“Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project”
Eugenia Lim
23 Mar → 14 Apr 2012
Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project is an introverted performance/installation exploring the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori or ‘shut in’ syndrome. Over one week, Eugenia Lim will live in a bedroom-style installation within West Space. Although physically ‘on view’ to gallery goers, communication between herself and the outside world will occur via a web portal or ‘hiki-site’ through which people can chat with her via smartphones or home computers. Meals will be delivered and she will not leave or receive visitors for the entire week.
Hikikomori confine themselves to their rooms for months and, in extreme cases, years on end. Without physical contact, hikikomori exist in isolation. Yet, many survive on a diet of pop culture and live a networked existence through an online community of forums, games and chatrooms. Increasingly, through our daily engagement with Web 2.0, we are all becoming networked beings. Stay Home is a project for anyone whose life intersects with technology and the Internet.
Project collaborators are Dan West, Yumi Umiumare and David Wolf. Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project is part of the Today Your Love program, which is generously supported by the Australia Council. Eugenia Lim will inhabit the room for one week, however the installation will be on display until 14 April. Eugenia and her collaborators are supported by the Australia Council and City of Melbourne.
Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese Singaporean descent who works across body, lens, social and spatial practice to explore how national identities, migration and capital cut, divide and bond our interdependent world. A performer within her own works, Lim invents personas to explore the tensions of the individual within society – the alienation and belonging in a globalised world.