>>> Japanese

AIT ARTIST TALK #71
"Tangled Thread over Southeast Asia"
Artist Talk by Piyarat Piyapongwiwat from Thailand
Date: Monday, October 23, 2017
Time: 19:00-21:00 (18:30 Door open)
Venue: Daikanyama AIT Room
*All admissions with 1 drink / Booking required / English only


Collaborative patchwork created by local home-based tailor, courtesy of the artist

AIT is pleased to host a talk by the current artist in residence from Thailand, Piyarat Piyapongwiwat.
For the past decades, Fast Fashion has brought a whirlwind of change in our world, economically and culturally. With the countries of Southeast Asia as well as China are the main producers in the industry that they satisfy our basic necessity, issues on the wage and the working/living environment of the workers have emerged along with the growth of the industry.

Over the last 5 months, Piyarat Piyapongwiwat has spent her days conducting detailed research over several countries in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam, Thaniland, Cambodia, Myanmar where she observed of workers carefully in garment factories in each country. She collected pieces of video footages including everyday lives of these workers, even with their own cameras on the mobile phones capturing their private scenes with the family members.


Left: Garment workers working in the factory in Phnom Penh, courtesy of the artist
Right: Worker dormitory near Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone (PPSEZ), courtesy of the artist

At this talk, Piyapongwiwat will share us what these collections of moments will narrate in today's globalizing community and will revolve around the issues on work environment, wage, and labor conditions in the Southeast Asia's garment industry, as the reverse side of globalism in our economic and cultural activities.

We hope that you can join us.

2017-10-12

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>>> Japanese


AIT is pleased to participate in hosting an exhibition at the Spiral Garden(Aoyama,Tokyo) from October 13 (Friday) - October 31 (Tuesday), 2017 as part of the The Nippon Foundation DIVERSITY IN THE ARTS Project.

The "Museum of Together" exhibition consists of artworks by 22 artists created in many different environments, including special care facilities, ateliers, private residences, and studios, as well as an archive of various materials and models.

We look forward to your support and attendance at this special exhibition.
For details of the exhibition, please see Exhibition Official website.

The Nippon Foundation DIVERSITY IN THE ARTS
Museum of Together Exhibition
October 13(Friday) -October 31(Tuesday), 2017

Outsider Art and Contemporary Art, Experience 22 Different Worlds of Art
A Museum Open to Everyone

Venue: Spiral Garden (Spiral 1F)
Opening Hours: 11:00-20:00 Free admission / Open every day
* Open until 18:00 on October 13 (Friday)



Download our official press release (Only Japanese available) (PDF)

[ Curators Message ]

The Museum of Together is a temporary museum showing art works and archives by 22 participants. The artists live and work in many different kinds of contexts; from being professional artists with gallery representation, artists who work in special care atelier facilities, artists who work at home and artists who teach in special schools. The motivations and intentions of the artists are diverse. Some have a deep awareness of art history, some make art to feel better and maintain health and balance, some sell their works and others ask that their works are thrown away after being completed.

What brings them together is an intensity of feeling and vision about art-making that is rooted in desires beyond simply the ego personality. Here art may emerge from despair, ecstasy, isolation, joy and varying degrees of altered states of consciousness. Although we can explain many aspects of their art through words, there are also many aspects that invite us to adopt different kinds of attention and sensibility. The Museum of Together tries to think about art as an active tool to generate and maintain psychic and spiritual wellbeing. This is not something special to only a certain kind of art such as Outsider Art, or an art that can be spoken about simplistically as 'pure' or 'raw'. It has been a crucial aspect of all art, from religious art to the many modern and contemporary expressions of what we can call 'spirituality' in art.

The art works are not only tools for the artists who create them, but crucially have the radical potential to be of use to all of us. The Museum of Together invites you to become an active part of the exhibition, not only through reading the accompanying captions, but through careful looking and letting different desires flow inside you. One of the aims of this exhibition is to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. In this regard we held many discussions from the initial planning stages with people with hearing, physical and visual disabilities. The exhibition design and Access Art Program have been planned with this in mind, and hopefully we have created a 'set and setting' appropriate for the art works to connect among themselves, the soul of the viewers and the wider society. We hope that the exhibition is used by the audience and that its affects resonate widely.

Roger McDonald / Yuko Shiomi

2017-10-10

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