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8th Yokohama Triennale “Wild Grass: Our Lives” Closes
The 8th Yokohama Triennale “Wild Grass: Our Lives” an international contemporary art exhibition held every three years in Yokohama, Japan, closed its doors on Sunday, June 9 after 78 days of operation. Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, Artistic Directors, and Mika Kuraya, Executive Director of the Yokohama Triennale Organizing Committee would like to thank everyone for their attendance and cooperation.
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The 8th Yokohama Triennale was conceived based on a literary work thinking about despair, yet as many visitors have discovered, it is an exhibition about hope. Hope resides in thoughts, actions, emotions, imagination, friendship, failures, confrontations, and above all, human agency. In this show, we have retold many stories of individual agency in history and from our contemporary times, foregrounding the humanistic values of art. These individual voices and experiences are important signals to us today. They inspire us to unearth and exercise our own agency, and to find cracks for planting seeds of hope in a time of escalating conflicts and challenges on all fronts. At this moment of bidding farewell to the exhibition, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has contributed to making “Wild Grass: Our Lives” a sign and site of hope. Having worked closely with the team of Yokohama Triennale, we firmly believe that it will continue to play a vital role in supporting cutting-edge artistic experiments and serious intellectual discourses, making a true contribution to the field of art. LIU Ding and Carol Yinghua LU |
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The 8th Yokohama Triennale “Wild Grass: Our Lives” successfully concluded on June 9. We want to express our sincere gratitude to Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, who served as Artistic Directors, the 93 artists/ groups who participated from 31 countries and regions, and above all, the many visitors who came to see the exhibition. From the 17th to the 19th century, Japan’s engagement with foreign countries stalled under the shogunate government. But, in 1859, it opened its doors after two hundred years of isolation, and Yokohama was one of the first ports to open to the world. Since then, Yokohama has developed into a unique place where people and goods from different countries and regions come and go. Today, it is an international city with a population of 3.77 million people, of which 110 thousand consist of 170 nationalities. As such, the Triennale is an important event for the people of Yokohama as an opportunity to listen closely to voices from around the world through artists and artworks presented in the exhibition. In the current edition, under the title “Wild Grass,” the participating artists called for surviving in solidarity to the audiences in Yokohama and Japan ― who, on the surface live in peace, but are actually threatened by disasters, economic disparities, intolerance, and uncertainties. The section, which introduced friendship and exchange between young artists in East Asia 100 years ago and pointed to the similar phenomena recurring today, left a lasting impression on us. Even if countries are not on good terms as nations, we still have a way to continue our dialog by engaging with each other as individuals. The previous 7th exhibition was held in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic. What will the world look like by the time we open the 9th edition in three years? There is no doubt that art will continue to impart wisdom to us so that we can endure adversities. With this hopeful outlook on our mind, we draw the curtains of the 8th Yokohama Triennale to a close. KURAYA Mika |