Contemporary Australia: Women

141 Hiromi Tango Japan/Australia b.1976 X chromosome (detail) 2012 Donated personal objects and art work, artist books, clothes, paper, wool, steel, wire, wood, embroidery threads, sewing needles, beads, crystals, plastic flowers 140 x 1594cm (installed) Hiromi Tango’s sculptures, X chromosome and Pistil , were produced especially for ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’. Each sculpture, made from clothes and fabrics bound to form colourful chords, has been configured for specific sites at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA): X chromosome for the long display cabinet at GOMA’s entry and Pistil for the intersection of GOMA’S two great axes. One’s first impression of them is of gorgeous profusion and excess. With a title echoing a connection to the compositional form of the DNA strand’s double helix, X chromosome folds into and onto itself through an abundance of ropes, some thick and bulbous, others threadlike and thin. Pistil , as its title suggests, draws connections with the reproductive structure of the flower. Both pieces are extensions and distillations of some of Tango’s previous projects, and both involve the public, and invited communities, in their creation. These most recent incarnations draw on Tango’s, and her collaborators’, personal history and experiences in the wake of two catastrophic natural disasters in 2011: the floods that inundated Queensland and Brisbane and the artist’s current home; and the great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the country of her birth. Tango explains: The works, I may have to say, started in 2005, as most of the works in the past several years are part of X chromosome and Pistil , and people who are working for these projects are also people who I have met over the years through my life in performance installation projects. It is quite interesting to know both objects and people and that their energy remains present over years. As we all know, objects trigger memory, but they are not as important as the people around us. My philosophy over these matters — object and memory — keeps changing, particularly after the tsunami in Japan and the big flood in Brisbane last year. I cannot even imagine what it means to lose everything, everything. Not only personal objects around you but people who you love, unexpectedly and indiscriminately. 1 Tango is very interested in ideas of interaction, and her works invariably involve public participation as she tests the boundaries of social engagement. She is highly attuned to feelings of anxiety and vulnerability, consistently placing herself at the active centre of her performance-based participatory art projects. Xchromosome and Pistil are the work of an artist who has ‘given much thought to the act of existence, to the business of living.’ 2 So she returns insistently to this edge, structuring these encounters more precisely now compared to one of her first temporary installation/ performance pieces in 2006, when she occupied the three large display windows at Brisbane’s Raw Space Gallery for six weeks, inviting passers by to talk, sleep, share tea and exchange ideas and gifts. Pistil , an evolution of the earlier works Womb 2011 and Hiromi hotel — mixed blood 2011, explores human vulnerability and the need for shelter, physical and psychological, in the face of natural disasters. It also addresses those deeper existential concerns that such situations often amplify, as people confront fear and weakness in search of meaning, healing, intimacy and connection. The womblike freestanding sculpture invites individual audience members to enter it, enveloping them and offering a space for contemplation. It is also an organic sculpture, which will change and grow as participants make additional forms during community workshops. The simple fact is that nature is very powerful and human beings are increasingly becoming too greedy . . . This simple fact changed my way of art‑making the most, I think. I do not want to create something too shocking or harmful or violent, as there are enough of these events in many of our everyday lives. We are all living in an extremely high-pressured and stressful society, and because of globalisation we are required to deal with extremely complex realities. We need to be very careful and sensitive. It seems to me that my work is more and more interested in ideas of art as therapy and healing. 3 Hiromi Tango Hiromi Tango The work of loss and accumulation