There Is Another Capital Beneath the Waves is a collaborative project between the Taiwanese artists and the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]. It focuses on the sugar industry in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period and traces the historical relationship and memories of modernization between Taiwan and Japan through contemporary visual creations and traditional puppetry performances.
During the exhibition at the Hong-Gah Museum, the project brought together collaborating musicians from Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, including internationally renowned Gidayu-bushi Yumiko Tanaka, multidisciplinary artist Richi Owaki, Hong Kong composer Tak-Cheung Hui, and Taiwanese percussionist Rho-Mei Yu. These musical performances blend traditional and contemporary shamisens’ works, including a world premiere of work by Fujikura Dai. The concert also includes self-made percussion instruments as well as live electronic music, dance, and motion-capture synthesizers in an improvised performance, guiding the audience through different musical styles and performance forms.
Performer
Yumiko Tanaka
Majored in musicology at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and its graduate school. Studied Gidayu-bushi and Gidayu-shamisen under the female Gidayu reciter Komanosuke Takemoto (Living National Treasure) and the late Bunraku shamisen performer Kinshi Nozawa IV (Living National Treasure). She has the stage name Tsuruzawa Yumi, under the care of the late Bunraku reciter Takemoto Koshiji Tayu IV (Living National Treasure). Yumiko Tanaka is designated as the general holder of Important Intangible Cultural Property of Gidayu-bushi.
In order to bring the acoustic world of the Gidayu shamisen to life in the modern age, she performs and composes in a variety of music scenes, including improvised music, contemporary music, theatre music, film music and popular music in Japan and abroad.
Received the 1990 Art Encouragement Prize from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the 1993 Seieikai Incentive Prize, and the 1999 Special Prize from the Japan Music Competition Committee.
Richi Owaki
Born 1977 in Aichi Prefecture. Richi Owaki studied under Masao Kohmura at Tohoku University of Art & Design. Since 1999, he has become a member of the artist group “dumb type”, participating in tour performances such as “memorandum”, and has also presented many individual installations and performance works. From 2003 to 2024, as a “Mediaturge” at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) InterLab, he used his expertise in media technology and physical expression to propose ideas and realization methods in the field of production. His installation work Skinslides was selected as a Jury Recommended Work at the 16th Japan Media Arts Festival (2012) and won the “Jaguar Asia Tech Art Prize” at the Taipei International Art Fair (2015).
Tak-Cheung Hui
Hui, Tak-Cheung is a Hong Kong-born composer. His works ranged from chamber/orchestral and electronic music to multi-disciplinary works and installations. His recent works often cooperate with artists and scholars in different disciplines, employing immersive and spatial audio, physical model sound synthesis other music technologies to reconstruct the present and past soundscape with human voice, musical instruments, specially-made, and electroacoustics instruments, telling tales, and stories of different eras and regions through sound.
Hui started self-learning guitar and played in a rock band before he started his formal education in music at Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. He completed his master’s degree in Composition at Conservatorium van Amsterdam and received his DMA from Boston University.
Over the course of his career, Hui has been awarded numerous prizes, including 1st prize in the 38th Irino Prize, Chaosflöte Commission Competition 2019, Leibniz Harmonien International Composition Competition 2016 and Atlas Ensemble Composition Competition 2014. His works have also been performed in different festivals by professional ensembles.
Rho-Mei Yu
Rho-Mei Yu is aTaiwanese percussionist born in 1982. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the National Taipei University of Education and her Master’s degrees from Conservatoire de Boulogne-Billancourt in France and Haute Ecole de Musique de Geneve in Switzerland. She obtained her Konzertexamen in HfMDK Frankfurt am Main in Germany.
Yu became a member of the IEMA Ensemble in Germany in 2010, and received First Prize for Chamber Music from the Berlin-based Boris Pergamenschikow Foundation in 2011 for her work with the Trio Onyx.
During her stay in Europe, Yu participated in various international music festivals and workshops, exploring collaborative performance forms with diverse fields and enriching her experience and perspective in contemporary music. After returning to Taiwan, she is currently a member of iOFloat Ensemble and Theatre des Enfants Terribles, engaging in percussion-related performance and education.
About the Performance
Time: 2024/5/5 (Sun.) 18:30 – 20:00 incl. 30 mins post-show discussion
Venue: C-LAB Art Space I, 1F｜Admission Free
Performer: Yumiko Tanaka, Richi Owaki, Tak-Cheung Hui, Rho-Mei Yu
* For more info, please refer to Hong-Gah Museum and C-LAB official website and social media.
Organizer: Chew’s Culture Foundation, Hong-Gah Museum
Collaborator: Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB)
Sponsors: Ministry of Culture Taiwan