Osamu Shikichi, When the Eyes Lick Images Curated by Luise Wank at Space n.n., on the occasion of Various Others, Munich
I see a lot of performance, various forms of dance mainly; I see a lot of art too, mostly ‘ultra-contemporary’ — ‘the newest, most innovative and experimental art being produced today’, says Google AI. When the two come together I am often underwhelmed … disappointed. When artists without the training or the bodily understanding of how to hold themselves whilst moving through space try to perform you can tell: form dissolves through clunky transitions and off-kilter postures, there is no spontaneity nor flex, no sense of believable criticality. Only dancers can speak, critically or otherwise, through their bodies. Osamu Shikichi is a dancer — a choreographer and artist too. Drawing upon traditional forms of Japanese performance — lap and Butoh dance as well as Noh theatre — they are well-scripted in the formalities of movement, able to speak subtly through their body and to deconstruct this language to create ultra mesmerising performances.
I saw Shikichi perform When the eyes lick images (2025) on the occasion of their first solo exhibition in Germany, itself titled When the Eyes Lick Images, held at space n.n., Munich (May 10 to June 16 2025). As a gallery, space n.n. feels oddly domestic, like a laundrette — I imagine washing machines once occupied this boxy room — a place where the privacy of homely routines are made public. With artworks positioned within the space, on its store front windows as well as on the ceiling above the entrance way, Shikichi utilises the gallery’s architecture to accentuate the relationship between a body and a surround. In our age of individuation, this connectivity has become ever more copycat; rather than tuning into our own erotic feeling for the world we mirror what and who is presented to us on a screen. Self-ownership has become a matter of voyeuristic mimesis in this regard. Shikichi’s body-work confounds this looking.
Before I speak about the performance at the heart of this exhibition, I want to dwell on Shikichi’s literary work A butterfly swimming in the water (erotic novel) (2024). Printed on plain sheets of A4 paper, the poem is delicately pinned, page next to page, on one of the gallery’s white walls. It curves softly about the space. This wing-like flow echoes through the text’s progression, formally dissolving from an arrangement of narrative fragments to an almost bare page. Language, ‘spoken, written, and gestural’, as the exhibition’s press release states, is a ‘key medium’ for Shikichi. Embracing metaphor, in this text they relate the flight of a butterfly, the bug’s romantic lulling through the air, to the carnal dreamery one experiences when kissing another. Heart-stopping flutters. With these figurative alignments the poem accentuates a sense of uncontainedness, a sense of freedom, found as one feels and flows as a body in tune with the world. There is no mimesis in heart flutters.
Shikichi’s exhibition isn’t all delicate dreamery. Their performance, When the eyes lick images, inverts the formal flow of their wall poem, building from palm-size gestures to punkish expression, blurring interior and exterior realms through ‘WET’ (weird erotic tension) movements — movements that embody the meeting of desire and fragility, tenderness and ferocity — to expose the apparatus that mediate our connectivity to ourselves and to our world.
I suspect most of us predominantly experience and engage with the world through our hands. We open doors, we pick things up, we eat, we point, we scroll through Instagram and emails, typing, we do it all with our hands. Shikichi’s hands ignite their performance. Curled on the gallery’s floor, their hands move elegiac and slow, fingers and palms twisting to caress different parts of their body, occasionally getting trapped beneath their feet. These are lap dancing hands, attractive to the voyeur. They pull us in. As Shikichi moves and grows across the floor, they take out their iPhone and begin to document their limby-dancers. Peering at their hands through this screen they become entranced, lost to the image they are seeing. As they move and grow ever more excited, extending up, into and about the space, lapping the air with their tongue, I become aware that Shikichi is no longer live documenting their hands but watching a video of their hands and mirroring these pre-recorded movements. This is a brilliant use of mise en abyme trickery, one which directly points to how most of us come to embody, or at least to be a body in touch with and to lust for, the world around us — ie, via a screen.
With that illusion cracked, Shikichi frees themselves from the direction of their phone, crawling up the wall of the gallery space, French kissing the ceiling, before striding out of the front door, closing this behind themselves. Now trapped in space n.n.’s boxy interior, with Shikichi looking back through the glass door, it is as if my fellow viewers and I are now the object of their gaze — it’s like we are the hand Shikichi’s has been lusting after, quite literally a social world sealed off behind glass. Shikichi doesn’t follow our movements, they stare at us crazed, limbs entangled and head swaying smooth. A sense of pain enters the performance here. Downing a glass of faux-blood, Shikichi starts tonguing the gallery’s door seemingly writing what their body is craving to say: let me in. Deprived of entry to this/my boxy glass-fronted world, Shikichi curls up on the street retching a silver chain out from deep within their throat. Link by link, they cough this up. It seems weighty. With this chain dangling between their blood-stained lips, Shikichi stands, dashing across the street, scrambling up and onto a parked van. Here they stand, swaying, coughing up chain, drawing the attention of horrified passersby. Quite a climax.
If the space of space n.n. blurs the line between domestic privacy and streetside decorum, Shikichi’s performance co-opts this confused architectural language, using ‘WET’ movements and metaphor to make insides bleed, accentuating the disconnect between bodies and their surroundings. As a poet unbound by language, Shikichi’s body speaks critically of our contemporary condition, questioning not only how we come to know ourselves but the apparatus that mediate this self-knowledge.
Osamu Shikichi, When the Eyes Lick Images, 10th May – 15th June, 2025 Space n.n.
