type of making Europe had been exposed to. This event was a huge push that leading to illustrators, like me, making in the way we do today!
What a joy it has been to contribute to this hearty illustration whakapapa, with a picture book all the way across the ocean in Aotearoa.
Not only is there a distinct intertextual connection between Japanese history and illustration, there are also distinct connections between Japanese and Kiwi craft philosophies. As high brow as that sounds, really all it means is we Kiwis, especially within te āo Māori and pasifika, have similar love of craft practices as Japanese sensibilities.
To see the value in the handmade, in mistakes that come from the human touch. To always carry our tīpuna with us. To cherish everyday objects and the stories they hold. To collaborate, share craft knowledge and practices, there is not 1 maker, but a group of makers. If you can’t tell, this is something I hold very close to my heart. I could talk about it for hours and hours, so to be able to make my own object, a picture book for our tamariki, where I get to teach them all about the beauty of everyday objects, is so joyful.
Mo, Flo and the Pot that Broke is a story following two sisters, Flo and Mo, who break a cherished family heirloom. Terrified of what their parents will think, they run away from home into the forest, taking any evidence of the broken bowl with them. Flo and Mo stumble into another world, where they meet long lost ancestors who share their knowledge of craft, and their stories they each have around the smashed pot. Through the sharing of skills and knowledge, the reunited whānau repair the pot. The sisters return home, now having added their own story to the many the pot holds.
