Printing Sound SURE INN

Printing Sound, an artist group straddling Japan, China and South Korea, presents SURE INN, a livestreamed online gathering with food, photographs, videos, music, sounds, animation, drawings, sculpture, flags, and performance.
Join in as more than 40 artists explore the potential of trans-border correspondence, multiplicity of mediums, conviviality, and the fostering of non-hierarchical environments in a region where historical issues continue to reverberate in the events of the present.

Livestreaming 20:00-22:00 (JST), Saturday, August 22, 2020
https://sure-inn.com/

Artworks and objects arising out of Printing Sound’s activities will be exhibited at Triennale venue Plot 48 in Yokohama from August 21.

Why “Sure Inn”?
“Printing Sound” rendered in Chinese characters is 刷音 and pronounced “shua in,” or “sure inn.”

About Printing Sound
Printing Sound was founded in 2018 as a collective of some 40 creators including musicians, artists, designers, photographers and performers. Based in Nanjing, China, and Tokyo, they employ a wide range of themes and methods to create spaces for discovery that contain reminders of historical issues continuing to impact the world today. For this exhibition, they will adapt to the challenge of COVID-19 by expanding their activities to the digital realm and launching the online project SURE INN. It will comprise a rich collaboration spanning Japan, China and South Korea, and address the historical issues they have attempted to overcome through the power of culture in addition to the increasingly universal problems caused by the virus and discrimination.

Artists @ SURE INN
on Lee, YANG Jian, Nahwan JEON, PEACE MOMO, KATAMI Yo, LU Jiawei, AOTA Shinya, JONG YuGyong, TANG Dixin, SHIMODA Hikota, TANIZAWA Sawako, MURPHY Zhong, OSAWA Yudai, Works, XU Xiaorong, HASEGAWA Yui, DJ TASAKA, Tianmu, KIM Myong Hwa, LI Tingwei, KUDO Natsumi, Absolute Purity, Yang Xi, Akira the Hustler, Dongwu Yang, LEE Kyungmin, MORI Takashi, 73, BuBu de la Madeleine, 6699press, AKEZAKI Kazuyuki, TANG Ting, MOUNTAIN/FULL EDITION, YABUUCHI Misako, Yongkwan KIM, Huangshan, TAKEKAWA Nobuaki, Gaymakimaki, Hepziba KIM, Wenjun, LEE Doyun, JUST PROJECT, USUI Yui, KOBAYASHI Noa, HIRANO Taichi, AMIGOS, and others

Curatorial Introduction

Artists search milieus in which to encounter art, other artists, and publics in uncharted ways. Their practices can create mutually supportive structures and environments. The subterranean flows of these practices stitch fault-lines of the present, re-writing them with new emotions. Trans-border correspondences, multiplicity of mediums, conviviality, being present together, and the discovery and fostering of non-hierarchical environments: these are some of the forces that drive artists. Yokohama Triennale 2020 invites Printing Sound, and the plenitude of forms they co-create, as an assertion of this tendency.

Highlights

A Picnic
Eating together is universally appreciated, so choosing it as the thing in common, artists in Japan, China, and Korea gathered online with their bento boxes on 2 August.

In Folds
The physical histories of Japan, China, and Korea reside in the folds of the earth; geological marks in the Japanese archipelago trace how the islands of East Asia were once part of a single continent. Balancing her body on her head, the artist takes a photograph of such a mark on a rock in Kii Peninsula. A photograph of a fish tank reflects on the brevity of human life compared to the life of this planet. Among close-ups of the artist’s body, we see wrinkles on a silicon breast; the body is itself geological.

With Figurines
Beings of clay, like dogū figurines of the Jomon period (10,000 BC to 300 BC), have become animated and are in travel. We hear voices of students in a Korean school in Osaka. The artist-teacher makes a visual and aural record.

Force of the Cutouts
While the music festival can no longer take place due to restrictions on gathering following the COVID-19 pandemic, artists in Japan and China overcome physical distance through WeChat, to create a promotional video featuring human gatherings and dancing cutouts. Efforts to resume communication with musicians in Korea continue.

In Translation
An online exchange of sounds and images between Kyoto and Shanghai, including translation of lyrics between Japanese and Chinese, yields music, the video for which is created through a togetherness of instruments and screens.

Border Crossing in the Time of a Pandemic
A time-lapse camera was set up inside a box in Japan and sent to South Korea. The camera took one photograph every 5 minutes inside the box even while in transit. On reaching Korea, after a brief stay with artists, it was being sent on to the next location, but a ban on the sending of electronic goods from Korea to China was discovered. How was it overcome?

Thinking Historical Tragedy
Photographs of Printing Sound’s activities in Nanjing in 2019 appear as a slideshow, a quiet and solemn reference to the historical tragedy of the city of Nanjing. A puppet artist, who is also a horn player, contributes a video with Nanjing’s soundscape.

Resisting the Singularity of an Image
Exchanges between participants of the Tokyo Rainbow Pride and Seoul Queer Parade brought about the Flag Project. A flag designed by an artist gathers images from all members of Printing Sound. The cloth napkin designed by two artists to cover the bento boxes for Printing Sound’s online picnic is also in this flag.

Dancing through Hostility
Moves and counter-moves marked the Japan-South Korea economic and political conflict in recent years, as seen in the order of the Supreme Court of South Korea in 2018 regarding Japanese companies’ compensation to Korean workers for work during WWII, and the strain on the intelligence-sharing pact between South Korea and Japan, known as the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) in 2019. The group AMIGOS (conceived from the same letters as GSOMIA) performs to demonstrate an amicable approach to this longstanding bilateral relationship.

—Printing Sound