When I exhibit sound sculptures in Europe, I get asked about the influence of the Futurists on my work. The alliance between Fascist Italian, Nazi Germany, and the Empire of Japan flashed through my mind. I answered that I am a Futurist by way of America, as a Japanese person born in the second half of the twentieth century.
From Muneteru Ujino, Plywood City Stories 1 (2017)
The basis of Chiba City’s modernization was the large-scale military facilities centered on the Imperial Japanese Army’s Railways and Shipping Section, which earned it the sobriquet of “Military City Chiba” in the early twentieth century. A city in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area with a contemporary urban culture, Chiba started off as a military city in the modern era and was then completed in the latter half of the twentieth century. The venue for the project is a vacant two-story house in the center of the city. Using this weathered steel frame and mortar building with Japanese-style sliding doors and an assemblage of general industrial products, House of Homy conjures up a rich space where the pain and pleasure of the twentieth century, war and peace, and past and present emerge in manifold ways.
Main Works to be Exhibited:
Homy and the Rotators, 2023
Ujino launched this experimental project in an attempt to synthesize two projects from different periods of his career: The Rotators, his DIY rhythm machine ongoing since the early 2000s that repurposes examples of twentieth-century products; and the more recent narrative-based video works he started making in 2017. To the beat of a sound sculpture assembled from consumer technology, Ujino’s one-hundred-year-old mother describes memories of gyoza dumplings, her favorite meal in her native Manchuria.
Refurbished Tansu Robo, 2025
Ujino’s Tansu Robo, which he calls a portrait of the twentieth-century Japanese, was originally part of a 2010 installation called The Ballad of Extended Backyard. It is here revitalized and reactivated for 2025 as Refurbished Tansu Robo, using materials procured locally and within a project to repair and restore modernity.
Lost Frontier – Route Home, 2025
First exhibited in 2023, Lost Frontier is a video work that deals with the personal experiences of Ujino’s Manchurian-born mother as a member of a migrant family. One of the key aspects of this is the railway line built in Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula by the predecessor of the Imperial Japanese Army Railways and Shipping Section. The new version of the work focuses on railways, traveling from present-day Chiba to the lost frontier of Manchuria that appears in the first film, an underdeveloped region and borderland that used to exist during the imperial era.
[Types of citizen involvement] Exhibition viewing, providing materials, etc.
