Voice of Session House 2021: Garden Activities Report

Garden Activities Report

In 2021, Session House 2F Garden, on Session House’s second floor, again served as a venue not only for its own projects and jointly organized or collaborative projects, but also for exhibitions by rental users, talks, life-drawing sessions, and other activities.

 

A Record of Our Own, Jointly Organized, and Collaborative Projects

January 9–15: Hiroyuki Kimura (木村浩之) Exhibition + Atelier Karelia Works Exhibition
January 25–29: 5th Wa Wa Wa Haiku Exhibition (T)
February 6–14: Exhibition Declaring an End to the Olympics
March 9–15: Charity Art Exhibition, “From Kagurazaka to Fukushima”
March 24–April 4: Suse Meyer (ツーゼ・マイヤー) Exhibition
May 7–16: Group Art Exhibition, “Resisting the Arrival of Dystopia”
May 17–23: Wakae Morita (森田わかえ) Exhibition (held concurrently with Norio Toyoda’s [豊田紀雄] Faces Exhibition)
May 25–30: Norio Toyoda (豊田紀雄) & Collection Exhibition
July 9–15: Art Exhibition for Bastille Day (T)
July 23–24: “Kudan (くだん),” by the alumni group who completed their membership of Waseda University’s Calligraphy Society in the 2010 academic year (Heisei 22)
October 18–26: Chikako Yokoyama (横山近子) Exhibition, “Jomon”
October 28–31: Polio Association Members’ Works Exhibition, “Living with Polio”
November 5–7: 21 Steps Exhibition
November 9–14: F Exhibition vol.5
November 19–24: Group Art Exhibition, “A Hundred Flowers” (T)
November 21–December 1: Noël Exhibition (T)
December 8–12: Each Person’s Works Exhibition (T)

 

* (T) indicates a project produced and planned by Norio Toyoda (豊田紀雄) of Engeki Bijutsusha (演劇美術社).
* The life-drawing sessions led by Takashi Yoshida (吉田卓史) were held 23 times.
* Ichie Watanabe’s talk series, “Let’s Listen to Fukushima’s Voices!”, was held 3 times.

 

Excerpt from Voice of Session House 2021

 

　Although some Garden projects were canceled or postponed because of the pandemic, we can say that, in its second year, thorough infection-prevention measures enabled us to hold more projects than in the previous year.

 

　But in today’s world, as the crises of the pandemic and war continue, divisions are deepening while the shift toward a surveillance society and pressure to conform are intensifying. This prompted us to hold a group art exhibition titled “Resisting the Arrival of Dystopia.” In Japan, after the Second World War, cases of an infectious disease called polio began appearing across the country around 1949, and it became a major epidemic for a period. Together with the exhibition of works by people who still suffer from its aftereffects, this was an exhibition that posed far-reaching questions. Osamu Ono (大野修) and Mariko Koyama (小山万里子), who coordinated these two group art exhibitions, contributed the following pieces.

 

Osamu Ono (大野修) (Jiyu Bijutsu [自由美術])

After the Group Exhibition “Resisting the Arrival of Dystopia”

Bruegel, a painter of the Low Countries, the present-day Netherlands, has a painting titled The Triumph of Death. Is this landscape from five hundred years ago? To me, it evokes the world swept by coronavirus over these three years. It is full of corruption, deception, brutality, and the smell of war; the nearly one hundred people and objects depicted are linked to one another through distrust. I think of the present, when everyone wears masks and is being separated from one another. Will we someday look back on now and say there was such an era, or will we come to realize that it was a portent of a great catastrophe?

 

The exhibition “Resisting the Arrival of Dystopia,” held at Session House in May 2021, was planned by Takashi Ito. His invitation included the words, “Under the rallying cry of social distancing, each of us stands frozen in a world that is being divided.” I agree completely. The invitation card featured an outstanding photograph by Blanca (ブランカ). There were ten exhibitors from various fields, ranging in age from their twenties to their eighties. Many were meeting one another for the first time; each brought distinctive works, and I gained a great deal. Looking at the works and talking together, we found a common denominator: fewer opportunities to meet people, wondering when we could take off our masks, and the anxiety of having our lives chipped away.

 

To pick up on the exhibitors’ words, Akiko Kondo (近藤あき子) addressed the George Floyd incident in her work “Escape,” and his final words, “I can’t breathe,” seemed like our own words as we feel suffocated amid this pandemic. After the Sinicization of Hong Kong came the restoration of military rule in Myanmar, and in Japan the tragedies of the prison called immigration detention: realities that continued day after day like a nightmare. Look closely and you realize that dystopia is this very world. Escape is not easy. But I want to continue speaking out without giving up. Shinichi Ogura (小倉信一) felt that, as a person who had encountered this era, and as a witness, the act of “hunting” sketches onto paper was also a task of confirming this era’s “time” within the nature of that act. Yumiko Tanno (丹野有美子) wrote in her comment, “Art cannot be medicine or medical care, nor can it take the hand of someone who cannot walk and help them move forward. But I would be happy if what appears there could be received as something connecting people, if it could awaken empathy.”

 

I think so too. Do not crowd together, refrain from conversation, do not embrace, do not touch: how strong this wind of pressure to conform is. But ordinary people cannot live without coming close together; they cannot sustain their lives. How many people can work remotely, or are fortunate enough to go to a second home far from any settlement? Nowadays, walk around without a mask and you are a criminal. At this exhibition, we talked a great deal with one another about making paintings. We discovered much that the pictures alone had not revealed, and together with our visitors we enjoyed time that was both pleasant and heartening. When viewers’ criticism is added and we talk together, including about our own works, things become visible; we could also hear from many people who came to see them. About art in Germany, France, South America, South Korea, and China, about Okubo now during the pandemic, and so on. What they had in common was that distortions in the world, somehow contained until now, had been unleashed. Wandering about, the anxiety of being unable to see what lies ahead in life, including painting. The anxiety of seeing no end, with only masks, handwashing, and gargling against coronavirus; the ominous anxiety arising from even war breaking out after the disaster. Yet through this exhibition, I want not to abandon hope, but to leave a record in my works, however modest, of what happened in this era. In this country, to use an old term, the seikin-ha—the “stars-and-violets school”—remains as flourishing as ever, and I want to resist that tendency too.

 

　I am writing this now, having just finished listening to President Samaranch’s hollow greeting at the Olympic festivities. Words so divorced from reality are frightening rather than merely infuriating!
* “Seikin-ha” is a term used derisively for sentimental people who, at times, sing of romantic love and sweet sentiment in poetry.

 

Polio Association Members’ Works Exhibition

What We Found in “Living with Polio”
Mariko Koyama (小山万里子), head of the Polio Association

The sight of people fearing the novel coronavirus, shunning those who are infected, and rushing to be vaccinated recalls scenes of public health offices stretching ropes in front of homes where someone had contracted polio—spinal infantile paralysis—prohibiting anyone from entering or leaving and disinfecting the surrounding area. This was Japan from the 1950s through the early 1960s.

 

　The Polio Association is an association of patients who contracted polio and lived through those circumstances. We have sought to ensure that not even one more person becomes a polio patient, and to foster understanding of how heavily polio—a disease now almost forgotten—weighs
on patients’ lives. We have also sought recognition and medical care for post-polio syndrome, a condition in which disability becomes newly more severe a dozen or more years to several decades after the onset of polio. Since founding our patients’ association in December 1995, we have run forward with all our might.
This exhibition, made possible with Session House’s cooperation, began after the event commemorating the association’s twenty-fifth anniversary was shelved because of the pandemic. Three women members, including Yumiko Tanno (丹野有美子), who works as a painter, talked about holding a three-person exhibition on the theme of polio instead.

 

Afterward, each of the initiators fell ill, and for a time we thought we should give up. Instead, by changing it into an exhibition of works by members of the Polio Association, we were able to realize this Polio Association Members’ Works Exhibition, “Living with Polio.” One of the initiators wished desperately to live at least until the exhibition, but that wish was not fulfilled, and her posthumous works were displayed. Amid that confusion, the project began with complete amateurs acting as its secretariat, proceeding by trial and error. With Session House’s cooperation, we were able to hold the exhibition.

 

　At first, we wondered whether we would be able to gather enough works. In the end, submissions came from all over—from Okinawa, Shikoku, Tohoku—not only paintings, but calligraphy, ceramics, dolls, photographs, and more. I think it was a major achievement that the members’ eyes were opened anew to one another’s existence and ways of living.

 

I feel that each person who has lived with polio was declaring proudly through this exhibition: this is what I love, this is how I work at it and devote myself to it, and I am living fully. That must apply not only to the members exhibiting but also to members who visited and appreciated the works, and I feel that every person who came received those feelings too. And I was happy that wonderful works were displayed without being boxed into a category such as “by people with disabilities,” and that many people saw and appreciated them. People said, “Even if every year is impossible, we would like to hold an exhibition once every few years.” I want to make that happen.

 

Precisely because polio is one disease among many, and moreover a disease with no new patients now appearing in Japan, I hope that having a venue like this will help people understand, even a little, the history of our struggle with it. I want to keep calling for the eradication of polio worldwide—that is, until the day the last polio patient draws their final breath and all trace of poliovirus disappears from the earth.

 

Editor’s Afterword

　Soon after 2022 began, a brutal war broke out in Ukraine. Those of us engaged in cultural activities, too, are being confronted with a major question: how can we think about and face this, or can we not?
　We tend to think of culture as something peaceful. Yet in every age there has been culture that expressed war affirmatively, and culture that resisted it. In Japan, too, during the last world war there were many cultural figures who applauded the attack on Pearl Harbor, and many whose words and actions were condemned, who were imprisoned and deprived of their freedom. This is history we must not forget. Without resting content in the idea that culture is peaceful, we must direct our eyes toward developments in the world and carry on our activities while thinking carefully. (T・I)

 

Edited by: Session House Planning Office (Takashi Ito, Michitaka Ueda)
Published by: Session House, 158 Yaraicho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-0805, Japan
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