The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, is proud to present Chim ↑Pom: Happy Spring from Friday, February 18 to Sunday, May 29, 2022.
Equipped with highly original ideas and impressive energy, artist collective Chim↑Pom has undertaken numerous projects intervening in society in ways that constantly confound our expectations. With themes ranging from cities and consumerism to gluttony and poverty, Japanese society, the atomic bomb, earthquakes, images of stardom, the mass media, borders, and the nature of publicness, their works serve as powerful statements on a plethora of phenomena and challenges in modern society, delivered mostly with a healthy dose of humor or irony.
With seemingly uncanny foresight, Chim↑Pom has also addressed in a number of their previous works the social issues of infection and discrimination against people with contagious diseases, and of bias, contamination and borders, all thrown into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now more than ever perhaps is the time to observe their thought-provoking knack for raising issues pertinent to the zeitgeist.
This will be the first-ever retrospective of Chim↑ Pom, bringing together major works from the start of their seventeen-year career to more recent years, plus new works produced for this exhibition, which would total approximately 150 works. Artworks will be arranged by theme - e.g., cities and publicness, Hiroshima, the Great East Japan Earthquake - highlighting matters consistently addressed by the artists, while examining the collective's oeuvre in its entirety. Dynamic exhibition design, rich in creative ingenuity, will also assist in shedding new light on the ever-surprising world of Chim ↑ Pom.
The title Happy Spring signals Chim↑Pom's hope for a brighter spring even amid this seemingly neverending pandemic, and that we retain our powers of imagination even if that long-awaited season arrives in the depths of adversity. In these unpredictable times, the powerful, convention-busting works of this enduring, but equally-unpredictable group of artists are certain to excite the imagination, and serve as a guide as we join in contemplating a better future.
