Work or Your Art

In the city centre of the second largest Japanese urban conglomerate, on the ground floor of the Namiyoshi business building in the Namba district, Osaka, the Shimbun Onna Gallery brings together a group of artists. The name of the gallery translates as the "Newspaper Woman", which is a pseudonym of Miyuki Nishizawa, performer, fashion designer, lecturer and improvisational maker of newspaper garments and sculptures. She comes from the tradition of the renowned Gutai group from Kansai, continuing its tradition by helping less experienced artists recognise their own potential and seek the possibilities to create. Having accumulated a wealth of experience over thirty years of her career and formed a spread-out international network of artists, Miyuki has established together with her partner a bar and gallery to serve as an anchor to the artist community. It is a lively international launch pad for the artist collective and a night-time shelter for a mixed clientele composed of all social strata, businessmen of all kinds as well as alternative personal identities.

A part of the exhibition celebrates the space of Shimbun Onna, the purpose of which had been defined by its shape and static features, as it seems that only a resilient cultural programme with loyal supporters could remain there in the long term. Gallery in the gallery features the works of a group of artists who responded to the recent call in Osaka to cooperate with the Match Gallery, and were chosen by the collective. These artists are Nobuhiro Soke, Mitsunobu Miyamoto, Kenji Sento, Hana Manjushage, Tetsuya Tamaki, Asami Takashina, Yuki Tama, Keiji Terano Guren, Taiji Mori, Isshin Matsumoto, Yumi Twewan and Shonyan.

Parallel to this, the other room in the Match Gallery explores the duality in the position of a Japanese artist-worker through photographs of “social photographer” Toshi Nishida who captured his fellow artists Miyuki Nishizawa, Yuhei Takada, Naoki Sasayama, Kei Karitani, Poppy Nakadoi and Aya Iida at their everyday work. The photographs are shown side-by-side to their works of art as a commentary on their situation in the highly competitive and commercially oriented Japanese society, putting them in an existential dilemma: whether to follow the tough Japanese working ethics or their insecure desire for creative freedom. This is also the source for the title – Work or Your Art.