is a Japanese filmmaker and video artist. Her works in photography, video and performance create visual investigations into the history, politics and culture of her homeland Okinawa. Particularly salient are themes related to the terrible civilian casualties incurred in Okinawa during World War II and the on-going troubles and hardships caused by the U.S. military presence in Okinawa. Since 2019 she is associate professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts.

Yamashiro has received various awards including the Kurashiki Contemporary Art Biennale (2005), the Asian Art Award (2017), the Zonta prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2018), the Asian Art Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize (2018), and most recently, the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (2020-2022). She has also participated in the Okinawa Artist's Exchange Residence Program in the Philippines (2011).

Early life Yamashiro was born in 1976 in Naha and raised in Okinawa. She received a bachelor's degree in oil painting at the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts in 1999. In 2000, she attended a fellowship at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design (presently University for the Creative Arts) in the UK. She obtained her master's degree in Environmental Design from the Graduate School of Formative Arts at the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts in 2002.

Career

Early Performance Works As an undergraduate student Yamashiro studied oil painting and experimented with installations that she created along various shores in Okinawa. During this time Yamashiro began to feel that these art practices were not compatible with her identity as Okinawan; her search for authentic Okinawan art led her towards primitive spiritual structures on the islands and the rituals performed at these places.Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 18. She 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.Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 18-19.

Upon her return to Okinawa, Yamashiro used tombs and graveyards as sites for her early performance work including Okinawa Graveyard Club (2004), a video in which Yamashiro dons white tennis attire and dances emphatically in front of a grave for 6 minutes and Graveyard Series (2004-2007), photographs documenting Yamashiro's playful interventions at graves, utaki, and other sacred space. She attributes the comical and spirited nature of these works as a celebration of Okinawa's “rich outlook on life and death,” and the performances' location of a gravesite specifically chosen because of practices such as maintaining gardens for the deceased and greeting ancestors by sharing a meal at the grave known as seimeisai (siimii in local dialect).Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 19. Art History professor Keiko Asanuma argues that these performances can also be viewed as an early sign of Yamashiro's interest in the concept of borders — the grave site acting as a border between life and death and the location offering an opportunity to obscure those demarcations.Keiko Asanuma, “Nature motifs in the work of Chikako Yamashiro,” 93.

Yamashiro expanded on the geo-political nature that applies to the notion of divided spaces in Okinawa for her video BORDER (2003) in which she walks along the fenced edge between US and Okinawan territory. At one point in the video, the camera reveals an Okinawan tomb that had been co-opted into US territory, thereby restricting access and the performance of rituals at the grave site. Since the creation of BORDER onwards, addressing the dynamic between Okinawa and the bases situated within it would become a central theme amongst Yamashiro's work.

OKINAWA TOURIST series (2004) Yamashiro exhibited her formative video work OKINAWA TOURIST series (2004) for her debut show as a video and performance artist at Maejima Art Center.Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 16. The series consists of three 6 to 8 minute long performances: Graveyard Eisa, I Like Okinawa Sweet, and Trip to Japan. 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 Yamashiro zealously licking an ice cream in front of a base fence. Trip to Japan takes place in front of the National Diet Building in Tokyo, where Yamashiro mockingly acts as either a representative of Okinawa or local tour guide while holding up an image of an Okinawan tomb.Jennison, Rebecca. “Unspeakable Bodies of Memory: Performance and Precarity in Recent Works by Yamashiro Chikako,” in Journal of Kyoto Seika University 44, 186-187.

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.Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 21. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, local and national governments were also active in promoting this beautified image of Okinawa in order to reassure Japanese citizens that the islands were still safe to travel to after growing concern that the area, populated by US bases, was a possible target for counterattacks. Borrowing the name from an Okinawan tourism operator for the series title, OKINAWA TOURIST relies on humor and parody to complicate the state's commercialized image and expose the realities of Okinawa. Visual Studies professor Tina Takemoto suggests that the segment I Like Okinawa Sweet takes on a particularly gendered reading of these realities, as the imagery of a young woman (Yamashiro) licking an ice cream within the presence of US soldiers (and a looped soundtrack of an American male voice calling out “Hey there, hey, how ya doin’?”) may conjure up, in local memory, the violence perpetrated by the US forces against Okinawan women and girls.Takemoto, Tina. “Keep Them Sweet.” Journal of Visual Culture 15, no. 1 (2016): 45-48.

Shore Connivance Shore of Ibano, Urasoe City — Complex.1 — (2007); Seaweed Women (2008) Between 2007 and 2008 Yamashiro created two videos/performances addressing the impact of the bases on the beaches and waters of Okinawa: Shore Connivance Shore of Ibano, Urasoe City — Complex.1 — (2007) and Seaweed Women (2008). Shore Connivance — Shore of Ibano, Urasoe City — Complex.1 — (2007), is set on a beach in Urasoe that was once largely untouched and abundant with wildlife due to its proximity to the bases.Suzuki, “Conflicting spaces,” 142. In her video, Yamashiro speaks to an anonymous older man who tells her about the beach's history including how local Okinawans capitalized on the ambiguity over the area’s regulating party and effectively reappropriating it as their own meeting grounds, even if just momentarily. The significance of this beach as a liminal space — or in her own words, a “ grey zone” — is underscored by Yamashiro's unconventional use of the word mokunin for the original Japanese title mokunin hama (translated into English as Shore Connivance).Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 27. This term derives from the word mokunin kosakuchi which was used to describe land taken from Okinawans by US forces that through ongoing negotiations, and what Yamashiro describes as a “guilty conscience” on behalf of the US, Okinawans were tacitly permitted to cultivate the land they once owned. In both the mokunin hama and mokunin kokusakuchi, Yamashiro saw a “grey zone” that was created through the resilience of Okinawans but under constant threat by US military forces.Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 28.

These borders, and the latent violence built into them, also informed Yamashiro's work Seaweed Women (2008) which was filmed at several waterside locations, including the “mokunin hama” from Shore Connivance and the highly contested bay of Henoko. The video is taken from the perspective of a fictional seaweed woman submerged in the water whose gasps for breath can be heard as she swims along the shore.Jennison, “Unspeakable Bodies of Memory,” 187. As Yamashiro crosses the invisible border between US and Okinawa waters, the camera finds traces of the military's omnipresence: an army tank resting on the coral seabed and a boat with Japanese coast guards.Asanuma, “Nature motifs in the work of Chikako Yamashiro,” 101. The act of crossing into restricted waters to film the scene and the surveillance of Henoko by coast guards allude to recent cases of Japanese coast guards violently restraining posters at sea who were demonstrating against base development in Henoko.Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 29.

Inheritance series (2008-2010) Inheritance series (2008-2010) includes a collection of photographs and the video Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009), which Yamashiro produced while running a workshop at an adult care center in Okinawa.Ma, Ran, “Okinawan Dream Show,” 198. The workshop relied on group reminiscence therapy with the goal of helping Okinawan survivors from World War II speak about their experiences, many of whom were initially reluctant to do so.Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 31. Over the course of numerous visits workshop participants eventually opened up and shared their memories, including one man who witnessed his immediate family members commit suicide while residing in Saipan. Yamashiro later asked the same man to record his story, which she used within her work Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat. In the video, Yamashiro stands before a white background, the camera closed in tightly around her face as she looks off to the side of the camera. As Yamashiro mouths the story he tells in the footage, a projection of his face is mapped onto hers.

In an interview with Keiko Okamura, curator at the TOP museum, Yamashiro explains her choice to reenact the footage being a consequence of her difficulty sympathising and grasping the participants experiences solely through listening to them speak as well as the impossibility of her visualising their stories when she had no similar experiences.Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 32. Through the memorization and repeated enactment of retelling the participant's story, Yamashiro felt that she could finally begin to envision and relate to his pain.Yamashiro, C. and Okamura, K., “Chikako Yamashiro: Talking about her own work,” 34. In virtually embodying the elderly man, Yamashiro lends her own body in the transmission stories from older generations, gradually being lost to time) unto the younger generations, also described as “bodies of memory”.Jennison, “Unspeakable Bodies of Memory,” 193-194. The photographs from this series also involve the corporeal transference of experience and memory, capturing scenes of ‘performances’ in which the elderly members surround Yamashiro, touching and caressing her.

Yamashiro's engagement with historical memory and war narratives became notably more prevalent after the 2007 controversy over the planned erasure of the forced suicides of Okinawan civilians by the Japanese army from history textbooks in Japan. Large demonstrations against the removal were held in Okinawa and the government only partially conceded to the protestors demands, however refused to explicitly criticize or implicate the Japanese Army.

Mud Man (2016)