Fuyuki Yamakawa

Fuyuki Yamakawa (山川冬樹) (born 1973) is a performance artist, sound artist and musician who lives in Yokohama and Tokyo, Japan.

Early life and education Yamakawa was born in London where his father was an anchor and correspondent for Fuji Television. At three years of age, his family relocated to Yokohama, Japan before moving to the United States where Yamakawa attended middle school. La Biennale di Venezia, Arsenale, Venice, Italy among other venues. He is known for his multi-tonal Khoomei singing and musical happenings that amplify the sound of his heartbeat and other body sounds using instruments such as stethoscopes and bone-conduction devices.

Yamakawa has exhibited and performed in Japan at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Toyama, Japan; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; Goethe-Institut Tokyo Hall, Tokyo, Japan; Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto, Japan; Laforet Museum, Tokyo; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan.

He has taught at the Tama Art University and at the Tokyo University of the Arts. Atomic Guitar, Mark I & Mark II, is an automated "guitar playing system operated by radioactivity." Nick Richardson of the London Review of Books has described the work as: "Two canary yellow stratocasters, mounted on stands to face each other and wired into squat black amps, buzz with a tentative open string drone. Next to the guitars hangs the shell of a radiation-proof suit." Each of the guitars was wired up to a geiger counter and a tactile transducer. A pot of soil collected from sites in Tokyo sits beneath each guitar on an empty stage. The soil was contaminated from the plume of air-borne radiation from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdowns that occurred 118 miles from Tokyo. As each geiger counter clicks from detecting radioactive isotopes that are emitted from the soil, the tactile transducers cause a vibration in the guitar strings to play a dissonant soundscape.

DOMBRA In the winter of 2020, Yamakawa performed a major work, DOMBRA, on a grouping of boats in the Tokyo Bay. The performance combined his throat-singing with the sound of seagulls, waves and passing boats. This work produced in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, placed the pandemic within a "historical context while demonstrating the potential to open up new avenues into tomorrow." Boats carried the audience into the bay while another boat held a sound stage on which Yamakawa and others performed. The content of the spoken word portions of the piece referred to the movement, commerce and other impacts of humans on the natural environs of Tokyo Bay.

Awards In 2015 Yamakawa received the Yokohama Cultural Award; In 2003, Yamakawa received the Avant-Garde Award from the "4th International Khoomei Festival", Republic of Tuva, Russia (sponsored by UNESCO)

Collections Yamakawa's work, The Voice Over, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.