Tokyo Culture Guide 東京都現代美術館: Dump Type

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo: MOT was opened in March, 1995. MOT is focusing primarily on postwar Japanese art and contemporary art. Currently, it has a respective show of leading Japanese media artist collective Dumb Type.

Dumb Type

Founded in Kyoto in 1984 by students of Kyoto City University of Arts, Dumb Type is a multi-media performance artist group centered on Teiji Furuhashi (1960-1995) which garnered attention for its highly inventive, non-hierarchic pieces which develop as collaborations between members who each pursued their own individual artistic style.

Within the superficiality, despair and seduction of 1980s Bubble-era Japan, the group was highly sensitive to a societal "lack of any awareness in spite of an overabundance of information" (=dumb) and developed artworks with a sharp, critical nature.

As a reaction against the textual emptiness of many language-driven performance groups, Dumb Type pursued a word-less approach (=dumb, mute) and composed works based around sound, video and installation pieces as well as the performers' reactions towards them.

Based in Japan, Dumb Type became world-wide pioneers who employed a revolutionary visual language and philosophy to express their visions of the "posthuman," born from new relations between body and technology.

text from the exhibition web-page

Seiya Kato