Chikako Yamashiro is a Japanese filmmaker and video artist.
18 Facts About Chikako Yamashiro
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Chikako Yamashiro has participated in the Okinawa Artist's Exchange Residence Program in the Philippines.
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Chikako Yamashiro was born in 1967 in Naha and raised in Okinawa.
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Chikako Yamashiro received a bachelor's degree in oil painting at the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts in 1999.
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Chikako Yamashiro obtained her master's degree in Environmental Design from the Graduate School of Formative Arts at the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts in 2002.
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Chikako Yamashiro eventually landed on the subject of Okinawan tombs and graveyards after her trip to the Aran Islands where she felt the resilience of Celtic language and beliefs and the remains of ancient ruins had equivalents in her homeland.
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Chikako Yamashiro expanded on the geo-political nature that applies to the notion of divided spaces in Okinawa for her video BORDER in which she walks along the fenced edge between US and Okinawan territory.
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Chikako Yamashiro exhibited her formative video work OKINAWA TOURIST series for her debut show as a video and performance artist at Maejima Art Center.
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Graveyard Eisa and I Like Okinawa Sweet are both filmed in Okinawa, the former shows a dystopian dance troupe performing eisa at a gravesite, and the latter features Chikako Yamashiro zealously licking an ice cream in front of a base fence.
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Chikako Yamashiro created the performances in response to representations of Okinawa as an idyllic paradise found in mainstream culture, such as the popular NHK drama Churasun which portrayed Okinawa with mainly blue skies and seas.
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Inheritance series includes a collection of photographs and the video Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat, which Chikako Yamashiro produced while running a workshop at an adult care center in Okinawa.
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Chikako Yamashiro later asked the same man to record his story, which she used within her work Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat.
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The photographs from this series involve the corporeal transference of experience and memory, capturing scenes of 'performances' in which the elderly members surround Chikako Yamashiro, touching and caressing her.
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Chikako Yamashiro's critically acclaimed video work Mud Man, created in cooperation with the Aichi Triennale, follows a non-linear narrative that bridges Okinawa to other parts of Asia through the legacy and trauma of militarism and neo-colonialism in their respective countries.
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Juxtaposition of the past and the present is employed throughout the work wherein Chikako Yamashiro weaves together contemporary 'war' images, such as protestors demonstrating against base development and shots of underground and underwater passages taken from abandoned US weapon storage facilities in Okinawa.
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In filming for Mud Man Chikako Yamashiro travelled specifically to Gangjeong village in Korea where the Jeju Naval Base, designed to aid US deployment in Asia, was recently completed.
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Mud Man was well received by both Japanese and international audiences; Chikako Yamashiro was awarded the Asian Art Award in 2017 and the Zonta prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2018 for her video.
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In 2018, Chikako Yamashiro performed the work And I Go through You for the Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival at the Kyoto Art Center.