Abstract:
A work of art is a medium, a thing made manifest, given form through critical perspectives, interpretations, and imaginings of world events. Whether it is a sound, a visual image, a three-dimensional object, a scent, or a written text, it can basically be attached to a space and shared with others, or an audience. The audience appreciates this, and makes their own interpretations.
The curator imbues these works of art, materials, and various objects with a form through the framework of an exhibition. The practice of curation creates “relational value,” in the sense of how new things emerge through connections. In today’s chaotic and uncertain era, caused by global warming, environmental destruction, and the division of society due to dualism and mechanistic modernism, sensory learning has the potential to transcend these issues.
Beyond anthropocentrism and subjectivism, a new narrative born from symbolization and abstraction generated through the five senses will lead to a transformation of perspective and a new resonance with all things and the world around us. In this new age of the Anthropocene, art and the curatorial practices that transmit it have an important role to play.
Interpretation, translation, and the creation of a “field of empathy” are essential to the artistic act as a way of connecting with others and those different from us. These two aspects are also the very essence of the practice of curation.
Bio:
HASEGAWA Yuko is Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and Professor of Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. Her areas of specialization are art criticism and modern and contemporary art. She completed a BA in Law from Kyoto University and an MFA in Art History from Tokyo University of the Arts. She has curated many exhibitions at art museums in Japan and biennials abroad, based on a critical perspective. Has pursued a cross-disciplinary curatorial practice, straddling different media (architecture, fashion, music) and multiple research fields (science, anthropology, and so on). Through contemporary art, her research focuses on examining the relationship between ecology and art, from gender and posthuman theory to the reconnection of humans with nature, including research in Brazil, the Amazon, and so on. She curated Clouds⇆Forest (2017), a project at the 7th Moscow Biennale on the theme of art in the Anthropocene.
Her publications include JAPANORAMA: New Vision on Art Since 1970, Suiseisha, 2021; “A New Ecology and Art: on the Clouds⇄Forests exhibition”, Journal of Global Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices vol. 1, Tokyo University of the Arts, 2020; Destroy, They Say: Women Artists Subtly Traversing Boundaries, Tokyo Geidai Press, 2017; “Performativity in the Work of Female Japanese Artists In the 1950s-1960s and the 1990s”, Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, 2010; Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa: SANAA, Phaidon Press, 2006.
"New Ecology and Art: The Anthropocene as a 'dithering time'"(Ibunsha), an anthology in collaboration with other researchers for which she served as editor, will be published in April, while an exhibition on the same theme will be planned and held at The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts from May 28 to June 26 this year.