SYMPOSIA

Urgent Talk 034:
The Ocean in Us - Flows of Art, Culture, and History Between Japan and the Pacific Islands

* Booked Out
Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation available

In Japan, the Pacific region is often misunderstood as “The Pacific Rim” - a ring of major countries on lands that border the Pacific Ocean. The true spirit of the Pacific, however, lives in the tens of thousands of Pacific Islands, which comprise the “great water continent” of Oceania - the vast archipelagos of Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia. Japan itself is an archipelago of nearly 7,000 islands and it has a deep engagement, culturally, historically, politically, and environmentally with the Pacific region. Even though surprisingly few people in Japan know much about this area, aside from touristic images of paradise or haunting nightmares of the Pacific War, Oceania is a diverse, vibrant and dynamic region, filled with thousands of years of indigenous knowledge and creative ingenuity.
“Urgent Talk 034” will make references to the contemporary art in the Pacific region that has been attracting a great deal of attention from the global art community in recent years, and aims to see ways, for us living in Japan, to build new and equal engagements with our Pacific neighbors.