Born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the six members of Chim↑Pom — Ellie, Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Masataka Okada, Toshinori Mizuno and Motomu Inaoka — came together in 2005 while working as models, assistants and hangers-on of the artist Makoto Aida. Aida’s dark humour and irreverent approach to social and cultural issues were powerful influences on the group’s early works, which tended toward raucous stunts and public interventions.¹ In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster, their work became more expressly political, a position consolidated in April 2012 when they organised ‘Turning Around’, an exhibition of international activist work at the venerable Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.²

Shot one month after the 9.0 magnitude Great Sendai Earthquake on 11 March 2011, KI-AI 100 2011 was the first of a range of symbolic interventions conducted by Chim↑Pom explicitly criticising the bureaucratic, corporate and governmental apparatus that precipitated the crisis at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, but which also communicated a need for empathy and support for affected communities. The video work KI-AI 100 depicts a group of young Japanese people in a huddle, including the six members of Chim↑Pom, along with a few Soma City locals — themselves tsunami survivors; they met while assisting with the clean-up of devastated neighbourhoods in Fukushima Prefecture. Proceeding one by one around the huddle, the group shouts improvised motivations and dedications. The shouts are by turns encouraging, absurd, funny and satirical, and the exercise produces an empathetic humour as the group struggles to reach the full 100 cheers, lapsing into non sequiturs and confessions of social and romantic anxieties, even pausing at points to check the number of cheers achieved. The work is shot from the perspective of an upward pointing camera in the centre of the huddle, and also from a series of wide angles that depict the little circle dwarfed by tsunami wreckage and debris on the shores of Soma City. The video ends with the crew piling into the back of a truck and driving through the devastation.

KI-AI 100 is arguably the most renowned work by a group whose radical nature has provoked public controversy on several occasions. Unlike certain earlier interventions, this short video is daring, but warm and funny enough to avoid being mistaken for an exploitative jab at a soft target.³ Part of its appeal comes from the gestures it makes to widely enjoyed aspects of Japanese culture. Ki-ai is the term for the battle cry-like shouts of martial artists, which synthesise breathing techniques with expressions of fighting spirit. The huddle is a familiar device, appropriated from American popular culture, from the team sports prioritised in the Japanese education system to promote group cohesion, part of the abiding influence of Confucianism. Particularly affecting is the ribald Japanese humour shared among the group’s members, characterised by self-deprecation and exaggerated gestures, with the huddle exploding in over-the-top cheering when the hundredth ki-ai is reached.

As mischievous as it might be — and the cry of ‘30 micro-sieverts!’ suggests a particularly incisive satirical consciousness — this work by Chim↑Pom expresses a genuine sense of solidarity and proposes comedy as a means of coping with tragedy without sacrificing respect for gravity and compassion.

Endnotes

1. The group’s name is derived from juvenile slang for the male genitalia, emphasised by the upward-thrusting arrow that appears in place of a hyphen. Their first DVD compilation PTA 2006 demonstrates their initial aspiration to produce a Japanese version of the MTV series Jackass.
2. In addition to Chim↑Pom’s own work, the exhibition included contributions by Voina, The Yes Men, Adbusters, JR and jamasyman, alongside Japanese artists Takeuchi Kota, and Iri and Toshi Maruki, as well as the iconic ‘finger-pointing worker’ video, an eerie impromptu performance by a worker from the Fukushima nuclear power plant during a webcam feed of the clean-up.
3. Chim↑Pom sparked controversy on 21 October 2008, when they commissioned a skywriter to spell out the word ‘pika’ above Hiroshima, a slogan from the animated TV show Pokémon, but also the onomatopoeic word for ‘flash’. The gesture provoked a storm of criticism from bomb victims’ associations and saw the cancellation of their exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, which had been scheduled to open on 1 November. A fireworks display staged on 25 October by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang proceeded without protest.