Mieko Shiomi

is a Japanese artist, composer, and performer who played a key role in the development of Fluxus. A co-founder of the seminal postwar Japanese experimental music collective Group Ongaku, she is known for her investigations of the nature and limits of sound, music, and auditory experiences. Her work has been widely circulated as Fluxus editions, featured in concert halls, museums, galleries, and non-traditional spaces, as well as being re-performed by other musicians and artists numerous times. She is best known for her work of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially Spatial Poem, Water Music, Endless Box, and the various instructions in Events & Games, all of which were produced as Fluxus editions. Now in her eighties, she continues to produce new work.

Biography

Early Training and Group Ongaku Mieko Shiomi was born in Okayama, Japan. She began music lessons as a child and studied music at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1957 under composers Yoshio Hasegawa and Minao Shibata, graduating in 1961. In 1960, while still a student, she co-founded Group Ongaku (Group Music) to explore improvisation and action. Members of this collective included Takehisa Kosugi, Shukou Mizuno, Mikio Tojima, and Gen’ichi Tsuge, with Yasunao Tone joining later. Between 1963 and 1964, she began to compose what she termed "action poems," eliminating musical notation from the score entirely in favor of verbal instructions to be interpreted by the performer. Shiomi further explains that while working on the action poems Mirror Piece and Endless Box in 1963, she made a trip to Tokyo where she was introduced to Nam June Paik by a mutual friend. Upon showing Paik her action poems, he promised to send her work to George Maciunas who was apparently so enamored of the work that he had it turned into the edition that funded her flight to New York.

From 1964 to 1965, Shiomi lived in New York City, working closely with George Maciunas and contributing to Fluxus events, editions, and communal life. Shiomi and Shigeko Kubota had flown over together on the same flight, and both initially lived near Maciunas's loft in Soho. As a result, Shiomi worked closely with Maciunas, Kubota, and Takako Saito, hosting communal fluxus dinners whose labor primarily ended up falling to the women, and producing Fluxus editions in the evenings until Kubota and Shiomi took up part-time evening work. After her arrival in New York, Maciunas continued to incorporate many of her works, such as Water Music (1965) and Disappearing Music for Face (1965), into Fluxus editions. His enthusiasm for incorporating her work into Fluxus editions secured her place as a seminal member of the loose collective, and has led many artists and musicians—both in and beyond Fluxus—to perform her work at both impromptu events and formal concerts.

While based in New York, Shiomi participated in several live performances, including the Perpetual Fluxfest at Washington Square Gallery in 1964 where she performed six pieces—Double Windows, Direction Event, Air Event, Passing Music, Water Music, and Disappearing Music for Face—which all incorporated audience participation, expanding the role of "performer" within her work. While living among other New York-based Fluxus artists, she also came to more actively re-conceive the boundaries of performance beyond formal events. Upon her arrival, Maciunas had secured temporary living arrangements for Kubota and Shiomi and helped them move extra furniture from his loft to theirs, in what Maciunas jokingly referred to as a "carrying event."

Late 1960s She returned to Japan in 1965 when she could no longer extend her tourist visa, but continued her relationship with Fluxus artists through mail art correspondence. She began her Spatial Poem series while still in New York. Shiomi solicited Fluxus members from all over the globe to participate by inviting them to respond to an instruction and the collected responses constituted the work. The nine Spatial Poems were published together in a booklet in 1975. Upon her return to Japan, Shiomi reconnected with members of the Japanese avant-garde, and remained active in the Tokyo art and music scene until her marriage in 1970. Her activities were particularly important for the development of the genre of intermedia in the late 1960s, as evidenced by her participation in key intermedia events including From Space to Environment and Cross Talk/Intermedia.

1970s to Today Upon her marriage in 1970, however, Shiomi's ability to travel regularly for rehearsals and performances was severely limited. She shifted her activities to what she could accomplish from her base of operations in Minoo, Osaka, completing much of the Spatial Poem series between 1970 and 1975. Music historian Miki Kaneda has described Shiomi's strategy of this time as a covertly feminist one, aimed at appropriating domestic technologies, such as the postal system, and adapting them toward her performative ends rather than breaking the constricting structures of the patriarchial order that chained her to the home. In Kaneda's words, "Shiomi’s Spatial Poems are a ‘submission to the inconvenience of the situation,’ but also a performative intervention into the ‘distribution of the sensible’ of her immediate surroundings."

After 1977, she returned to work on her own compositions but continued her links with Fluxus, including organizing the Fluxus Media Opera in Kobe in 1995 and participating in events and exhibitions that re-examined the legacies of Fluxus in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Once her children reached adulthood in the 1990s, she became more active, starting with a Fluxus Balance mail art collaboration series initiated in the early 1990s.

Artistic development

Group Ongaku Group Ongaku formed in 1961 around a desire to reorient their attention toward improvisational elements that they felt had been lost in modern Western music, and "rediscover the meaning of music, which they thought had been minimized." They pursued sounds that would stretch the meanings of both music and auditory experiences. Such non-musical sounds included a vacuum cleaner, radio, and kitchenware as well as experiments with magnetic audiotape. This strategy was intended to draw attention to the spatial aspects of sound, inciting audiences to understand the constructed environment and thereby "destroy[ing] the hierarchical representation of a musically privileged space." She began working on instructional pieces, composed of words invoking actions, which she termed "action poems." This approach grew out of her increasing doubt about the real nature of music, and her growing belief that its essence did not reside in sound waves per se, but rather in sensations of time that could include physical actions. She performed it again for Flux Week in September 1965, at Gallery Crystal in Tokyo. In the Tokyo version she interpreted the instructions in several ways, including drawing up water from a kiddie pool using syringes and other tools, and dripping water onto a glue-covered record. In the case of the record, which was rotating on a turntable, the act of dripping the glue dissolved it to reveal the record and gradually allow portions of the record to play. She again performed the work in 1992 at Xebec in Kobe, hitting the surface of water in several basins with upside-down cups. Shiomi herself now sees the bottled version of Water Music as an exemplary instance of her concept of "transmedia," which she describes an artwork "continu[ing] its creative evolution by transferring from one medium to the next."

Art historian Jessica Lynne Santone sees Spatial Poem primarily as a window into Fluxus' networked community, serving "as an illustration of the process of community in formation, an event that is a function of the circulation of performance and document." Art historian Kristine Styles takes this a step further in claiming the work is a quintessentially Fluxus performance, creating "a sort of metaphysics of the dynamics of social exchange and human action that extends from the infra to the supra—from the personal to the political, from the regional to the international.” Music historian Miki Kaneda however, takes a cue from art historian Midori Yoshimoto's assertion that the work responded to the specific situation—a mother of two young children—Shiomi found herself in, in the early 1970s.

Technological interests Shiomi was already experimenting with electronic media in the 1960s, using a theremin-like electric-wave instrument for her contribution to Ichiyanagi Toshi's 1961 performance at Sōgetsu Art Center, and employing electronic synthesizers in performances for the Intermedia festival she co-organized and the Cross Talk/Intermedia event, both in early 1969. Yet in the 1960s these uses of electronic technologies were intended more as a means of exploring the gaps between different media or bridging across traditionally distinct media, as signaled by her use of Dick Higgin's term "intermedia," rather than explicit content in her work. Boundary Music, 1963 Event for the Midday in the Sunlight, 1963 Events and Games, 1964 Spatial Poems no. 1-no. 9, 1965–1975 Flying Poem no. 2, 1989

Sweet 16, Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo, 3–5 December 1963

Fluxus Symphony Orchestra Concert, Carnegie Concert Hall, 27 June 1963

Monday Night Letter, Café au go go, NY, 30 November 1964

Flux Week, Gallery Crystal, Tokyo, 1965

From Space to Environment—Happening, Sōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo, 14 November 1966

Happening for Sightseeing Bus, various locations in Tokyo, 18 December 1966

Intermedia Art Festival, 18, 19 and 21 January, Killer Joe's Discotheque and Nikkei Hall, Tokyo, 1969 (co-organizer along with Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone)

Fluxus Media Opera, Xebec Hall, Kobe, 24 July 1994

Fluxus in Japan 2014, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2014

Fluxus wo kataru (On Fluxus, Talk, Symposium and Concert), Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, 19 January 2019

Select group exhibitions Flux-Show, Gallery A, Amsterdam, 1976

Yin & Yan, Fluxeum, Wiesbaden, 1992

Fluxus Media Pre-Exhibition, Xebec Hall, Kobe, 1994

Fluxus Show, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 1994

Japanese Women Artists in Avant-Garde Movements, 1950–1975, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Utsunomiya, 2005

Between Art and Life: Performativity in Japanese Art, Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, 2008

DISSONANCES – Six Japanese Artists, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, Japan, 2008

Fluxus East, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, Poland; Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest, Hungary; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia; Kunsthallen Nikolaj, Copenhagen, Denmark; Henie Onstad Art Center, Høvikodden, Norway, 2007–2010

Fluxus at 50, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Germany, 2012

The House of Dust, James Gallery, Center for the Humanities, NY, 2016

JAPANORAMA, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France, 2017

Orgasmic Streaming - Organic Gardening - Electroculture, Chelsea Space, London, 2018

EXODUS I: A Colossal World: Japanese Artists and New York, 1950s – Present, WhiteBox, NY, 2018

Fluxus ABC, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, 2019

Body. Gaze. Power. A Cultural History of the Bath, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany, 2020

Humor Has It, Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeongju, South Korea, 2021

Select Solo and Two-Person Exhibitions Fluxus Balance & Balance Poems, Galerie J & J Donguy, Paris, 1995

Collagen und Multiples, Galerie & Edition Hundertmark, Cologne, 1998

Mieko Shiomi & Fluxus, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2013

Mieko Shiomi & Takuma Uematsu: Exploring The Stars, Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo, 2019

Discography Her work has been recorded and issued on cassettes and CDs, including: Requiem for George Maciunas (1990) An Incidental Story On The Day Of A Solar Eclipse #1#2#3 (1998, Edition Hundertmark) Fluxus Suite (A Musical Dictionary Of 80 People Around Fluxus) (2002? Records) Satoko Plays Mieko Shiomi—Fractal Freaks (2005? Records) *piano performed by Satoko Inoue The World Of Sounds And Words (2010, FONTEC)

Collections Archiv Sohm Staatgalerie Stuttgart, Germany

Centre Pompidou, France

Fondazione Bonotto, Vincenza, Italy

Fondazione Mudima, Italy

The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA

Kurashiki City Art Museum, Okayama, Japan

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain

Museo Vostell Malpartida, Spain

Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan

Nam June Paik Art Center, Korea

The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan

The Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Japan

Queensland Art Gallery, Australia

Urawa Art Museum, Saitama, Japan

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, USA