Particularly noticeable on the train, in Japan everyone appears to maintain their outward appearance to a very high degree. Almost everybody, regardless of age, has at least one carefully considered aspect to their style, be it a new season jacket or sneakers, flawlessly made up face / hair, or slender arms placed either side of a spotless sleeveless blouse. It seems like everyone’s (makes themselves) beautiful here, like it’s a given that all surfaces be cared for and are inherently (worthy of being made) (to look) beautiful. Or perhaps it’s more just an outsiders view of a strange uniformity or order. Genetic ties to Japan may be why I have this impression, which continues to be childishly wide eyed as it is searching and cynical, although Japan’s refined aesthetic sensibility is no doubt a hugely prominent part of the culture. How this aesthetic concern or care has actually practically taken shape – how and why the many amenities that are overly abundant in Japan today came to be so meticulously considered and designed – while …

Contingencies It will be quiet. All of my friends will be there. I’ll take an innocent looking pill on the morning of my 40th birthday and slip away peacefully. My friends will drink cheap red wine and smoke in my honour. By this point cigarettes will have to be ordered on the darknet, paid for in Bitcoin, and imported inside small bags of ecstasy which is now very legal and deeply uncool. I will have achieved everything I set out to achieve and I will no longer be afraid of anything. This is how I have decided to die. This is also a misinterpretation of the task at hand. In Hiroharu Mori’s Death Workshop, students are asked to imagine and rehearse the circumstances of their own deaths, rather than how best to make themselves comfortable with dying. It is an exercise in probabilities, in ordering disasters both big and small according to how easy they are to imagine. There is an earthquake, a sudden death in an office building, a stereo stands in for a …

Toss Woollaston along with Colin McCahon are old enough and dead enough to be regarded as the grand old men of modern New Zealand art. McCahon always got the lion’s share of recognition and adulation, mainly because he was the more innovative and conceptually daring. He was forgiven his religious obsessions from a largely secular and disbelieving public on the grounds of his pioneering, evolving style and inventive means of addressing his audience. His influence lives on, even in the form of parody. Michel Parekowhai, for one, had a go at the famous, I AM.  No such legacy lingers around the work of Woollaston, perhaps because it lacked any existential or intellectual angst to provide academic leverage or traction to serve ongoing interest. What the artist served up was essentially a visual feast to do with colour, form and composition. No angels of annunciation hover over Woollaston’s landscapes. No finger wagging biblical text waves in front of the foothills.        What Woollaston presented us with was essentially bravado with the brushstroke, the manipulation of a …

The accompanying publication for These stories began before we arrived tells me that this exhibition has honest beginnings. Combine an opportunity from the 2015 Taipei International Book Exhibition, three curators who went on the Asia New Zealand Foundation/Creative New Zealand curator tour together and New Zealand’s recent aggressive move to the inclusion and exchange between us and targeted Asian countries and art communities. Voilà — there you have it — a narrative heavy exhibition of New Zealand and Taiwanese artists structured on the connector of Austronesian migration. I turned up to the silos on a friday afternoon. The show looked good. It was conceptually tight. The install was slick. The custom-built projection suspenders and screens — the perfect size for each silo — were impressive. Chang En-Man’s Arena is entrancing. The smooth panning and image quality draws you in and the subtitled narrative keeps you there. A focus on the effects colonisation and industrialisation have had on Indigenous Taiwanese parallels our local interest spike in Indigenous empowerment. Picking up on the odd chicken walking across …

At the end of August this year The Banff Centre in partnership with Red Sky Performance showcased the premiere of Backbone (2015) is an Indigenous dance piece crafted to depict the idea of the mountains being the spine of the Americas. With a troupe of mostly Indigenous dancers, the show unfolded brightly with a Fijian dancer  placing the South Pacific on stage. I felt right at home. The lights lowered, the atmosphere changed and movement began immediately. The choreography poured through intense and high energy technical pieces that favoured the male dancers. The muscular physiques led into fast sequences, dramatised within the theatre environment and moving effortlessly from one excerpt to the other. Backbone was dreamt up by the Director of Indigenous Arts Sandra Laronde and was produced in collaboration with Jera Wolfe (Co-Choreographer) and Thomas Fonua (Faculty/Co-Choreographer). With a strong presence annually in Banff, Fonua is featured in many of the photographs that advertise the Banff Indigenous Dance Residency and his role as faculty and performer has allowed him to form strong relationships with …