AT THE HARVARD ASIA CENTER, “EYE EYE NOSE MOUTH” EXPLORES THE INTERSECTIONS OF ART, DISABILITY, AND MENTAL HEALTH

The first exhibition of works produced in art workshops for people with disabilities ever to take place at Harvard (and only the second devoted to self-taught artists since the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art’s Exhibition of American Folk Paintings in 1930), “Eye Eye Nose Mouth: Art, Disability, and Mental Illness in Shiga-ken, Japan, and Nanjing, China” opened last month at the Harvard Asia Center (CGIS South Concourse), and will be on display until March 25th. The exhibition opening was attended by undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members, art therapy practitioners, gallerists, collectors, and a number of guests from China and Japan. 

In preparation for the exhibition, co-curators Raphael Koenig (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, 2018) and Benny Shaffer (Ph.D. candidate, Anthropology) spent several weeks at both Nanjing Outsider Art Studio in China and Atelier Yamanami in Japan in the summer of 2018. Long-time Harvard colleagues, they share research interests in experimental art and film as well as in the medical humanities. Shaffer, who studied Chinese cinema at Columbia University as an undergraduate, is interested in the “edges” of the art world in China. Koenig’s interest in surrealism and the avant-garde has formed the basis for his current research interests, which include the history of the reception of self-taught artists.

While on site in Nanjing, China and Shiga-ken, Japan, they participated in the daily activities of both workshops with an approach inspired by the anthropological methods of ethnographic fieldwork (participant-observation, informal interviews and conversations, and practice-based media production with a video camera and audio recorder). They sought to obtain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of how each of the workshops operate, the types of challenges they face, and how they successfully maintain a supportive, open environment for the artists to freely express themselves without specific modes of formal training or aesthetic intervention.

The exhibition thus features video work by Benny Shaffer documenting the daily rhythms of each workshop alongside a number of original works on paper and sculptures produced at Atelier Yamanami in Japan and Nanjing Outsider Art Studio in China. These workshops, operating outside of psychiatric or medical institutions, attempt to improve the living conditions and promote broader acceptance of people with mental disabilities and mental illness in their respective societies. They encourage participants to express themselves artistically, providing a supportive environment for them to develop their own practices at their own pace, without intervening in the creative process. The title of the exhibition is an homage to the numerous “Eye Eye Nose Mouth” series of works created by Yoshikawa Hideaki at Atelier Yamanami over several decades. His drawings and sculptures are exemplary of the unique, diverse, and formally innovative bodies of work to emerge from both workshops, a broad selection of which is featured in the exhibition.

Mental illness and mental disability are particularly complex issues in both China and Japan, due to prevalent social stigma, and, in the case of mainland China, a relative lack of state-supported care facilities. In order to provide further context on this phenomenon, already discussed at length in the exhibition’s 80-page catalogue, the exhibition opening was accompanied by a symposium in which participants shed light on the aesthetic, social, and political implications of the activities of each workshop within their respective national contexts.

Prof. Karen Thornber (Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard Asia Center and Professor of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University), who regularly teaches a Comparative Literature seminar titled “Literature and Medicine,” gave the opening statement, insisting on the urgency of producing more scholarship on questions of disability and mental health, and providing insights into the scope and extent of these issues in East Asia. Her intervention was followed by a short presentation by the show’s curators, who emphasized the necessity of providing careful contextualization, focusing on the processes and conditions of production at both art workshops. According to Koenig and Shaffer, while such works have attracted the attention of the art world in recent years, for instance when the sculptures of Shinichi Sawada were exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2013, their reception is too often distorted by outdated, essentializing biases that return to primitivism and exoticism.

The directors of the two workshops, Guo Haiping (Nanjing Outsider Art Studio, China) and Yamashita Masato (Atelier Yamanami, Japan), who had flown to Boston especially for the occasion, then presented the history, guiding principles, daily practices, and future plans of their respective workshops. They both insisted on the necessity of refraining from intervening in the creative processes of the artists. They also emphasized how such artistic practices noticeably improved the quality of life of their creators, while also being powerful tools to fight against widespread stigma toward people with mental disabilities and mental illness in their respective societies. Building on the presentations by the two workshop directors, Prof. Shaun McNiff (Lesley University), who pioneered the theory and practice of art therapy in the United States beginning in the 1970s, then delivered an enthusiastic statement welcoming the possibility of fostering an international dialogue on these issues among the United States, China, and Japan. According to McNiff, the expressive qualities of the works exhibited at the Harvard Asia Center illustrate the significant results yielded by each workshop’s deliberate strategies of tolerance and empowerment.

The second panel focused more specifically on the social and legal issues associated with disability and mental illness in China and Japan. Its first two speakers, Prof. William Alford (Director, Harvard Law School Project on Disability and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School) and Prof. Cui Fengming (Director, China Program, Harvard Law School Project on Disability, and Professor, Renmin University of China Law School and Senior Fellow, Renmin University of China Disability Law Clinic), presented the work of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, which attempts to improve the concrete living conditions of people with disabilities by working with and improving upon existing legal frameworks to tackle discrimination and unequal access to employment and education. Prof. Cui offered the striking example of the Chinese high school final examination (or gaokao), which until recently did not provide any way to accommodate the needs of people with major visual impairment. The following speaker, Dr. Andrew Campana, offered insights into the ways in which activists for the rights of people with disabilities produce artworks in a variety of media ranging from poetry to performance to make their voices heard in Japanese society. Finally, Prof. Arthur Kleinman (Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Social Medicine, and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard University), gave a moving account based on his extensive ethnographic fieldwork on mental health in China over the past three decades, offering interdisciplinary insights from both psychiatry and anthropology that addressed the changing state of mental healthcare in China and beyond.

Exhibition-related events continued the following day with a presentation of museum holdings related to mental health and self-taught art at the Harvard Art Museums’ Art Study Center by Raphael Koenig. The event was attended by art collector and Harvard alum David Barrett, who spoke about a number of major works of self-taught art that he and his wife Didi donated to the Harvard Art Museums in 2011. Andrew Edlin, director of the Outsider Art Fair in New York, was also in attendance and shared insights into the latest developments in the field of self-taught and outsider art. After a presentation on the exhibition at Lesley University organized by Prof. Shaun McNiff, which included the curators as well as the workshop directors, the final event featured at the Harvard Asia Center was the U.S. premiere of Jizo Libido, a feature-length documentary film about Atelier Yamanami. The film’s director, Yoshiaki Kasatani, was present for the screening and Q&A, alongside Masato Yamashita and Tokyo-based gallerist and leading expert of Japanese self-taught art Yukiko Koide. 

 Since the opening, the exhibition has been viewed by many visitors from the Harvard community and beyond. The exhibition organizers were particularly delighted to welcome a group of young students from the Boston Higashi School, the Boston branch of an international school devoted to children with autism. Led by their art practice teacher Chie Mitsui, who also acted as an interpreter during the exhibition’s symposium, the group felt encouraged to pursue their own art practices with renewed enthusiasm. The exhibition will be on view at CGIS South Concourse until March 25th.

 

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

 

 

Eye Eye Nose Mouth: Art, Disability, and Mental Illness in Shiga-ken, Japan, and Nanjing, China

 

Exhibition curated by Raphael Koenig & Benny Shaffer. 

A Fung Scholar Event sponsored & organized by The Harvard Asia Center 

with the generous support of: 
The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University 
The Harvard Law School Project on Disability
The Harvard-Yenching Institute
The Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard University 

 

Location: Japan Friends of Harvard Concourse, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 

On view January 30 – March 25, 2019 (M-F, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.)

Free & open to the public. 

 

ARTWORKS BY: 

(surname + given names)

Atelier Yamanami (Shiga Prefecture, Japan) 

Kamae Kazumi 
Nakagawa Momoko 
Takenaka Katsuyoshi 
Ukai Yuichiro 
Yoshikawa Hideaki 

Nanjing Outsider Art Studio (Nanjing, China)

Li Ben 
Li Jie
Niu Niu 
Sun Yue
Xu Jian