Installation

The Voice of Inconstant Savage
Commissioned for the Engawa – Japanese Contemporary Art Season programme organized by Calouste Gulbenkian Museum's Modern Art Center, The Voice of Inconstant Savage is an immersive installation that superimposes a prayer inspired by the story of a 16th-century Portuguese missionary, a chant from a Kakure-Kirishitan (hidden Christians) prayer – a religion rooted in Nagasaki Prefecture –, a chant from the Karawara spirits of the Awá indigenous people – who live in the Amazon rainforest – and a chorus of Western Gregorian chant. Morinaga questions the position of the aesthetics of inconstancy in relation to the discourse of the “savage” that modern society confronts.

Field recordings

Sombat Simla: Master Of Bamboo Mouth Organ
Simla is known in Thailand as one of the greatest living players of the khene, the ancient bamboo mouth organ particularly associated with Laos but found throughout East and Southeast Asia. His virtuosic and endlessly inventive renditions of traditional and popular songs have earned him the title ‘the god of khene’, and he is known for his innovative techniques and ability to mimic other instruments and non-musical sound, including, as a writer for the Bangkok Post describes, ‘the sound of a train journey, complete with traffic crossings and the call of barbecue chicken vendors’.

Cinema

Shadow and Act
Shadow and Act navigates through the remains of Chaya Jitrakorn, built in 1940, once the most prominent photo studio in Thailand and the only preferred studio of director Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram. The iflm explores the studio's seventy two year archives and its owner's personal photographs, while representing the defunct studio like the corpse of a deceased giant. The film experiments with the relationships between memory and space, and the past and future.(https://www.acc.go.kr/en/board/schedule/event/2610)

Outland ethnologies

HOKKAIDO WITH & LIJIANG WITH/OUT
The experiments presented here, Hokkaido With and Lijiang With/Out are, if you will believe it, connected. Think of them as an evolution of inquiries into an artist’s presence or absence in an unfamiliar place, built on both doubt and confidence, both a lack and a surfeit of context. Both projects put pressure on artists by putting them in difficult situations, but by working directly with these problems, the projects and the artists open up new possibilities in their unusual approaches.

Field recordings

Gong Culture of Southeast Asia「Bahnar」
The Bahnar are an ethnic group in Vietnam, living from the north to the south and northeast of the Vietnamese central highlands. Bahnar speak a language in the Mon-Khmer language group. These recordings were conducted in Dak Doa, Gia Lai Province. Bahnar people use both knobbed gongs and flat gongs; knobbed gongs mostly have a rhythmic function, the flat gongs are used for melodies. Usually a gong ensemble comprises 8 or 9 gongs in total (6 flat gongs and 2 or 3 knobbed gongs), but the number of gongs can go up to 20 (10 flat gongs, 10 knobbed gongs) or even 22 (11 flat and 11 knobbed). For this recording, the musicians brought different sorts of sharpened twig as drumsticks. the biggest knobbed gong was played by twig of jackfruits. For Bahnar people, gongs - equivalent in value to several water buffaloes - are acquired through exchanges with the people from Laos, Cambodia and nowadays with Kinh groups of Vietnam. Gong music is commonly played among the Bahnar on particular occasions such as harvesting, funeral, buffalo sacrifice, wedding ceremonies, etc.