Artist

Tamami Asada

Being ridiculous is what Tamami Asada cannot stop.

Asada was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1962. Her younger brother is mentally challenged, and she has personally felt the discrimination towards the handicapped people by the Japanese society. When she was a teenager, she tried to hide her brother from her friends, being afraid of the reality of exclusion.

Video art gave her a change. She started making videotapes in her twenties at the Video Information Center in Tokyo. Soon she was absorbed. It was a surprise for her that strange things could be welcomed in the world of contemporary art. The more she practiced a different way of thinking, the more she felt released from the anguish of her heart. In the videotape Brothership, she and her brother gargle together. By doing something ridiculous together, she found a joy to communicate with her brother, whose disability she did not know how to face with for a long time. The lifework for Tamami Asada is to search for the ways to release us from what binds our mind, from what makes us mentally blind.

She received a BA degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton, where she studied with Ralph Hocking (Experimental Television Center) and Ken Jacobs. Her works were shown in some of the international film festivals and galleries, such as Cinema Jove (Valencia, Spain), Wonder Art Festival (Tokyo), One Minute Festival (Sao Paolo), Selfish Slaves of Zines and Animation (Toronto), Video Primer (Toronto), and Image Festival (Toronto).

Artist Code: 391

Videography

Brothership

1997, 07:32 minutes, colour, Japanese

Split

1997, 05:00 minutes, colour

Screaming Videotape #2

1996, 01:08 minutes, colour, Japanese, English

Before Words, After Words

1995, 03:00 minutes

Diversity

1995, 02:20 minutes

A Day

1994, 00:30 minutes

A Show

1994, 01:00 minutes

Sabio in the Afternoon

1994, 01:03 minutes

Hand

1994, 01:21 minutes

Place Where Dance was Born

1991, 00:60 minutes, colour, none

Neko-No-Maki 1 & 2

1991, 02:00 minutes, colour, Japanese

Critical Writing

Video Primer: A Series of 5 Video Programs: Language
by Michelle Jacques. Video Primer, 2002. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2002.