Akiko Hatakeyama

2022

I often hear about Asian culture and Asian people. I belong to this category by the global standard, but I am from a specific region and culture. I respect other “Asian people” for their uniqueness, too. But, we are often treated as the same thing in the U.S., and it makes me wonder. What is “Asian culture”? I don't know what that is. 

Years ago, someone was surprised that I had never meditated to singing bowls or sang ohm. In fact, I didn't know much about the practice until coming to the U.S. These metal bowls are commonly associated with Tibetan Buddhism, but their origin is unclear. They seem more tied to meditation as a popular spiritual practice in the U.S. This phenomenon is an example of an imaginative exoticism based on mixed information that slowly became a cultural myth that people accepted as a foreign culture. In くぼみ — kubomi, I use a singing bowl and a mere décor metal bowl, along with sounds of piano and western flute, to challenge the cultural appropriation and exotic expectations.

くぼみ — kubomi is a live interactive performance piece of a custom-designed instrument/controller, kane, that senses the capacitance of the performers’ hands. By stroking the rims of metal bowls, the performer triggers sounds through the capacitive sensing system. With live sounds of hitting the bowls and Western sound sources, this composition encourages us to think about exoticism and quick associations people tend to make about foreign cultures. This composition strives to contemplate all people – how we categorize people based on the look and make quick assumptions, and how we can make ourselves better at understanding each other. “Kubomi” means concave or dent in Japanese.