Ōranges and other offerings delineates the bonds and distances existing between families, both blood and chosen. As the first institutional solo exhibition by Japanese-Australian artist Reina Brigette Takeuchi, the exhibition takes inspiration from her father’s eco-farm in Tokyo entitled Field of Dreams. Her father, Yukifumi Takeuchi, embarked on creating the field during the pandemic for his own wellbeing and to grapple with the implications of living in perpetual environmental crisis.
Through ritualistic gestures and time-based media, Reina uses an auto-ethnographic approach to represent familial storytelling; both real and false memories. Through collaborations with family and friends, including her friend and collaborator Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn, oranges and oceans become metaphors for diasporic existences, transience, and gaps between spaces; otherwise known as 間 [ma] in Japanese. Ōranges and other offerings is a space to recollect memories and examine the complexities of the Nikkei experience through community and familial knowledge. Exposing the isolated experience of diasporic peoples during Covid, Ōranges and other offerings explores how transformation can occur for one’s wellbeing and one’s environment through cultivating nature and familial love.
Reina Brigette Takeuchi is a Japanese Australian artist-researcher, dance maker and curator who has lived and worked across Japan, India, Thailand, and Australia. She explores how sensorial experience can be enhanced through ritualistic performance, interactive installations, and time-based media. Reina’s work utilises choreographic processes and the transitory qualities of sound and action to meditate on transculturation, diasporic existences and her experiences living peripatetically across East and Southeast Asia during her youth. These processes allow for a clarity of somatic contemplation for the artist, and in turn, she explores the potential for this sensitivity to be shared with the viewer. Her practice spans across visual arts, choreography, curatorial projects, written publications, and creative facilitation. She has exhibited internationally and has performed for Ars Electronica Festival, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, SomoS Art House, Berlin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Late program. She is currently a PhD candidate at QUT, focusing on Asian Australian performance for her research project Countermoves of the Transcultural. She is currently based between Gubbi Gubbi Country / Sunshine Coast and Sydney / Warrane.
Lucia Truòng Vy Nguyên is a Vietnamese Australian writer exploring the intersection of Southeast Asian folklore, ludic violence and global technoculture. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Kill Your Darlings, Art Collector and LIMINAL’s non-fiction anthology, Against Disappearance (Pantera Press, 2022). With her collaborator and friend Reina Takeuchi, she has exhibited at SomoS Art House Berlin, and co-written an essay for Going Down Swinging which on the Non-Fiction category for the 2022 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. She is invigorated by the opportunity to play and dream within, around, or even outside capitalist structures of “work”.
This exhibition has been produced on the stolen lands of: the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora Nation; the Awabakal people; and the Yuggera and Turrbal peoples. We would like to pay our respects to the elders of these Nations—past, present, and emerging—and to any other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people encountering this work and their transgenerational connections to these lands.
This Acknowledgment of Land highlights colonialism as an ongoing process and how non-white, non-Indigenous people continue to contribute to and benefit from it. We hope to acknowledge the theft and violence inherent to our settlement of these lands.
OPENING
Friday 21 April 2023, 6-8pm
JWAC Gallery, 420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley.
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Artist in-conversation:
Reina Brigette Takeuchi and Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn
Saturday 22 April 2023, 2-4pm
JWAC Gallery, 420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley.
As collaborators, Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn and Reina Brigette Takeuchi write, create and perform works that critically engage with the ongoing labour of being Asian women in so-called Australia, considering reciprocal care in work and friendship. Their work includes a co-authored essay Not Your Miss or Madame: A Three-Act Meditation on Love, Opera and Friendship, as published by Going Down Swinging; which was awarded the 2022 Woollahra Nonfiction Award; and Shadow, a performance video work exhibited at SomoS Art House, Berlin, and Outer Space, Meanjin/Brisbane. They strive to create ruptures in the colonial Australian Arts Sector.
Image: Reina Brigette TAKEUCHI / Documentation still from Shadow, 2022, video, sound / © Lucia Truòng Vy Nguyên and Reina Takeuchi Reina Brigette Takeuchi
