Minouk Lim: Hyper Yellow: Obayashi Foundation
The Obayashi Foundation is pleased to announce the details of the project of Minouk Lim, the 4th grant recipient of "Visions of the City," a biennial grant program that has been conducted by the Obayashi Foundation since 2017. This project selects artists from Japan and abroad who have a strong interest in urban planning, and suggests and proposes a new vision of the city from a different perspective from conventional urban planning.
The recipient of this year's grant, Minouk Lim, an artist from Korea, is engaged in artistic practices that use a diverse of methods to evoke forgotten and hidden voices and presences in contemporary society, crossing the boundaries between art and politics, past and present, the individual and the community.
Minouk Lim will hold the exhibition Hyper Yellow at the Komagome SOKO in Tokyo from Thursday, February 29 to Tuesday, March 12, 2024, and the performance S.O.S - Run Shin Shin on Saturday, March 2 and Sunday, March 3, 2024, which will take participants on a tour around the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay on a Yakatabune (a Japanese style houseboat).
The exhibition title Hyper Yellow refers to something beyond a certain color or race; it invites us to a critical zone that exists anywhere yet nowhere. It allows us to explore new possibilities of coexistence and connectivity. Presented in the exhibition space are Portable Keepers, which are reinterpretations of Otaimatsu or the pinewood torches used for the Omizutori ceremony held at Todaiji temple in Nara, Japan, every March. In the video where Eleven-Headed Guanyin appears as a tourist, a story unfolds in a narrative of collisions and creations shown in Japan’s water and fire festivals, Shinto and Buddhist syncretism.
The performance S.O.S - Run Shin Shin invites the viewers to Yakatabune, which tours around Sumida River and Tokyo Bay. Traveling by boat, the viewers encounter various events on the riverside and enter a world of inverted allusions, listening to stories and sounds suggested by the artist at each location. The artist thus presents a reconstruction of history, nation, belief, and ecological and geographical senses while focusing on the layered structure and fluid borders that appear in Japanese rituals.
