Fiona Long Art

Apologies that it’s been soooo long since my last post! I did intend to blog every day when I was away in Tokyo but I had such a hectic time that I rarely got more than four hours sleep so, as you can imagine, I didn’t get much blogging done! Then I’ve been catching up with lots of other stuff since I got back which I’ll let you know about soon.

So, after our long flight, we arrived at Tokyo Wonder Site, signed in and then went off for our first meal together, and, in spite of being exhausted after the flight, stayed up until about 4.30am! Not wise but great fun and it was really good to get to know each other a little better. Then after a necessary lie in we went to some lectures by our tutors for the workshops.

We were welcomed by Yusaku Imamura, the director of Tokyo Wonder Site where we were generously accomodated and where we took part in workshops. We were then introduced to our tutors (in no particular order):

Professor Chris Wainwright who organised for us to go on this trip. He’s the Head of Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon Colleges of Art within the University of the Arts, London. He briefly outlined his work, mentioning his projects: The Moons of Higashiyama and the Cape Farewell Expedition to the Arctic to raise awareness about climate change.

Kayoko Iemura, the programme director of Tokyo Wonder Site.

Kotaro Watanabe of takram design engineering where he aims to fuse poetry with engineering. Below is a video of one of his projects that he was demonstrating:

Kosuke Tsumura, a fashion designer who established an urban survival brand called “Final Home”.

Toshi Ichiyanagi, another of the tutors, is a composer and pianist famous, partly, for his involvement with John Cage and his previous marriage to Yoko Ono. Below is his performance/demonstration of a different way of using a piano, seeing it as a string and percussion instrument.

We also had the honour of having Song Dong as a tutor. He gave us a wonderful lecture the next day so I’ll tell you all about that next time….

After the talks we went off to the Sumida River Fireworks Festival. It was vibrant and exhilerating getting caught in the Tokyo crowds for the first time. I did get lost though and was seperated from the group. It was a little scary as I didn’t have much of a handle on navigating around the city at that point but fortunately I made it back to Wonder Site safely. In fact, I made it back before everyone else and was happily supping on a nice cold can of Japanese beer when they returned!