The 2026 exhibition “Entanglements: The Rhythm of Being” at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum features Yamashiro Chikako’s video work Mud Man. [1] Passing through heavy curtains, the viewer encounters three large screens set side by side; in the pitch-dark projection room, an enormous sound fills the high-ceilinged space, and the senses respond to the images, as if one were lying in the soil too. On screen, a group of people lie face-up in a field, yellow-grey mud covering their faces, the line between life and death hard to discern. A man stands and looks up at a bird’s nest in a tree. Clods of earth, like bird droppings, fall from the sky and strike these half-sleeping bodies, waking them. A man picks up a lump of soft soil and holds it to his ear, as if listening to a conch shell from the sea, and hears voices from within telling of history and inheritance, of nature and other communities. [2]
Chikako Yamashiro, Mud Man, 2016, 3-channel video installation, Size variable, 23 min, © Chikako Yamashiro.
Photo by Tsai Min-Ying, installation view of Entanglements: The Rhythm of Being, 2026, Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Reproduced by permission of Chikako Yamashiro Production.
Bodies Buried in the Soil: A Genealogy of Body and Land
Soil is the substance to which Mud Man keeps returning. People lie within it, are woken by the land, and in turn listen through the land. The work makes “soil” and “body” into media of reception and transmission. Yamashiro says: “I have long been fascinated by how the body carries memories that cannot be conveyed by language alone. For me, film is not only something to ‘watch.’ It is at the same time a bodily experience.” [3]
Chikako Yamashiro, Mud Man, 2016, 3-channel video installation, Size variable, 23 min, © Chikako Yamashiro. Photo by Tsai Min-Ying, installation view of Entanglements: The Rhythm of Being, 2026, Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Reproduced by permission of Chikako Yamashiro Production.
In the 1945 Battle of Okinawa,[4] tens of thousands of residents lost their lives. As the mud-covered figures lie raising their hands, amid blooming, garish lilies, they suggest new growth out of ground already soaked with the dead.
Mud Man sets out from the histories of Okinawa in Japan and Jeju in Korea, presenting a myth-like story in which locals wake from the mire through “seeds of verse” carried by migrating birds. A man, setting out to sow, stumbles into a hole in time and space, beginning a journey through the wartime past.
Chikako Yamashiro, Mud Man, 2016, 3-channel video installation, Size variable, 23 min, © Chikako Yamashiro. Photo by Tsai Min-Ying, installation view of Entanglements: The Rhythm of Being, 2026, Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Reproduced by permission of Chikako Yamashiro Production.
Their journey unfolds in a magical-realist style, interspersed and collaged with US documentary footage of the WWII Battle of Okinawa and Jeju April 3rd Incident. The search for the source of the sound is figured as a longing to regain identity, autonomy, and the ability to tell one’s own story, history, and memory.[5]
Chikako Yamashiro, Mud Man, 2016, 3-channel video installation, Size variable, 23 min, © Chikako Yamashiro. Photo by Tsai Min-Ying, installation view of Entanglements: The Rhythm of Being, 2026, Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Reproduced by permission of Chikako Yamashiro Production.
Yamashiro also frequently use the act of walking the body through contested land as a method of video narration. Okinawa has so-called “mokunin” (tacitly permitted) spaces: land and beaches along the fences of US bases, nominally off-limits yet still fished and farmed by residents. Yamashiro returns again and again to these ambiguous military zones, letting the viewer enter a borderland that is militarily occupied yet tacitly accessible.[6]
Two Islands, One Bodily Predicament: Okinawa and Jeju
Most of the field, tunnel, and lily scenes in Mud Man were shot on Ie island and Jeju Island. On Jeju island where the underground tunnels were built by the Japanese military during the period of Japanese colonial rule. The figures that burrow underground, bending and gasping through concrete passageways, walk through these very tunnels. And those white lilies, swaying in the breeze, grow in the fields of Ie Island, yet also upon its former battlefields and military installations. This also resonates with Yamashiro’s distinctive editing strategy in Mud Man, in which footage shot on Ie Island and footage shot on Jeju Island are interwoven in a detailed and complex way. Through this editing, she abstracts and interweaves different places and histories, in the hope that when viewers encounter the work, they might connect the landscapes they see with the history of the place where they themselves live, or with their own personal histories.[7]
Gangjeong, on Jeju, is another site of struggle, its residents long opposed to the construction of a US–Korea naval base. In 1948 the Jeju 4·3 Incident broke out; the island’s leftist and self-governing communities were bloodily suppressed, with tens of thousands of civilians killed, and the trauma was thereafter repressed, silenced, and even stigmatized by the South Korean government for decades.[8]
Chikako Yamashiro, Mud Man, 2016, 3-channel video installation, Size variable, 23 min, © Chikako Yamashiro. Photo by Tsai Min-Ying, installation view of Entanglements: The Rhythm of Being, 2026, Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Reproduced by permission of Chikako Yamashiro Production.
The 1945 Battle of Okinawa took nearly a quarter of all Okinawans. Both Okinawa and Jeju were once independent kingdoms, later colonized, and after the war became strategic nodes and major military bases. The Japanese image critic Masashi Kohara (小原真史) calls the two islands “siblings” in their relations with the United States, Japan, and Korea respectively, both alike cursed by their geopolitical value.[9]
Bodies That Cannot Leave Their Native Ground
In Mud Man, poetic editing interweaves the two places’ experiences across three channels; the fragments need not carry any clear sequence or relation—the work seeks to present the two islands’ shared bodily predicament. Recurring images of wings and flight always gesture toward refusal. Outside the gallery, Yamashiro placed a trilingual dialogue in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese: the narrtor is startled that the people here all have wings. The old one says, “Does that surprise you? Everyone here has wings. But they are useless. I would tear them off, if I could.” The narrator then ask, “Why did you not fly away?” The old one replies, “Why should I fly away from my own town? Why leave my homeland, the dead, the gods?” [10] The wings symbolize a subjectivity these people once pocessed; now only the empty shells of wings remain, stripped of the power to fly, carring with them the melancholy of being unwilling to leave their native ground.
Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2016, 3 channel video installation, 23 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Conclusion: Memory as Bodily Experience
Mud Man withholds any direct retelling of the war’s context; instead, sound first pierces the viewer’s body and the touch of mud clings to the skin, so that the war memories of Okinawa and Jeju reach the viewer through bodily sensation. The war memories of the two islands flow here as “affect,” passing through the viewer’s body. At the film’s end, the mud-covered figures raise their hands; the applause swells and then returns to silence.
In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation,[11] Brian Massumi equates “affect” with “intensity” and distinguishes it from “emotion.” Emotion is a feeling already named, delimited, and absorbed into the subject’s narrative; affect is a bodily intensity not yet delimited, one that consciousness cannot fully capture. In the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader,[12] Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth further note that affect occurs “between” bodies—a force of touching and being touched, an intensity transmitted within relation, not yet congealed into emotion. What Mud Man seeks to convey is precisely this intensity before naming: it does not resolve war into recognizable sorrow or fear, but lets memory flow, unformed, among screen, sound, and the viewer’s body. Yet the transmission of affect does not guarantee arrival, nor is it necessarily understood; it may linger, or it may be missed entirely. In handing memory over to the body, Mud Man also raises the uncertainty of sensory transmission, leaving it for the viewer to explore. —[SCR]
[1] “土の人” is read tsuchi no hito and may also be rendered “people of the land.” Yamashiro uses the title to echo and invert “dojin” (土人), a slur once used to demean Okinawans. See Rebecca Jennison, “Performance, Memory, and Affect in Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud Man,” in Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles: Art in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2021), p. 209. ↩
[2] Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, “Song of the Land, by Chikako Yamashiro,” Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, accessed August 10, 2026 ↩
[3] Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2016, accessed August 10, 2026. ↩
[4] The 1945 Battle of Okinawa was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War and among its most brutal; the US sought Okinawa as an air and naval base for the invasion of the Japanese mainland. Over eighty-three days, some 200,000 people died, more than 120,000 of them Okinawan residents. See〈沖繩戰役中最不忍直視的一頁：萬名「戰歿」的孩子們〉，《報導者》，瀏覽日期：2026年8月10日。↩
[5] “Chikako Yamashiro,” Hawaii Contemporary, accessed August 10, 2026↩
[6] On Seaweed Woman and Okinawa’s “mokunin” spaces, see Rebecca Jennison, “Performance, Memory, and Affect in Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud Man,” Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles (Routledge, 2021), pp. 200–202.↩
[7] This passage is drawn from the artist Chikako Yamashiro’s own remarks, shared in correspondence with the author of this article. ↩
[8] On the casualties of the Jeju 4·3 Incident (1948), see 許湖峻, 《濟州四．三：跨越沉默，讓真相走向世界》 (Horizon, 2025).↩
[9] Masashi Kohara (小原真史), “Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud People,” Kyotographie 2017, p. 37; cited in Rebecca Jennison, “Performance, Memory, and Affect in Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud Man,” Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles (Routledge, 2021), p. 204. ↩
[10] Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2016, accessed August 10, 2026. ↩
[11] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002).↩
[12] Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, 2010).↩
Bibliography
Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2016
（川滿彰），〈沖繩戰役中最不忍直視的一頁：萬名「戰歿」的孩子們〉，《報導者》。
（許湖峻），《濟州四．三：跨越沉默，讓真相走向世界》（Horizon，2025）。
Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, “Song of the Land, by Chikako Yamashiro”.
Hawaii Contemporary, “Chikako Yamashiro”.
Rebecca Jennison, “Performance, Memory, and Affect in Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud Man,” in Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles: Art in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2021).
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002).
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, 2010).
*Supported by the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Winsing Arts Foundation under the “Phenomena Writing—Visual Arts Criticism” Project.
**Header Image: Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2016, 3 channel video installation, 23 min. Courtesy of the artist.
