A quote from Muhammad Ali, the pithy title of Shimabuku’s most recent exhibition—“Me, We”—draws attention to the relational qualities of the artist’s work. Although this quirky midcareer retrospective eschews a chronological presentation, it nonetheless starts with photographic works documenting Shimabuku’s earliest performances, actions, and ephemeral assemblages, dating back to the 1990s. Tour of Europe with One Eyebrow Shaved, 1991, for example, saw the Japanese artist traveling through a dozen European countries for as long as it took for his eyebrow to grow back. The missing eyebrow helped the artist to break the ice with fellow travelers along the way.
Journeys feature prominently in Shimabuku’s itinerant practice, and not all of his travel companions are human. For Cucumber Journey, 2000, he sailed for two weeks on a canal from London to Birmingham, using the time onboard to learn how to pickle cucumbers—a “slow food” process eminently suited to the pace of travel on a barge. Shimabuku has taken more than one octopus out for a walk (see the video piece Then, I Decided to Give a Tour of Tokyo to the Octopus from Akashi, 2000, or the poster series With Octopus, 1990–2010), in addition to creating sculptural objects for the aquatic animals to engage with (Sculpture for Octopuses: Exploring for Their Favorite Colors, 2010). In Shimabuku’s Fish & Chips, 2006, among the most poetic offerings on view, the artist orchestrated an encounter between a fish and a potato that appears to be swimming of its own accord. He accompanied the 8-mm film of this underwater scene with a tongue-in-cheek neon sign spelling out the work’s title.
The top floor of the museum showcases the most recent works, including those produced for this exhibition, such as Me, We, 2023, a site-specific installation confronting fragments of two local buildings scaled for demolition and renovation, dating respectively from the thirteenth and the early-twentieth century, and the glazed ceramic piece Moon and Potato, 2023, whose twin protagonists appear on equal footing against a jet-black backdrop. The pairings attest to Shimabuku’s uncanny ability to draw out hidden affinities between disparate objects.