On Monday evening, three artists currently displaying their work as part of the Counter Photography: Japan's Artists Today exhibition in the Millais Gallery in Southampton talked about their work as people surrounded them sitting on stick stools and drinking wine.
The final artist to talk was Shimabuku. He began by talking about his youth, being broke, and concluding that his face was his own space. This led him to shaving his eyebrow while travelling on the underground. Apparently in Italy, people were quite hospitable towards him due to this.
The audience seemed to particularly like Shimabuku's project "Souvenir", which was exhibited at the Iwatayama Monkey Park in Kyoto. He explained that 1 in 200 monkeys like shiny objects and he thought the same would apply to art. "Monkey art is not for humans," said Shimabuku. The monkeys were not that impressed, which Shimabuku said was not surprising, because if a bench is put in a monkey area, sometimes it takes 10 years for a monkey to actually sit on that bench. He said that after that, exhibiting his work to humans seems a lot less daunting.
Shimabuku showed pictures of the public art project "Sound Art" in Iwakura, Aichi (near to the well-known Toyota plant). He was asked to make a permanent art piece for the town, but wanted to make a different one each year, so a compromise was made, and he agreed to make an art work every month for the town. This sometimes consisted of a large colourful bird with sound emanating from it, but after a while he replaced the bird with a pineapple. Children tried to listen to the pineapple, and Shimabuku showed some delightful pictures of this.
Austria was the location for a more recent project by Shimabuku. He was taken by the deep valleys and that, at one point, the area may have been filled with water. To reunite the ideas of the sky and the sea, the local people and Shimabuku flew kites shaped like fish.
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