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Chim ↑ Pom

Mujin-to Production, Tokyo, Japan

If art is going to include an element of shock, then it can’t be the type that just wears off with repeated viewings. The provocative must also be evocative – enough to spark fire-cracker explosions of thoughts and insights, where the inconceivable suddenly becomes incontrovertible. Insights like: man’s best friend is not the dog, but the rat! The Third World is living off the trash of the First! The weapons of former despots should be drafted into a war against financial inequality!

Or: this ‘bunch of pricks’ might just save Japanese contemporary art!

OK, I take that last one back. A literal translation of ‘Chim ↑ Pom’, the name of a six-person artist group whose third ‘solo’ exhibition in Tokyo in as many months is now at Mujin-to Production, probably wouldn’t be as coarse as that. Penis, perhaps, or something more cute, maybe - like pecker or willy. The point is that in a local art scene long verging on the ‘yawn’ side of staid, even that’s enough to make these guys sound immediately fresh.

Chim ↑ Pom formed in 2005 – a collection of wandering art graduate asteroids pulled into orbit around slacker art star, Makoto Aida. ‘Basically we met each other during drinking sessions with Aida’, member Yasutaka Hayashi explained to me a few months ago. Ellie, the group’s only woman (or gyaru – gal – as she says in the lingo of her peroxide-and-dark-makeup generation), had modeled for Aida’s paintings. The group’s leader, though, is Ryuta Ushiro. It was he who explained the concept behind their controversial exhibition two months ago at Hiromi Yoshii gallery. ‘The only thing rats, crows and humans have in common is garbage,’ he announced, as if that totally explained why we were peering through a one-way mirror into a small concrete room in which a rat, a crow and a human (Toshinori Mizuno, one of the group’s members), were about to spend two weeks living off trash.

After two weeks, of course, the crow had died, but the others had pulled through, apparently having formed some kind of Free Trade Agreement between ground-hugging scavengers. Accompanying that performance/installation, Becoming friend, eating each other or falling down together (2008), there was a video documenting how the crow had been ‘rescued’ in a midnight raid on one of the traps installed in the metropolis by the famously anti-crow Tokyo Governor, Shintaro Ishihara. ‘We took your crows!’ the artists can be seen scrawling on a sign outside, adding the tag ‘C ↑ Shepherd’ and jokingly aligning themselves with Japan’s environmentalist tormentor, Paul Watson.

In the current exhibition, Chim ↑ Pom are showing work that they made during a recent trip to Bali alongside other new work. The Bali piece, Saya mau perigi ke TPA (Take me to the garbage disposal plant, 2008), includes a video showing Ellie in the guise of a cashed-up bimbo chick tourist cavorting in a helicopter above a giant garbage tip. As she dumps junk from about 200 meters up, a local community of recyclers sifts through the refuse below. Japanese dropping garbage on their poorer Asian neighbours?! The offensiveness is only just outweighed by the knowledge that the artists’ primary target isn’t the Indonesians, but their own, unthinking countrymen.

Chim ↑ Pom produces work at a pace that only a six-person group could manage. In just three years they have built up a mind-boggling oeuvre that includes taxidermied rats, bleached and dyed bright yellow to resemble the video game character Pikachu, a biennale guerrilla performance held at the Tokyo Disney Resort’s version of Venice, the mustering of hundreds of wild crows to the National Diet Building in Tokyo, the destruction of Louis Vuitton handbags in Cambodia using unexploded landmines, and Hard Rock Café signs drawn with kerosene-hoses and lighters (one of the new works in the current show).

Where it’s all heading is anybody’s guess; what it tells us about Japan is crystal clear. Shock like that of confronting a live crow in a gallery hasn’t figured in Japanese art since the late 1960s, when, to a backdrop of student and left-wing riots, Hi-Red Center donned lab coats and started polishing the sidewalks with toothbrushes. The prosperity and peace of the ‘80s and ‘90s steered local artists towards a predominantly refined academicism. Nowadays, with China’s emergence as a geopolitical power, the pension scandal (millions of records were lost) and a spate of random stabbing crimes, cracks have appeared in the nation’s veneer of confident affluence. All of a sudden satire, cynicism and subversion are back on the table, and Chim ↑ Pom aren’t wasting a second.

Edan Corkill