Following an online-only preview and interview with the artist during the fall of 2020, the Richmond Center for Visual Arts is pleased to announce the Midwest premiere of an on-site exhibition this September featuring Japanese artist Mimi Kato’s most recent body of work, Wild Corporation. Inspired by the hallmarks of Butoh dance theatre—absurdity, resistance to fixed forms, and earthbound postures—Kato combines photography and performance to explore gendered power dynamics in large-format digital prints and surreal sculptural objects. Appearing repeatedly in costume throughout a series of complex scenes, Kato weaves a darkly humorous narrative that references Japanese culture and its corporate traditions, the artist’s personal experiences, as well as more broadly gendered tasks, from warfare to washing laundry. Set against dramatic landscapes, Kato’s female characters take hostages, hunt, and lash out against one another, fashioning their weapons from staplers, rubber bands, zip ties, rulers, thumbtacks, binder clips and the like, all while donning impractical short skirts and high heels.

Coming of age in Japan during the 1980s and ‘90s, Kato was taught to accept society’s remaining gender inequalities as simply inevitable. While many women were urged to assume Japan’s non-career tracks (Ippanshoku), women who pursued leadership and managerial positions (Sōgōshoku) often ignited powerful feelings of resentment and conflict amongst women in the workforce. Incorporating her personal experiences with corporate Japanese culture as well as her life in the United States, Kato’s work contests the boundaries of patriarchy, while also examining rivalries between women. Turning the expected feminist script on its head, Kato’s larger-than-life visual sagas in Wild Corporation feature two tribes of female workers who, with little hope of career advancement, turn against one another to battle it out. Despite the aggression at work in these narratives, the series culminates in a heroic sea hunt during which the female teams work together to take down the social structure that seeks to keep them submissive and sparks their antipathy against one another.