Lives that Salvage Contemporary Art

The Korean philosopher Ko Byung-kwon has long taught people with a wide range of disabilities at Nodeul Night School for the Disabled, a place of learning that resists discrimination against people with disabilities. Based on this experience, he wrote Mokumoku (Silently) (2018), which bears the subtitle “A Philosophy That Walks Together with Unheard Voices.” Through his time at Nodeul, Ko came to discover a path not toward “maturation through philosophy,” but toward the maturation of philosophy itself.
As he puts it: “How childish and rude must the great figures of knowledge, who prided themselves on being teachers of life, have been when standing before people with intellectual disabilities . While claiming adulthood for themselves, how many people have they driven into intellectual disability?¹”

This exhibition, Exploring III – Fragments of Art Born from Encounters – (hereafter referred to as “the exhibition”), is positioned as part of the Contemporary Art Promotion Project by Artists with Disabilities. In recent years, contemporary art seems to have come to recognize the saving of minority lives as one of its important missions. Artistic practice possesses the power to cast light on those who have been excluded from society and whose value has long been diminished. This has been demonstrated by numerous artists.
Free from the conventional binary opposition of “able-bodied” versus “disabled,” this exhibition reconsiders the expressions of people with disabilities within the framework of contemporary art. In doing so, it fully demonstrates the possibilities of such curatorial approaches.

However, in this exhibition, the expressions of people with disabilities, including their creativity and their very lives, are not merely saved by contemporary art. On the contrary, they save contemporary art itself. Confronted with the practices of the artists participating in this exhibition, contemporary art is forced to expose how, to borrow Ko’s words, “childish and rude” its own domain has been. I myself must engage in serious self-reflection. How narrowly I (and we) have conceived creativity, expression, production, and representation in our engagement with art. The supposedly “mature” world of contemporary art, which “prides itself on being adult,” is compelled by this exhibition to dismantle and reconstruct its own “common sense” and “assumptions.” Below, I will examine this in concrete terms.

First, concepts such as “diversity” and “coexistence” come to mind. Within the field of contemporary art, these terms already fall within the realm of common sense. There is little room to question their significance, at least as far as I am concerned. In principle, respecting social diversity and seeking ways to coexist with others are indispensable practices. However, it is also true that a certain sense of wariness has spread in response to their overuse, not only within the art world but across society as a whole. This wariness itself is a healthy one, and it is important to ask what lies at its root. It likely arises from the feeling that “diversity” and “coexistence” have come to function not as premises that should be recognized, but as goals that are meant to be pursued.

While acknowledging the social significance of “coexistence,” the philosopher Hoshino Futoshi expresses the following sense of unease regarding its substance.

(…) we can never truly be “alone.” For that reason, coexistence is not so much a lofty ideal as it is an inescapable reality that we cannot resist. This is why language that treats coexistence itself as a goal to be pursued inevitably carries with it a certain sense of discomfort².

There is not a single practice in this exhibition that seeks social “inclusion” as its primary, explicit aim. The prayer-like, almost manic repetitions of Hirata Yasuhiro, Nakane Kyoko, and Katsuyama Naoto ask only to be acknowledged as what they are: something that simply exists there as part of their ordinary, everyday lives.

Next, let us consider the concept of “visual pleasure” as theorized by Laura Mulvey. In her epoch-making essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1985), Mulvey, drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, argues that “cinema further intensifies its focus on woman as image, on her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness,’ and devises ways for this ‘looked-at-ness’ to become spectacle itself.³” She demonstrates that the pleasures of popular culture are not necessarily “popular” in any neutral sense, but are instead structured to align with the psychic organization of heterosexual men, thereby enabling men to consume images of women as nothing more than erotic objects.

As Mulvey made clear, the patriarchal ideology dominant in many cultures fixes women as “images to be looked at” (objects) and men as the “bearers of the look” (subjects) within the pleasures offered by works of cinema, art, and literature in those cultural spheres. This exhibition, however, is suffused with what might be called a “de-normativized” form of visual pleasure. The layered accumulations of color and line that Oe Masahiko, Katsunobu, and Saito Aya depict in their tableaux inscribe traces of pleasures they quietly enjoy in a space detached from attributes such as gender, sexuality, or ethnicity. They point to sites of pleasure that are not tuned to make only particular individuals, often members of the dominant majority, feel comfortable.

Finally, I would like to turn to the “language” through which we speak about contemporary art, as well as the language spoken within it. Many art historians and cultural researchers have woven narratives intended to “draw out” the expressions of people with disabilities. Hokari Minoru, a historian of Aboriginal history, cautions that within the tradition of historiography that seeks to “draw out” Indigenous myths and memories, the power relations between the “researcher who respectfully draws out” and the “Aborigine who is respectfully drawn out” often remain intact⁴. We, too, as art historians and cultural researchers, must ask ourselves whether, within such paternalistic perspectives, we have likewise preserved our power relations with people with disabilities intact.

Following Hokari’s insight, what matters is not to seek ways of “including” the expressions of people with disabilities within the normative discourses of contemporary art. Rather, it is to let the multiple narratives revealed by such expressions resonate at the same time, even when they appear at first glance to be contradictory or in conflict, and in doing so to destabilize those normative frameworks themselves. The diverse formal “languages” embedded in the works of Takada Mal, Matsumoto Kunizo, and Morimoto Eri expand the vocabulary through which contemporary art is discussed and dramatically multiply the terms that circulate within its field. The vocabularies they employ are at times academic, at times sensory; at times textual, at times iconographic; and at times none of these. This “language,” understood in its broadest possible sense, holds a dizzying sense of infinity.

I served as a moderator at the Art to Live International Symposium held in 2024, where I listened to Koide Yukiko, Tom di Maria, and Hosaka Kenjiro, figures who have long been deeply engaged with forms of artistic expression that have not belonged to the “mainstream” of the art world, including the work of people with disabilities. Through their words, I came to experience the pleasure of having the “common sense” I had acquired within the field of contemporary art dismantled. Rather than focusing on how they themselves might contribute to the expressions of people with disabilities, each spoke about how much they had learned from those expressions. Likewise, instead of asking how contemporary art could contribute to such work, they emphasized how much contemporary art itself stands to learn from it. Now, I feel that I understand what they meant, at least more clearly than I did before.

Footnotes

1. Ko Byung-kwon, Mokumoku (Silently): A Philosophy That Walks Together with Unheard Voices, Japanese translation by Kagemoto Takeshi, Akashi Shoten, 2023. p. 38. ↩

2. Hoshino Futoshi, Shokkakuron (On Parasitism), Kodansha, 2023, p. 7. ↩

3. Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, trans. Ayako Saito, Imago, vol. 3, no. 12, Seidosha, 1992, p. 52. ↩

4. Hokari Minoru, Radical Oral History: Historical Practice among Indigenous Australian Aborigines, Iwanami Shoten, 2018, p. 251. ↩