Haruko Okano: Performance Art Modalities
Ephemeral Media & Performance Components in Art Activism
Jun 2, 2009
The materials and process which art activist Haruko Okano utilizes in her works are ephemeral: bone, pine needles, petals, sawdust. There is often a performance component to these pieces which accentuates their "moment in time" quality. They are a direct repudiation of the greed and cupidity of collections and hording. Their most important impact is on the hearts, minds and imaginations of the people who view them.
High (bridi) Tea
Okano once cultivated a type of fungus called kombucha, which was served on paper plates for her collaborative installation and performance piece with poet and writer, Fred Wah, called High (bridi) Tea. The piece was about racism and contamination anxiety, an oddly hilarious work utilizing lots of white bread and mold. The kombucha, which is considered an edible fungus, had grown mold during the cultivation process, which rendered it inedible. When it dried for the installation, it acquired a thin, stiff consistency with the colour and texture of leather.
High (bridi) Tea which was held at Wong's Chinese Restaurant in Vancouver in 2001, was just one of many extensions of Bryan Mulvihill's The World Tea Party. The Tea Party motif interested Okano as a result of its symbolic connection to her biological heritage. Okano is Japanese-Canadian, but she was adopted and raised by Causasian parents. This created a certain disconnection between her racial background and her upbringing that she expounds upon with her art. Of particular attraction is pidgen Japanese-Canadian language, hybrid words, and racialized language. Okano cultivated the words in mold on white bread and served them on her kombucha plates. The tea party, itself, acquired a performance component as the bread was served to a "tea party" of dinner guests at Wong's Café.
Haruko often works with ephemeral materials such as kombucha, because of her concern for the environment. Her impact on the natural world drives her, but it isn't the sole purpose. She gives a pointed talk about the use of materials in this recording on Prayer Wheels for the Living (youtube.com link), which had to do with re-conceiving the use of the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, in conjunction with hospice-workers and AIDs patients, as a space of grief and mourning to a place where the lives of the people in it are honoured and celebrated.
For one thing, ephemeral materials are culled from nature, and are often from discarded elements like sawdust or autumn leaves. Okano's piece Arboretum Arborescence which toured through British Columbia and utilized pine needles through suspended inverted cones of fabric. Arboretum Arborescence addressed several issues:
- environmental degradation
- climate change
- harmful forestry practices
- collective effects on forests.
Flesh Mapping
Flesh Mapping, an exhibition in conjunction with Bettina Matzkuhn, Suzanne Rutchinski and Krista Tupper and the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, used a different modality of this ephemeral style. The exhibition which took place at the Vancouver Public Library and Gallery Gachet, November 25 to December 10, 2008, focused on the sex slave trade and its implication in terms of the violence and exploitation of women indirectly aided and abetted by the civic and provincial government's policies and practices towards the impoverished in the Vancouver area.
The art was created on bedsheets which were displayed throughout the Gallery. The ephemeral and performance component of the exhibition took place when spectators were invited to write the most outrageous examples of rationalizations that they had heard on cards, which were then projected onto the bedsheets.
Salt of the Earth
In April 2009, Okano's site-specific installation, Salt of the Earth, was exhibited at Touchstone Museum's Salt: the Distillation of Matter, curated by Deborah Thompson. The piece was based on the stages in the Tibettan Bardo (Book of the Dead) which involve the body's disintegration into its elemental constituents, and the reincarnation of new life from those elements. Like the body itself, the work was not constructed to last forever, but its constituent elements of salt, cloth, metal spoons, bones and teeth could be recycled or returned to the elements — all except for the heart carved out of pink Tibettan rock-salt in the center of the display.
In lieu of a performance component, Okano led a workshop for children at the museum in which they decorated and cast their own Mexican style "Day of the Dead" skulls out of wet sugar, food colouring, feathers, coloured foils and beads. This brought awareness to the children of positive approaches to death as practiced in other cultures.
Further information about Okano's works and her philosophy can be found at Haruko Okano: Ephemeral Artist and Activist.
 |
 |
 |
 |
