Jam Session: The Ishibashi Foundation Collection × Yamashiro Chikako × Shiga Lieko

The Artizon Museum’s Jam Session series fosters new expression by pairing contemporary artists with works from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection. This sixth installment of the series features Yamashiro Chikako and Shiga Lieko whose works, though rooted in vastly different geographic regions—Okinawa for Yamashiro and Tohoku for Shiga—engage themes of history and memory.

In recent years, localized social change and natural disasters have amplified differences in regional and cultural experience, prompting once shared memories to fade. In Japan, what was an almost imperceptible divide between center and periphery has widened with diminished memory over time of World War II and the Battle of Okinawa, for example, or of natural disasters and earthquakes such as the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. This situation provides the context for the examination and re-evaluation of the themes of “center and periphery” and “place and memory” in the In the midst of exhibition.

In our “post-truth” era of blurred facts and information overload, how can the past be understood? Yamashiro and Shiga confront history and memory directly and viscerally in their art. Their works are powerful appeals to action that rouse viewers to re-examine their own views and accepted perspectives and narratives.

Yamashiro and Shiga’s new works created in dialog with the Ishibashi Foundation Collection offer an opportunity to reconsider our own views on complex and difficult realities as we contemplate the power of art.

Yamashiro Chikako
Contemporary video artist. Born in Okinawa, 1976.

Her works in photography, video and performance create visual investigations into the history, politics and culture of her homeland Okinawa. In recent years, she has taken the issue of Okinawa as a universal proposition that does not stop there, and has used the overlooked history and people of the East Asian region as her subject matter, her activities and thinking focus on the themes of identity, the boundary between life and death, and the inheritance of the memories and experiences of others. Recent solo exhibitions include: Song of the Land (Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal, 2024–25), Flowers of Belau (Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, 2023), Reframing the land/mind/body-scape (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2021), Chinbin Western (Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK, 2021).


Shiga Lieko
Photographer. Born in Aichi, 1980.

Shiga moved to Miyagi prefecture in 2008. There, while encountering people who lived there, she continued her work, exploring themes such as the ties between human society and nature, and memories going back generations. In 2011, after the Great East Japan Earthquake and its aftermath, she was overwhelmed by the experience of “recovery”—a déjà vu of Japan’s high-growth period.

She began tracing it back to the roots of the human psyche, expressing it through a variety of works. Her major solo exhibitions include Human Spring (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2019), Blind Date (Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, 2017), Canary (Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, 2013), and RASENKAIGAN (Sendai Mediatheque, 2012–13).

Concurrent exhibition
Selections from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection Special Section Yasui Sotaro