Contemporary artist Maki Umehara majored in English in her teens, but surrounded by foreigners and Japanese students who had lived overseas, she lost confidence, and gave up her childhood dream of becoming a foreign language specialist. Subsequently in the art world she was to work on producing artist books in German and other languages, and on projects with artists from various countries.

In the collaborative projects [nüans] Umehara worked on in Europe from 2006 to 2016, she focused on avoiding the clashes of binary oppositions such as Europe/Asia, male/female, conservative/liberal. Rather, by re-ordering relationships in the environment from which artists, curators and art emerge, she worked to find a new perspective by bringing together different types of people and elements in the art projects she explored.

The archival book she created through her projects– Jūnen: Collaboration and Archiving – examines how society depicts itself as a place for learning, like a school, with the underlining themes of “place for self-education” and “network”. The book is the result of Umehara’s efforts to understand from an external perspective, as a Japanese person, projects that mainly operate in the world of European culture and the German language, and will probably give a different impression depending on who looks at it.

In this talk Umehara will show how the smallest collective unit comprising society has transitioned over time and how she has started to create her own space away from all that. More specifically, she will talk about how she has found and improved her sense of self amid European culture.

* artist collective nüans (by Anna Heidenhain, Elmar Hermann, and Maki Umehara, 2006 – 2016).

About the contributors