Art in the Seto Inland Sea: Examining the Impact of Setouchi Triennale on Local Communities
From July 2019 to January 2020, Michelle Lim carried out sustained long-term research on the impact of the Setouchi Triennale on the local communities in the Seto Inland Sea region. She was particularly interested in how local people responded to and co-existed with the artworks during the time between the festivals; in other words, the development of a sustainable art/cultural ecology on the islands. During this period, She was based in Tokyo and made several extended trips to the Setouchi region. She also had the opportunity to visit a number of major exhibitions and art spaces while she was in Japan, notably the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field in Niigata, the Tobiu Art Camp in Hokkaido, the Okayama Art Summit, Art Base Momoshima in Hiroshima and Arts Maebashi in Gunma – these excursions helped her gain a deeper understanding of the contemporary art scene in Japan outside of the Tokyo city center. (An unexpected outcome was the documentation of pre-COVID life in contemporary Japan.) This report outlines the main activities and preliminary findings from this period of research, towards developing a critical discourse on curatorial ethics and ecological sustainability.
- Main Cities of Activity
- Japan:Okayama, Hiroshima, Kagawa, Tokyo, Nagoya, Nigata, Maebashi, Hokkaido
- Host Institution(s) / Individual(s)
- Yoshitaka Mōri(Professor of Sociology, Cultural Studies and Media Studies, Graduate School of Global Arts and Department of Music Creativity and its Environment, Faculty of Music, Tokyo University of the Arts)
