The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

101 ARTISTS Rite for a dream – Today my empire sings (stills) 2016 Three-channel HD video installation, 27:30 minutes, sound, colour, 16:9, ed. 2/5 (+ 2 AP) / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / Image courtesy: The artist and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo Born 1976, Gunma, Japan Lives and works in Yokohama, Japan Rite for a dream – Today my empire sings 2016 is a three-channel narrative video installation by Japanese performance and video artist Meiro Koizumi. The work focuses on two concurrent, performative interventions organised for the 2016 Hantenren anti-emperor rally. This controversial republican demonstration is held annually in Tokyo on 15 August, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of the Pacific War in 1945. The work continues Koizumi’s exploration of the politics of nationalism, in particular the complex symbolic, ideological and psychological space of emperor-centricity. It also introduces the aesthetics of Christianity, a minority religion in Japan that is often associated with Westernisation. Following a series of works based on interviews with survivors of the Pacific War that provided insights into popular memory and mass psychology, Koizumi’s attention has shifted towards the sensitive topic of the role of the emperor in Japanese society. The 2016 rally, for which Rite for a dream – Today my empire sings was created, was held amid a resurgence of public interest in the issue after the current Emperor Akihito expressed his desire to abdicate. Passions were high, and anti-emperor marchers were vehemently opposed by ultra-nationalists, who had to be separated by armoured police lines. This volatile atmosphere, especially the harsh speech of the counter-protesters, serves as the backdrop for the central performances in Koizumi’s work. Koizumi chose not to feature the marchers, focusing instead on his interventions: a blindfolded chamber orchestra and choir who intone a hymn; and a handcuffed man, pushed along by riot police at the rear of the march, whose journey is the subject of the central screen for much of the work. The video dramatises a vivid dream from the artist’s childhood, in which, during a food shortage, his father is taken away to be turned into animal feed. The strains of the choir have been layered with an ominous drone, the shouts of the crowd, and the judicious use of ambient megaphone feedback, allowing the work to build to a tense, cinematic climax, informed by the dynamics of Koizumi’s earlier experiments with melodrama. The work’s Christian imagery is notable, with the figure of the condemned man recalling depictions of Christ at Calvary. The hymn that provides the emotional soundtrack is an unusual one. Published by the Japanese Methodist Church in 1895, it praises both the Christian God and the Japanese emperor (who was at the time regarded in Shinto faith as a divine being), and was followed in its original hymnal by the Japanese national anthem, Kimigayo . Apart from personal relevance to the faith of the artist’s father, these references also touch on historical suggestions that Emperor Hirohito expressed an openness towards Catholicism amid the ideological malaise following Japan’s wartime surrender. A complex exploration of a relationship between ideological vehemence, the aesthetics of religion and melodrama, the symbolic field of particular social systems, and their penetration of the psychic lives of their subjects, Meiro Koizumi's Rite for a dream – Today my empire sings is a powerful and engaging audiovisual experience, touching on questions that remain sensitive in Japanese society. Reuben Keehan Meiro Koizumi