The artist and filmmaker Christiaan Bastiaans, whose works are shown in the “Ginza Curator’s Room” of Shibunkaku Ginza, has intimate connections to Japanese culture. Since he was enrolled in Kyoto City University of Arts in his early years and had been practicing martial arts, i.e. karate and taikiken, he was combining these energies like two streams or ‘rivers’ 1), where this type of martial art functioned to develop inner strength.

His fascination with Japan and Asia in general has different roots: on the one hand in his family, who were of mixed descent (his father, from Dutch, French and Indonesian-Javanese ancestors, and his mother, part Indonesian-Sumatran, part Armenian, had met in Indonesia) and later on, through his own interest in the arts and in technology.

Theatre, etching, photo-lithography, film and literature are import- ant sources for his early art-making. From Shakespeare’s King Lear, out of which he developed theatre/live performances titled Real Lear, to Yukio Mishima and Kobo Abe, filmmakers Shohei Imamura, Michelangelo Antonioni and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Of importance were encounters with surrealism (painter Joan Miro, as well as filmmaker Luis Bunuel) and Shuji Terayama’s theater group Tenjo Sajiki, which he saw in Amsterdam’s Mickery theater, to whose works he was drawn “by the multiple viewpoints that coexist”.

In those years artist Shoichi Ida also became a close connection, which contributed far more to his formation than the academy. Living in Osaka, Bastiaans visited him regularly in Kyoto to under- stand how a studio and its master would function in Japan. But he also admired very different artists whose works had made an impression, like Francis Bacon or Picasso, particularly his Guernica.

By the time his own work fully develops, he seems particularly drawn towards the figure of the victim, both in war (child soldiers for instance) and in society (psychiatric patients, people living in leper colonies) and gives his personae names like “Hurt Models” who become recurring figures both in his drawings and his films. “Hurt Models are archetypes of vulnerability and resilience” says Bastiaans.

For his films he was able to involve well-known actresses like Jeanne Moreau, Liv Ullmann, Hanna Schygulla; Japanese actor Yoshi Oida and Butoh dancer Yoshito Ohno, for the films Club Mama Gemütlich, Valuable Cargo and Gods Narrators.

In the trailer for the film Laboratories of Empire, which is being premiered at this exhibition actors Bert Luppes, Hélène Vrijdag and Charlie Chan Dagelet play roles that continue Bastiaans’ investiga- tion into the spheres of lazarets, war zones and shelters that seem to offer comfort to the wounded, as well as suggesting ‘otherwordly’ realms in an ‘alternative reality’.

For the exhibition at the Ginza Curator’s Room I have, as curator, in concert with the artist, selected a group of drawings, collages and film-installations that give a concise overview of his work, while focusing on the topicality of those works. Not only are war and conflict a continuous concern for Bastiaans, but also the inter-connectedness of our geographically and often politically spread-out worlds of art and culture, where grief seems to play an ever-growing role.

One of his many literary inspirations is Simone Weil, who admires the Iliad, one of Homer’s masterpieces saying: “perhaps they will yet rediscover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate”. 2)

In his many encounters with the displaced, the disfigured and the poor who suffer in different parts of the world, Bastiaans, who often operates like an investigative journalist on his extensive voyages, is impressed, he says “by the resilience of the people concerned in face of the horrors they live”. “It helps me in my journey to find what is the ‘essence’ of life”.

Saskia Bos, Amsterdam, February 2024

All quotes by Christiaan Bastiaans are from an as yet unpublished interview with the author from December 2023, unless stated otherwise.

Note 1: quote by the artist in a conversation with curator Marianne Brouwer, see: cat. Christiaan Bastiaans, Club Solo, Breda, Netherlands, 2023.

Note 2: Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force, Chicago Review 18:2, 1965, p.5.