Egami Etsu’s exhibition was a multimedia installation, composed of documents, drawings and sound. Through her work she researchs and re-experiences the history of the relationship between Japan and the UK.
EXHIBITION
Dialogue Beyond 400 Years
— Egami Etsu
24th – 25th of Feb 2018
Egami Etsu’s exhibition was a multimedia installation, composed of documents, drawings and sound. Through her work she researchs and re-experiences the history of the relationship between Japan and the UK. As a part of that history Etsu will highlight how Japan received, responded to and incorporated Western culture and political structures. Etsu also proceses the fact that the relationship between the countries started off as a misunderstanding, having found that the first Japanese people arrived in the UK 431 years ago – seized by an Englishman on their way to California. Another part of her installation will be her experience when she visited London in 2017 for her two weeks project “Mis-Hearing”, exploring social issues relating to language and barriers of communication. She collected stories of English speaking people who participated in the experiment: Communicating in a language they do not understand (Japanese), she had made them interpret the meaning of the voice by intuition, thus leading to mishearing and misunderstanding. During her Exhibition Etsu will pass the question on to the visitors: think not only about the contemporary intercultural dialogue but also about the impact of language throughout the history.
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About
Egami Etsu was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1994. She graduated with a B.F.A. from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) specializing in Oil Painting, winning an award for her work. She ist currently studying for her M.F.A. at CAFA under the mentor of artist Liu Xiao Dong as part of which she is doing an exchange program with HFG Karlsruhe and Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe ZKM. Partially growing up in the United States and Europe, and currently living and working in China and Germany, Egami Etsu experienced various communication barriers she encountered as a result. She felt that languages can “only be sensed, not explained”, thus becoming more interested in the discipline of language and communication. Etsu’s works comprise of various media forms, such as voice, video and drawings, through which she strives to question human’s instincts and the authenticity of communication. Between 2012 to now, Etsu won numerous CAFA and international awards for her work and exhibitions. Egami Etsu’s work is a comprehensive one composed by a group of videos of mishearing games displayed on little screens and some videos of social disputes displayed on background walls. From the origin of language, she probes the meaning and possibilities of communication through these overlapped videos.
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