The beatbox, the rumble of mud kin and island flowers

Born and raised in Okinawa, Chikako Yamashiro’s multimedia artistic practice embodies two essential themes in contemporary art: intergenerational relations and intertwined local histories. In her formative years, studying painting at art school on the island during the 1990s, the artist was already experimenting with the time-based media of performance. Spending time in the UK in the early 2000s drew her to artists’ film and video.

She is wearing a pretty floral dress, her body pressed against the wire fence demarcating the U.S. military base on the island. In this performance video, I Like Okinawa Sweet (2004), she shimmies in front of the camera, licking cone after cone of creamy soft scoop. Her dancing becomes more lurid; her gobbling accelerates. The pinkish ice-cream drips down her chin in the tropical heat.

In the catalogue text accompanying Yamashiro’s major solo exhibition at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2021), the curator Keiko Okamura notes the alignment of her artistic formation with a generational turn among Okinawans. The defiance and humour of the video conveys Yamashiro’s singularity as an artist. At the same time, this breakthrough work situates her within a generation who came of age at the end of the previous century. They sought to somehow inherit painful collective memories of the island’s dispossession. While doing so, they claimed Okinawan lives as contemporary and culturally self-determining, sometimes through appropriating pop culture or subverting reductive images of the island.

Yamashiro’s restlessly experimental practice is grounded in this existential formation. She mobilises multiple artistic media to grapple with the necessity yet the impossibility of channelling the stories of generations of islanders who are both kin and other. Presented at this year’s Asian Avant-garde Film Festival, Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009), adapts the cinematic technique of lip-synching and visual superimposition to relay the harrowing testimony of an old man whom she encountered at a retirement home. Overwhelmed by the rawness still of his memory of unbearable loss during the Japanese occupation of the island, she records herself multiple times repeating his utterance. In the video, we see Yamashiro’s disturbed expression, her mouth moving to the hesitant rhythm of the old man’s voice over. Later, as his voice tells of returning to the site of the mass murder of islanders to console the dead, his face appears superimposed onto hers. Artistic self-determination means creating cinematic forms that register the ultimate incomprehensibility of the experiences of others and yet also exert bodily efforts to affirm relational possibilities. Accordingly, the rhythmic capacities of film and video grow central to Yamashiro’s practice.

Mud Man (single channel version, 2017) and Flower of Belau (2023) signal the artist’s attuning to resonant histories of dispossessed islands. Both works are stunningly cinematic. As the film theorist Ran Ma suggests, Yamashiro’s ambivalence about representing the traumatic memories of others compelled her to create translocal forms. Shot on Jeju and Okinawa islands, Mud Man imagines a fable of kinship. On land and underground, the slumbering bodies of mud ancestors awaken. Their descendants address them by placing a ritualistic formation of berries on the soil. Large clumps of mud fall from the sky, each transmitting non-verbal and multilingual chatters. Mud people poke their heads from underground, their dried mud-stained faces mesmerised, as if watching a shocking spectacle. Inside the dark cave, their row of bodies forms a projective surface. Their skin illuminates an aggressive montage. Fast paced archival footage, flashes of combats, explosions, crashing fighting planes, collide with dancing bodies in crimson club lights. Bodies, lilies, waves, rocks, soil, entangle in rhythms of repetition, acceleration, jolt, shudder, slow motion. Voices soar, howl, call, respond, rattle, echo, whisper, mutter. We hear a cacophony of utterances, poetically pulsating, deliberately untranslated. Intimate sonic excretion becomes louder; bodies breathe, release. A timid patter gains propulsion, rising into a roar of hands. The camera swoops, surges, speeds in at strange angles, swirls in on an eye. The restless camera rides swaying lily stems then hovers over green shoots just poking from the soil.

Flower of Belau continues Yamashiro’s experiment with cinematically entwining Okinawa’s land-sea-body with that of other places. An interplay between digital video and analogue film, this work echoes the history of Okinawans sojourning to neighbouring islands. Here, too, rhythm registers relations. An orchestration of counterpoints gestures kinship. Digital algorithm conveys the daylight of Okinawa, film grain the foliage of Palau. A lone voice sings a call; a lively chorus responds. The frangipani petals are creamy, the cherry blossoms vibrant. The old man gazes out of the bus window; the toddler stares at the waves. The video camera records shaky sights of bald hills from the bus window. The film camera glides with the plane’s take off. The shadow of the plane wing blurs into an arial shot. Deforested land becomes dots of islands.

One night last year Yamashiro took me aside. It was the last night in a week of watching films, eating, and talking together for hours, a few hundred of us from far and wide, gathered at the Thai Film Archive for the Flaherty Film Seminar. The spontaneous dance party was getting sweaty. The teenagers from the traditional Thai performance arts academy were whipping up the crowd with their moves. Getting ready to say goodbye, the artist spoke into her phone and showed me the screen. South Asian techno was blasting from the gigantic speakers. As the translation app lit up, it said, ‘I believe cinema doesn’t need words.’