KIMIKO TANABE
APRIL 13-15, 2023
8PM
$20 in advance / $25 at-the-door
Portrait of myself as a Yūrei
Portrait of myself as a Yūrei' is a folktale that wanders into the afterlife of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II. It brings to life yūrei, Japanese female ghosts drunk on hatred, sorrow, revenge, and rage with wild long and limp hands broken at the wrists and calls upon their unapologetic chaos to surface emotions about the camps rarely expressed in Japanese American families.
The US has entered the stage of Japanese American Incarceration that writer and poet Brandon Shimoda calls “the ruins.” The camps are no longer open, the generations who lived through them are getting older or have passed, and many of the sites themselves are in ruins. Kimiko’s generation lives in the afterlife of the camps and like the yūrei can access powerful emotions in the afterlife, Kimiko questions what emotions she can access that the older generations weren’t afforded. This is a ghost story that is as much about the future as it is about the past.
Please note this piece contains mature content and haze.
Kimiko Tanabe is a fourth-generation Japanese American artist. She explores the mediums of performance art, dance, writing, origami and paper, and is in a committed partnership with her .38 Muji pen. She is forever fascinated with Japanese folklore and as a lover of literature she finds herself making important life decisions under the eyes and influence of fiction. Her work combines her background in contemporary dance with her literary tendencies to create surreal performance art that is both joyful and haunting, and that gives platform and power to the Asian-American emotional experience. For Kimiko, art is intimate and inexact.
Kimiko graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Creative Writing and Dance in 2016. She is a 2022 BAX Space Grant Recipient, 2022 Gallim Moving Artist Resident, 2021 Artist in Resident at The Floor, and 2021 Fresh Ground Pepper Play Ground Play Group Residency Cohort Member. She currently performs with and glenn potter-takata and has performed with marion spencer, Kizuna Dance, Seymour::Dance Collective, Lisa Fagan and Hannah Mitchell, HIJACK, Nial Ibragimov, Shawn Womack, Patrizia Herminjard, Kristi Cole & Guests, and Morgaine DeLeonardis.
@kimiko_tanabe
www.kimikotanabe.com
Photos by Julia Discenza, Olga Rabetskaya, and Julia Discenza.