is a Japanese filmmaker and video artist. Her works in photography, video and performance create visual investigations into the history, politics and culture of her homeland Okinawa. Particularly salient are themes related to the terrible civilian casualties incurred in Okinawa during World War II and the on-going troubles and hardships caused by the U.S. military presence in Okinawa. Since 2019 she is associate professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts.
Yamashiro has received various awards including the Kurashiki Contemporary Art Biennale (2005), the Asian Art Award (2017), the Zonta prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2018), the Asian Art Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize (2018), and most recently, the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (2020-2022). She has also participated in the Okinawa Artist's Exchange Residence Program in the Philippines (2011).
Early life
Yamashiro was born in 1967 in Naha and raised in Okinawa. She received a bachelor's degree in oil painting at the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts in 1999. In 2000, she attended a fellowship at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design (presently University for the Creative Arts) in the UK. She obtained her master's degree in Environmental Design from the Graduate School of Formative Arts at the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts in 2002.
Career
Early Performance Works
As an undergraduate student Yamashiro studied oil painting and experimented with installations that she created along various shores in Okinawa. During this time Yamashiro began to feel that these art practices were not compatible with her identity as Okinawan; her search for authentic Okinawan art led her towards primitive spiritual structures on the islands and the rituals performed at these places. She eventually landed on the subject of Okinawan tombs and graveyards after her trip to the Aran Islands where she felt the resilience of Celtic language and beliefs and the remains of ancient ruins had equivalents in her homeland.
Upon her return to Okinawa, Yamashiro used tombs and graveyards as sites for her early performance work including Okinawa Graveyard Club (2004), a video in which Yamashiro dons white tennis attire and dances emphatically in front of a grave for 6 minutes and Graveyard Series (2004-2007), photographs documenting Yamashiro's playful interventions at graves, utaki, and other sacred space. She attributes the comical and spirited nature of these works as a celebration of Okinawa's “rich outlook on life and death,” and the performances' location of a gravesite specifically chosen because of practices such as maintaining gardens for the deceased and greeting ancestors by sharing a meal at the grave known as seimeisai (siimii in local dialect). Art History professor Keiko Asanuma argues that these performances can also be viewed as an early sign of Yamashiro's interest in the concept of borders — the grave site acting as a border between life and death and the location offering an opportunity to obscure those demarcations.
Yamashiro expanded on the geo-political nature that applies to the notion of divided spaces in Okinawa for her video BORDER (2003) in which she walks along the fenced edge between US and Okinawan territory. At one point in the video, the camera reveals an Okinawan tomb that had been co-opted into US territory, thereby restricting access and the performance of rituals at the grave site. Since the creation of BORDER onwards, addressing the dynamic between Okinawa and the bases situated within it would become a central theme amongst Yamashiro's work.
OKINAWA TOURIST series (2004) Yamashiro exhibited her formative video work OKINAWA TOURIST series (2004) for her debut show as a video and performance artist at Maejima Art Center. The series consists of three 6 to 8 minute long performances: Graveyard Eisa, I Like Okinawa Sweet, and Trip to Japan. Graveyard Eisa and I Like Okinawa Sweet are both filmed in Okinawa, the former shows a dystopian dance troupe performing eisa at a gravesite, and the latter features Yamashiro zealously licking an ice cream in front of a base fence. Trip to Japan takes place in front of the National Diet Building in Tokyo, where Yamashiro mockingly acts as either a representative of Okinawa or local tour guide while holding up an image of an Okinawan tomb.