Ei Arakawa-Nash: Paintings Are Popstars

The National Art Center, Tokyo

Finished

Artists

Ei Arakawa-Nash et al.

This will be the first solo museum exhibition in Asia by Ei Arakawa-Nash, a Japanese American artist who has been showing his performance works at numerous art biennials and international museums since the 2000s. The exhibition, titled “Paintings Are Popstars” is a solo show by Arakawa-Nash, but the works of more than twenty painters who collaborate with him will also “appear” in the exhibition space. Each of the paintings will be worshiped as a popstar with its aberrant presence, and Arakawa-Nash will develop collaborative performance pieces inspired by the attitude of each popstar = painting.

Starting with Mega Please Draw Freely—a participatory work that was first organized at Tate Modern in London in 2021, which allows anyone to inscribe freely on the floor of the museum—the exhibition continues with a painting space with topics that include: being an artist-parent; a queer action video that uses paint as a “beauty” treatment; metro-spectrum performance; rooms with paintings that alternately sing to the audience; narrating the voices of paintings through historical research of Japanese wars and immigration; flying kite paintings in Fukushima and Berlin; and a club-like space where abstract paintings talk to the public with philosophical riddles about taste.

Visitors are invited to experience Arakawa-Nash’s performance art, in which children, paintings, histories, music, bodies, conversations, and humor work together in a dissonant and yet enveloping way. In addition to several newly constructed installations in the 2,000 m² (21,500 ft²) floor space of the museum with 8 m high ceilings, live performances by Arakawa-Nash will be held regularly. In addition, Arakawa-Nash, who “wants to greet the audience,” will lead “short but intimate” tours. This is the first solo exhibition by a performance artist at the National Art Center, Tokyo, since its opening in 2007.

The exhibition also includes works by historical painters such as Miyoko Ito, Yuki Katsura, On Kawara, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Toshi Maruki (Toshiko Akamatsu), Henri Matisse, Luis Nishizawa, Fujiko Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, Jiro Yoshihara, as well as works by contemporary painters such as Kerstin Brätsch, Leidy Churchman, Nicole Eisenman, Jutta Koether, Shimon Minamikawa, Oscar Murillo, Silke Otto-Knapp, Laura Owens, Gela Patashuri, Seth Price, Trevor Shimizu, Amy Sillman, and Yui Yaegashi. Filmmaker Reiji Saito and designer Daishiro Mori will also participate in the exhibition.

Schedule

Oct 30 (Wed) 2024-Dec 16 (Mon) 2024