Aichi Triennale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Period:September 13 to November 30, 2025, 79 days, Venues: Aichi Arts Center, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, Seto City

What’s On

Mayunkiki+

  • Performing Arts
  • Aichi Arts Center
  • Seto City

Performances

World Premiere, New Commission
kuste
  • © Hirose Modoro
Date/Venue

October 3 [Fri] - October 5 [Sun]
Setogura Tsubaki Hall

Date/Venue

October 12 [Sun] - October 13 [Mon, holiday]
Aichi Prefectural Art Theater, Large Rehearsal Room (B2F)

Tickets

Tickets for performing arts programs are scheduled to go on sale Saturday, July 12, 2025.

Staff

apetunpe (Rekpo, Mayunkiki)
SUIKA KEIMAI (Hirose Tact, Mayunkiki)
hoshifune (Koyano Tetsuro, Watanabe Naoka)
WHITELIGHT, and others.

Profile

  • Formed 2025 in Japan. Works nomadically.

Mayunkiki, a musician and contemporary artist from Hokkaido, grounds her creative practice in a deep, introspective engagement with her identity as an Ainu, an Indigenous ethnic minority in Japan. Taking as her point of departure the “experiences that arise from being Ainu,” she insists on an artistic perspective rooted in personal subjectivity as she probes the complexities of what it means to be Ainu in the present moment.
Mayunkiki+ is a special ensemble created exclusively for this performance at Aichi Triennale 2025. The group brings together: apetumpe, featuring Mayunkiki’s older sister Rekpo, a singer active mainly in traditional Ainu music; SUIKA KEIMAI, an experimental sonic unit featuring Mayunkiki and Hirose Tact; Koyano Tetsuro and Watanabe Naoka of hoshifune, collaborating with Ainu shadow pictures; and WHITELIGHT, who will handle audio design.
This ensemble has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Tenryu River basin in the Oku-Mikawa district in Aichi Prefecture and the upstream areas of Ishikari River in Hokkaido. Drawing on the findings of this fieldwork, kuste will retrace the footsteps of Kawamura Kaneto: Mayunkiki and Repko’s grandfather, who was a legendary surveyor and prominent Ainu leader in the city of Asahikawa, Hokkaido, during the early part of the Shōwa era (1926 -1989). Kawamura left a remarkable legacy through his work constructing some of Japan’s most challenging railway sections, including Oku-Mikawa and the old Sanshin Line (the current JR Iida Line), between the Tenryukyo (Tenryu Gorge) Station and Mikawa Kawai Station in Shinshiro, Aichi Prefecture.
The title kuste comes from a transitive verb in the Ainu language meaning “to let something pass through a place.” Following Kawamura’s path, this performance seeks to build bridges across what often feels unbridgeable and irreversible: before and after, upstream and downstream, and ancestors and descendants.

Selected performances
2024
SUKIYAKI MEETS THE WORLD (Toyama, Japan)/SUKIYAKI TOKYO (Japan) Mayunkiki & Surge (*1)
2024
“ukouk”, Sapporo International Art Festival 2024, MAREWREW × KOMAKUS (*2) (Hokkaido, Japan)
2023/2024
“nociw kotan”, Upopoy, hoshifune × apetunpe (Hokkaido, Japan)
2023
Shanku Musical Festival 2023, SUIKA KEIMAI (Hualien, Taiwan)
2022
Mayunkiki solo exhibition, SIKNURE – Let me live Opening performance, Mayunkiki & Surge (Birmingham, UK)
2022
Picnic at Music Hall, hoshifune × Apetunpe (Kanagawa, Japan)

*1 A band SUIKA KEIMAI organized in the United Kingdom.
*2 An artistic group whose members were originally with WHITELIGHT.

Related Information