Aichi Triennale 2019

Takayama Akira is an artist who expands the possibilities of the theater medium and explores the ways in which it can engage society, on the basis of the question, "What is theater? "

For Aichi Triennale 2019, Takayama brings the city into contact with the pre-war Pan-Asianist concept, "Asia is one," an ideal that justified (or was exploited to justify) Japanese expansionism in Asia. The performance script for the artist's project draws from "The Ideals of the East" by Okakura Tenshin, "Greater Asianism" by Sun Yat-sen, and "A Letter to My Korean Friends" by Yanagi Soetsu. These notable compositions express aspirations for friendship and solidarity among Asian countries, and appeal to the emotions of their readers even today, but they carry the risk of promoting the assimilation of others. At the beginning of the Triennale period, a reading of these texts will be presented in the form of a video with subtitles, and the artist will deliver lectures addressing the aim of the project. In the following two-and-a-half months, the three texts will be interpreted by multiple rappers in Japan, as well as brought into the hip-hop communities of three cities in Asia, and reformulated in their respective languages and styles. The project will conclude with a party that connects Nagoya and the three Asian cities through a live broadcast. Here, the "emotional solidarity" that Pan-Asianism originally strived for will be updated in the present through public speeches.