Waiting for the Wind

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 that began at the award ceremony, 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ーboth of which suffered devastating and lasting damage in the Great East Japan Earthquakeー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.

Artists: Shiga Lieko, Takeuchi Kota

*Please refer to the TCAA website for details of this exhibition.