All Living Things are
Breathing Now
Exhibitions
Kyunchome
All Living Things are Breathing Now is Japanese artist duo Kyunchome’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Curated by Keith Whittle, the exhibition centres on a new series of work by Kyunchome that celebrates the seas and tidal intertidal zones as energetic ecotones and contact zones in which humans and multiple species interact with intertidal rhythms.
Please click here to read more or here to download the exhibition brochure.
All Living Things are Breathing Now
BBC Radio broadcast featuring artist unit Kyunchome and curator Keith Whittle discussing the exhibition, All Living Things Are Breathing Now. This exhibition showcases work produced during Kyunchome’s year-long residency in the Philippines from 2022 to 2023, which was supported by Japan’s Ministry of Culture Program for Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists. This experience marked a significant shift in their artistic practice.
Please click here listen to the broadcast.
Bontarō Dokuyama
Borrowed Scenary (study), an exhibition of work by Bontarō Dokuyama. Exploring the continuous interaction between historical perspectives and the unending dialogue between the present and past in Japan. Dokuyama takes the symbolic cherry blossom, its historical and contemporary interpretation, and its adoption as a symbol of Japanese national identity.
A narrative that during Japan’s Imperialist expansion across South East Asia linked soldiers whose lives were cut short through battle to the Somei-Yoshino strain of cherry tree blossoms, with its petals that fall just a few days after reaching full bloom, in the minds of mourners.
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Chikako Yamashiro
Shapeshifter, the first UK solo exhibition at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by acclaimed performance and video artist Chikako Yamashiro.
Yamashiro, winner of the Asian Art Award 2017, dramatises the lesser-known aspects of Okinawa’s contemporary reality, while questioning dominant historical accounts of Japanese and American occupation of the islands.
Please click here to read more.
Aki Sasamoto
Clothes Line, a solo exhibition of drawings and films of performances at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by Aki Sasamoto. The artist’s first presentation at a UK gallery.
Based in New York, Sasamoto works in performance, sculpture, dance, and whatever other media required to get her ideas across. Sasamoto’s performance/installation works revolve around gestures on everything and nothing.
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![Moré Moré [Leaky]: The Falling Water Given #4-6, Installation view at White Rainbow, London, 2017 Wood Frames, found objects, water pump system](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/f77de345378d4bbd8727a6ed36e9635a/YukoMohri.07.jpg)
![Moré Moré [Leaky], Installation view at White Rainbow, London 2017](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/bab59ac4056eb3deee19e32a594e468f/YukoMohri.06.jpg)
![Moré Moré [Leaky]: The Falling Water Given #4-6, Installation view at White Rainbow, London, 2017 Wood Frames, found objects, water pump system](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/bae9d65d007c516d2f63c20110c997f0/YukoMohri.01.jpg)
![Moré Moré [Leaky]: The Falling Water Given #5 (detail), 2017 Wood Frame, found objects, water pump system](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/b9a24c0997a6b4f529fac3afb4893af7/YukoMohri.04.jpg)
![Moré Moré [Leaky], Installation view at White Rainbow, London 2017](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/b4fbd58f87ba7f1036fc7cf5715793aa/YukoMohri.03.jpg)
![Moré Moré [Leaky], Installation view at White Rainbow, London 2017](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/b66be9c8b48126ca0707045b331bea59/YukoMohri.05.jpg)
![Moré Moré [Leaky]: The Falling Water Given #4-6, Installation view at White Rainbow, London, 2017 Wood Frames, found objects, water pump system](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/c1467de7a3ecda9045ddfef0cb201453/YukoMohri.09.jpg)
Yuko Mohri
Moré Moré [Leaky], an exhibition at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by Yuko Mohri. The artist’s first presentation at a UK gallery.
The solo exhibition by Mohri, who recently represented Japan at the 60th Venice Biennale, showcased her installation titled Moré Moré [Leaky]. This work is part of her long-term research project focusing on the Tokyo metro. Mohri first presented this project at the prestigious Nissan Art Award in 2015, where she won the award. Responsive to the built environment, her kinetic installation at White Rainbow is in the form of a circuit, with found materials ‘wired’ together to contain flowing water, mimicking makeshift water repairs she noticed in the Tokyo metro.
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Meiro Koizumi
Battlelands, a solo exhibition of film, photography and sculpture at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by Japanese artist and filmmaker Meiro Koizumi (b. 1976, Gunma, Japan). The artist’s first UK solo exhibition.
In his compelling and challenging body of work, Koizumi examines a range of complex issues: power dynamics on scales both familial and national; the tension between staged and authentic emotion; and the conflict between duty and desire. Koizumi’s artistic practice is shaped by and often directly addresses the political and military history of his native Japan, and its impact on culture and society in the present. Japan’s Peacetime Constitution – a reaction against the brutal militarism of Japanese imperialism – has seen pacifism become central to Japanese identity.
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![Chim↑Pom, Archival installation from '道 [Street]' (2017), installation view at White Rainbow, London, UK, 2018 © Chim↑Pom, Image: Damian Griffiths](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/7673f292ed0a1d094f0f6b6fdf86d70d/Chim-Pom.05.jpg)
![Chim↑Pom, Archival installation from '道 [Street]' (2017), installation view at White Rainbow, London, UK, 2018 © Chim↑Pom, Image: Damian Griffiths](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/2620e6b60e25f8548e3096972dd2d345/Chim-Pom.04.jpg)
![Chim↑Pom, Archival installation from '道 [Street]' (2017), installation view at White Rainbow, London, UK, 2018 © Chim↑Pom, Image: Damian Griffiths](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/4de224ea3bc12e9494b8fbb6f9f41e77/Chim-Pom.02.jpg)
![Chim↑Pom, Archival installation from '道 [Street]' (2017), installation view at White Rainbow, London, UK, 2018 © Chim↑Pom, Image: Damian Griffiths](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/561cff7844e2b304be71941b384d7d59/Chim-Pom.06.png)
Chim↑Pom
Why Open? – a solo exhibition at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by the renowned artist collective Chim↑Pom.
Comprising Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Ellie, Masataka Okada, Motomu Inaoka, and Toshinori Mizuno, Chim↑Pom’s work includes interventions through performance, video, painting, installation, curating and organising events. Sharp social critique underpins the group’s work, and the collective is unafraid to cause controversy in the service of their message. As Christopher Y. Lew, Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum, New York, has stated: ‘the group negotiates a difficult line – they do not make the direct assertions of activists but rather offer an ambiguous voice that is both complicit and critical.
Please click here to read more.
Taro Izumi
My eyes are not in the centre, an expansive installation at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by Taro Izumi. The artist’s first UK solo exhibition.
Comprised entirely of new work, Izumi’s exhibition constructs a complex web of interactions mediated through technology, evoking digital and new media’s dissociative effects on the senses. How does perceptible reality change when first hand experience is outsourced to a lens?
Please click here to read more.
Acquisitions
Mari Katayama
Further to her first UK solo exhibition at White Rainbow curated by Keith Whittle, artist Mari Katayama talks about her work recently acquired by and on display at Tate Modern. Katayama uses her body and the materials she finds around her to make self-portraits, embroidered objects and living sculptures.
Please click here to view or here to read about her White Rainbow exhibition.
Publication Essays
Daisuke Ida
Publication essay by Keith Whittle for the National Arts Centre Tokyo exhibition, For Whom the Bell Tolls? by Japanese artist Daisuke Ida that delves into and explores perceptions of reality, physicality, changes in perspective, and our understanding of the world – historic, personal, economic, and technologically, reflecting on a global reality, in the post-coronavirus world and surveillance society.
Publication date 2025
Satoru Aoyama
Essay by Keith Whittle for Division of Labour, a solo exhibition at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London. The focus of the exhibition was a new series of work: ‘Map of the World (Dedicated to unknown embroiderers)’ (2012-). The works reference the Afghan craftswomen who assisted in the making of Alighiero Boetti’s ‘Mappa’ series (1971-1989).
Please click here to read the essay or here to read about his White Rainbow exhibition.
Published 2017
Residencies
Sutapa Biswas
Mata Ne, (See you Soon), a solo exhibition of video and mixed media at Fujiya Gallery, Beppu Japan by British Indian artist Sutapa Biswas. The artist’s first presentation at a Japanese gallery.
Curated by Keith Whittle during a two-month residency in Japan, Mata Ne, (See you Soon), is inspired by the oral histories of women of Oita, Japan, who recount important moments in their lives. A method of recovering neglected histories, through a methodology exploring autobiographical practice centred on the subjectivity of the narrator. Oral histories focused on women’s experiences that demand revision of the historical.
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Adam Chodzko
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, a solo exhibition of video and mixed media by British artist Adam Chodzko. The artist’s first solo show at a Japanese gallery.
Curated by Keith Whittle during a two-month residency in Japan, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden is suite of works that connects Chodzko’s ongoing investigations into how a community connects with its sense of its self, its place, its past, and the world ‘outside’. The work develops a series of mythologies in order to investigate these connections using a mixture of documentary ‘truth’ and a form of science fiction to communicate a psychological surrealism.
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Yuko Mohri
Brairdcast Media: A History of Machine Translation, a residency and solo exhibition by Yuko Mohri who won the Asian Art Award in 2016, and represented Japan at the Japan Pavilion during the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Mohri’s first international residency and solo show in the UK, produced and curated by Keith Whittle. The exhibition explores the early history of broadcast media in the United Kingdom, with a focus on the work of John Logie Baird, a pioneering inventor of early television. It highlights his invention, the “Televisor,” which was a semi-mechanical analogue television system that utilised a patented mechanical scanning method.
Please click here to view the exhibition brochure.
Erika Tan
A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling, a two-person international residency and touring exhibition that was first staged at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art. It features London-based Singaporean artist Erika Tan and was curated and produced by Keith Whittle and Alistair Robinson as part of The British Council’s major festival, UK-Japan 2008.
During the summer of 2008, the artists spent time in each other’s countries of residence— the UK and Japan. This experience informed their research and led to the creation of commissioned films, videos, and photographic installations, which later toured to BankArt in Japan. Erika Tan’s works are collectively titled Made in Japan. These artworks examine the expectations that travelers have, the iconic images typically associated with Japan, the various assumptions related to Japanese culture, and the physical and psychological mechanisms that underpin these perceptions.
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Festivals
Sun Xun work is featured in the exhibition There is no ‘I’ in Team, and part of CHINA NOW, the largest festival of Chinese culture ever held in the UK. This exhibition curated by Keith Whittle, Keri Elmsly (UK), Pauline Doutreluingne (Germany), Jian Jiang (China), offers a unique opportunity to see the works of an extraordinary and vibrant new generation of Chinese artists from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. These artists are working in moving images, sound, and installation art, representing some of the most prolific and powerful work being created in China today.
Sun Xun is one of the most distinguished contemporary artists of his generation. He employs traditional Chinese ink painting and printing techniques to create ink paintings, charcoal drawings, woodcuts, animated films, and large-scale installations. His art references Chinese mythology, European art traditions, literary classics, and contemporary events.
Please click here to read more.
Mio Shirai
A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling, a two-person international touring exhibition, first staged at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art. Curated by Keith Whittle and Alistair Robinson. It features the work of London-based Singaporean artist Erika Tan and Japanese artist Mio Shirai.
The project is part of the British Council’s UK-Japan 2008 and Japan-UK 150 festivals, which celebrate the anniversary of trade and cultural links between the two countries. The commissioned works went on to tour BankART 1929 in Yokohama in 2009.
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Single-Channel Presentations
John Akomfrah
The Call of Mist by John Akomfrah, a work by the Ghanaian-born British artist and filmmaker, known for his exploration of themes such as memory, post-colonialism, temporality, and aesthetics. Filmed in various locations on the Isle of Skye and serves as a poignant reflection on loss, memory, and media.
In 2024, Akomfrah presented a new body of work titled Listening All Night to the Rain at the British Pavilion in Venice – La Biennale di Venezia.
Please click here to read more.
Derek Jarman
Blue is a film by Derek Jarman (1942-1994), a legendary English artist and filmmaker, best known for his avant-garde art films, and also renowned as a set designer, gardener, author and gay rights activist.
Blue weaves a sensory tapestry that serves both as a political call to action and a meditation on illness, dying, and love. Originally released as a feature film in 1993, the year before the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s death due to an AIDS-related illness, Blue is a daring and powerful work of art.
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Elizabeth Price
Turner Prize winner, London-based artist Elizabeth Price creates richly layered, moving image works made specifically for gallery settings. Composed of a broad range of imagery sourced from analogue and digital photography, animation, and motion graphics, her works are often accompanied by scrolling text, narrated by a computerized voice and paired with music.
Price makes immersive video installations, which feature diverse historical materials including film and video footage, archival documents, plans and photographs and popular music.
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Marina Abramović and Ulay
Video and Performance: Marina Abramović and Ulay, a single-channel programme of several works by the legendary couple in performance art.
Marina Abramović and Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) started collaborating as artists and living together in 1976. Their separation was marked by the famous The Lovers: Great Wall Walk performance in China, in 1988. Over and over again, they have made themselves the topic of their performances and actions, exploring the limits of physical and psychic endurance and specific gender roles.
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Site-Specfic
Hoo Fan Chon
Into the World of Palpable Objects and Fruitful Delight, a solo exhibition curated by Keith Whittle of work by Malaysian artist Fan Chon Hoo at Eleven Spitalfield’s. One of a number of Georgian townhouses built in the late 17th and 18th centuries to accommodate the French Protestant (Huguenots). The artists first UK solo show.
Shortlisted for the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4’s New Sensations 2010, Fan Chon Hoo is an artist with a uniquely compelling visual language. By assuming the role of a modern-day amateur antiquarian and anthropologist, one informed by earlier figures of 18th and 19th-century travellers and amateur naturalists, Hoo explores the role that cultural artefacts have as residues and deposits of the process of cultural translation.
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Michael Lin
Untitled, one of two site-specific works in Beppu, Japan by Michael Lin, an artist living and working in Taipei and Brussels.
Beginning in the late 1990s, Lin gained recognition for his use of expansive floral motifs, which reflect Taiwanese culture. These floral patterns, reminiscent of the embroideries typically found on Taiwanese pillows, are inspired by the shifting domestic and political climates in Taiwan that Lin experienced upon returning to the region after many years abroad. Although his repetitive and seemingly simple floral landscapes are closely tied to Taiwanese visual tradition, they have emerged as the most politically and culturally significant aspects of his work.
Adel Abdessemed
EXIT, a site-specific artwork created by Adel Abdessemed, a prominent figure in the international art scene who was born in Constantine, Algeria. Currently based in Paris, Abdessemed works with various media, including drawing, video, photography, performance, and installation.
He transforms everyday materials and images into unexpected, impactful, and sometimes shocking artistic statements. Abdessemed draws inspiration from a wide array of sources—personal, social, and political—to create a visual language that is rich and economical, as well as sensitive and controversial, combining elements that are both radical and ordinary.
Commissions
Sonia Boyce
Phil Lynott Rocks is a work by Sonia Boyce, a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at the University of the Arts London.
Boyce’s work explores art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators.
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Isaac Julien
One of today’s most prominent and influential figures in media art and film, Isaac Julien is an award winning British installation artist, filmmaker and Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His multi-channel installations, documentaries, and photographs explore Black and queer histories and identities. Julien gained international attention for his iconic film Looking for Langston (1989), a montage that reimagines the life of poet, novelist, and playwright Langston Hughes during the Harlem Renaissance. Julien’s works emerge from in-depth investigations of history, blurring the barriers between film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting, and sculpture.
Julien’s Vagabondia (2000), commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, where Keith Whittle worked from 1994-2005, is a two channel installation exploring how structures of power and domination impact historical narratives in museums.
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Mark Leckey
Parade, by Turner Prize winning British artist Mark Leckey is a video installation with an unnerving sound: a parade of consuming pleasures in psychedelic decadence.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in association with the Brighton Photo Biennial for the Brighton Photo Biennial, and to accompany its major group exhibition Make Life Beautiful! The Dandy in Photography at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Mark Leckey’s Parade, a sound and video installation at Fabrica, continues the artist’s ongoing exploration of style subcultures and other contemporary icons.
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Talks
Keith Whittle
The first in a series of five talks, Keith Whittle gave a keynote on the concept of Bienalisation and related developments in the art world. These developments include the rise of global curatorial discourse, the diminishing boundaries between art and non-art categories, and the increasing prominence of contemporary art from non-Western countries such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Fram Kitagawa
Fram Kitagawa, the director of the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, is a visionary art producer and curator who discussed the groundbreaking festival that has become central to the unique social art movement in Japan over the past 20 years. The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, one of the largest art festivals in the world, is held once every three years in the expansive rural area of Satoyama, located in the Niigata Prefecture.
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Leah Gordon
In 2023, the Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale exhibition at Documenta Fifteen was awarded the Exhibition of the Year by AICA Germany. Leah Gordon, an artist, curator, writer, and co-founder of the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti, discussed the biennale, which was originally designed to highlight issues of social, racial, class, and geographical immobility.
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Shubigi Rao
Shubigi Rao discussed her diverse artistic practice and her experiences as the curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which ran from December 2022 to April 2023. Her work encompasses various disciplines, including archaeology, neuroscience, libraries, archives, histories, literature, violence, ecology, and natural history.
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Lewis Biggs
Former Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Liverpool Biennial, Lewis Biggs, discussed how the Liverpool Biennial emerged as a latecomer among the growing number of international biennials that began to proliferate in the late 1980s. He outlined the challenges faced by earlier biennials and described the creation of a model that holds significant importance for the city, its citizens, its artistic community, and the international art scene.
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Mari Katayama
White Rainbow and Japan Foundation presented an artist talk by Mari Katayama, to coincide with her solo show Broken Heart curated by Keith Whittle at White Rainbow Gallery, London. Katayama discussed her artistic process, touching on how her physical difficulty has informed her work and influenced her body image. The talk was followed by a conversation with Simon Baker, director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.
Please click here to view.
Keith Whittle
One Place After Another: What can periodical International Contemporary Art Projects share?
This talk at The Japan Foundation, London, Keith Whittle examined the rise of large-scale international recurrent exhibitions of contemporary art around the world. Following the presentation a discussion with Keith Whittle was held to further examine issues related to these projects. The panel included two internationally recognised curators: Yuko Hasegawa, who has curated several major exhibitions in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, and Lewis Biggs, former director of the Liverpool Biennial. Also participating was Koki Tanaka, the representative artist for the Japan Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition in the Venice Biennale, and Mark Rappolt, Editor of Art Review.
Conversations
Yuko Hasegawa
Yuko Hasegawa, Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan in conversation with Keith Whittle.
Please click here to listen to an audio sample.
Andrea Schlieker
Andrea Schlieker, Director of Exhibitions and Displays, Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom interviewed by Keith Whittle.
Please click here to listen to an audio sample.
Jonathan Watkins
Jonathan Watkins, former Director, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom in conversation with Keith Whittle.
Please click here to listen to an audio sample, or here to read a transcript of the interview.
Mami Kataoka
Mami Kataoka, Director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan in conversation with Keith Whittle.
Please click here to listen to an audio sample, or here to read a transcript of the interview.