We are thrilled to welcome acclaimed Okinawan artist Chikako Yamashiro to present a career- spanning program of her films and videos, many of which are screening for the first time in the United States.
Starting in the mid-2000s, Yamashiro’s performance-based videos offered a disarming critique of neo-colonial forces that shape everyday life in Okinawa: the ongoing presence of the US military on the islands, and extractive tourism from mainland Japan to its southernmost prefecture. In early works, the artist films herself consuming a seemingly endless supply of ice cream cones in front of an American army base (rendering economic dependency and cultural imperialism absurd and abject in I Like Okinawa Sweet,); or transforms into an imaginary sea creature, the titular Seaweed Woman, who confronts the invisible base perimeter that the US military claims extends into the sea. Yamashiro has also long considered questions of intergenerational memory, bearing witness to the immense loss of life among Indigenous Ryūkyūan people during the Battle of Okinawa in the waning days of World War II. In Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat, the artist combines oral history, layered projections, and reenactment to embody the testimony of survivors in an entrancing meditation on cultural inheritance and transmission.
Since the 2010s, as Yamashiro’s practice has continued to expand into photography, installation, and performance, new approaches have also taken hold in her filmmaking. Rarely appearing in front of the camera, the artist has instead explored different narrative and sonic strategies. Her recent work also connects Okinawa with broader archipelagic realities: Mud Man, commissioned for the 2016 Aichi Triennial, envisions the reawakening of slumbering peoples across Okinawa and South Korea’s Jeju Islands as a sensorial call and response of movement, speech, and sound; while her newest film was shot in Palau, inspired by the historic migration of many Okinawan residents—including the artist’s own father—to Palau in the first half of the 20th century. In the words of curator Madoka Matsumura, Yamashiro’s current work asks, “Is there some route by which people in East Asia subjected to colonialism, militarism, and ongoing state violence can find each other and live together?”
The screening is followed by a conversation with the artist, moderated by Sophie Cavoulacos, associate curator in the Department of Film.
Okinawa Graveyard Club. 2004. 6 min. No dialogue.
I Like Okinawa Sweet [from the OKINAWA TOURIST series]. 2004. 8 min. No dialogue.
Seaweed Woman. 2008. 8 min. No dialogue.
Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat. 2009. 7 min. In Japanese; English subtitles.
Mud Man. 2017. 26 min. In Japanese, Korean; no subtitles.
Flower of Belau. 2023. 8 min. No dialogue.
Program approx. 62 min.