The Typhoon Queens are an ecological artist collective formed in 2019 during a typhoon in Osaka, Japan, with members from Japan, Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.
Our work is part exhibition, part experiential story. Combining physical works, stories, sound, moving image, and performance, the work takes the form of a lyrical play, where humans and nature rotate characters as moderator, observer, and instigator. We create spaces where social, political, and ecological icons transform, into a world with potential for re-imagining everything.
In this mode of making work, artworks are fluidly connected through a live ecological and social narrative, happening inside the gallery. The narrative considers the meaning of borders, boundaries, and of how we define ourselves in relation to each other, and to this earth.
The inaugural Typhoon Queens exhibition, built together with Robin Lasser, Takuma Uematsu, Masahiro Kawanaka, and Suhee Kang, was exhibited at Art Spot Korin, in Kyoto. This exhibition also became the first virtual exhibition to premiere at The Nature of Cities Urban Ecological Arts Lab, an effort to support ecological artists during the COVID-19 pandemic. A live streamed artist tour is available at The Nature of Cities.
Though collaboratively designed, each artist also produces independent work. In Kyoto, my work “Anatomy of a Cultural Cloud” took form as a cloud sculpture — made of pulped newspapers from Japan and Korea — that revealed remnants of sentences and words from our daily cultural headlines, as they intermix and float together in the space. This work is juxtaposed with a single image of the clouds between Japan and Korea. Printed by exposure to sunlight through the archaic ‘cyanotype’ process, the image offers a small, calm moment, high above a storm between two countries.
You can read more about the Typhoon Queens at www.cityasnature.org/queens/
Exhibition Dates
2020.4.21 — 5.3
Art Spot Korin, Kyoto, Japan (a satellite event of Kyotographie KG+2020)
The Nature of Cities / Urban Ecological Arts Forum, New York (virtual exhibition)
Video
More films are viewable at the Urban Ecological Arts Forum.