Mio Okido

The artist Mio Okido (*1986 in the city of Sado, Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture, Japan; lives and works in Berlin since 2015) is presenting four new works. They were inspired by her artist residency as part of the project “The Collaborative Museum” (CoMuse) and examine constructions of memories of the period of Japanese imperialism/colonialism/fascism in East Asia, ca. 1872–1945.

One of Okido’s starting points are neo-traditional, national-Japanese Nihonga paintings from the exhibition Contemporary Japanese Painting, which took place in Berlin in 1931. Four of them are on display in Room 318. In Geister (Ghosts), Okido confronts these paintings with motifs relating to Japan’s military aggression in Manchuria in the same year.

The two-channel video installation Betrachten (Viewing) creates a complex visual atlas of memory by combining historical images and documents with footage of places, buildings, monuments, and works of art as carriers of contradictory emotions and interests taken by Okido herself during trips to South Korea and Japan in 2023. All the images appear in black and white in uniform format. With a blink of the artist’s eye, the projected images keep changing, addressing ambivalences, openness, and the constructed character of the narratives of (hi)stories associated with the images.

Fassade des Gesichts (Facial Façade) shows a portrait of the artist with a veil of medallions. On it are images of “great men”, who are regarded as heroes of Japan’s modernisation, but appear here in miniature and the form chosen by Okido. In the artwork, woman meets men, the individual meets the collective, and history meets the present.

The wall-based textual sculpture Menschliche Beziehungen (Human Relationships) forges a bridge to the German language and, going a step further, links the topicality of the subject to Berlin and the world of today. Condensing the remembered narratives of (hi)stories into “killing” or “being killed”, the artwork poses a central question for the present and (hi)stories of the future.