Shiomi Mieko graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts’ Department of Musicology in 1961. During her student days, she formed Group Ongaku together with fellow students and experimented with tape music and improvisation. In 1964, Shiomi moved to the USA and became a member of Fluxus. In 1965, she started her “Spatial Poem” series. Following her return to Japan, she developed the gesture of the “event” as performance art. In 1970, she relocated to the city of Osaka. Starting with the Fluxus festival in Venice in 1990, she took part in numerous Fluxus projects held all over the world and in her home of Japan. Having become interested in electronic technologies in the 1990s, she began to implement them into her transmedial performances. Shiomi continues to work in a variety of fields and genres today, including visual art, performance art and music compositions. Since 2014, Shiomi is also active as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Archival Research Center in Kyoto City University of the Arts.

Shiomi Mieko’s Contemporary Art exhibition includes her new work <Spatial Poem: moving event> (2022 version) as well as nine documents and publications related to her Spatial Poem series (1965–75) collected from several Japanese art museums.

For Aichi Triennale 2022’s Performing Arts program, Shiomi selects performance works from her Events series from 1966 until today, including new works, in accordance with the festival’s theme “STILL ALIVE,” and presents two programs titled “Performing Words and Concepts” and “Piano × Performance”.

Selected Works & Awards

2014

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

2013

Mieko Shiomi and Fluxus, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan

2001

Fluxus Trial, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan

1995

Fluxus Balance & Balance Poems (solo), Galerie J&J Donguy, Paris, France

1994

Fluxus Media Opera, Xebec Hall, Kobe, Japan

1990

Fluxus Festival, Venice, Italy

Exhibition

With the COVID-19 pandemic restricting the movement of people around the world, mail art that makes use of postal mail has once again come into the spotlight. This method was also used by the avant-garde art Fluxus movement, which spread from New York to Europe and Japan during the 1960s as a technique that evokes a sense of fluidity, movement, and change.

Shiomi Mieko graduated from the Department of Musicology at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. While still a student, she formed Group Ongaku with Kosugi Takehisa, Tone Yasunao, and others in 1960, and moved to the U.S. to join Fluxus in 1964. In the “Spatial Poem” series that she began the following year, Shiomi mailed various instructions to artists and acquaintances in different locations, and held the following nine events over a period of ten years－ “1: Word Event,” “2: Direction Event,” “3: Falling Event,” “4: Shadow Event,” “5: Opening Event” “6: Orbit Event,” “7: Sound Event,” “8: Wind Event,” and “9: Disappearing Event.” Approximately 230 people participated. The original reports by the participants still exist, as well as related multiples of events 1 through 4. Events 5 through 9, along with 1 through 4, have been compiled in books. These materials convey with exuberance the global connections between artists at a time when the internet did not yet exist.

At this exhibition, a new Spatial Poem (2022 version) “movement event” was carried out. 61 people, including participating artists in this exhibition, responded to the following instruction. “Move something. Please inform us of when, how and what you moved from where to where.” The various ways of “moving” that the COVID-19 pandemic forced us once again to think about have been revived in a new version some 50 years later, and placed on a map of the world and exhibited.

• Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022
• Spatial Poem (2022 version) “moving event”, 2021-2022
• Photo: ToLoLo studio

• Courtesy of the artist

• Photo: Hideto Maezawa
• Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo