is a Japanese artist, composer, and performer who played a key role in the development of Fluxus. A co-founder of the seminal postwar Japanese experimental music collective Group Ongaku, she is known for her investigations of the nature and limits of sound, music, and auditory experiences. Her work has been widely circulated as Fluxus editions, featured in concert halls, museums, galleries, and non-traditional spaces, as well as being re-performed by other musicians and artists numerous times. She is best known for her work of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially Spatial Poem, Water Music, Endless Box, and the various instructions in Events & Games, all of which were produced as Fluxus editions. Now in her eighties, she continues to produce new work.
Biography
Early Training and Group Ongaku
Mieko Shiomi was born in Okayama, Japan. She began music lessons as a child and studied music at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1957 under composers Yoshio Hasegawa and Minao Shibata, graduating in 1961. In 1960, while still a student, she co-founded Group Ongaku (Group Music) to explore improvisation and action. Members of this collective included Takehisa Kosugi, Shukou Mizuno, Mikio Tojima, and Gen’ichi Tsuge, with Yasunao Tone joining later.
Shiomi returned to Okayama in March 1962 after completing her bachelor's degree and a year of graduate study at the Tokyo University of the Arts. In a solo performance at the Okayama Cultural Center she performed her own new compositions alongside those of American composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. Between 1963 and 1964, she began to compose what she termed "action poems," eliminating musical notation from the score entirely in favor of verbal instructions to be interpreted by the performer.
Fluxus Life in New York
Several incidents connected Shiomi to Fluxus, leading George Maciunas to invite her to New York in 1964. Art historian Midori Yoshimoto explains that both Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ōno had mentioned Shiomi's work to Maciunas, and art historian Colby Chamberlain notes that a card in Maciunas' file records a recommendation of Shiomi from Toshi Ichiyanagi by letter, written after she performed in his concert at the Sogetsu Art Center, on January of 1962. Shiomi further explains that while working on the action poems Mirror Piece and Endless Box in 1963, she made a trip to Tokyo where she was introduced to Nam June Paik by a mutual friend. Upon showing Paik her action poems, he promised to send her work to George Maciunas who was apparently so enamored of the work that he had it turned into the edition that funded her flight to New York.
From 1964 to 1965, Shiomi lived in New York City, working closely with George Maciunas and contributing to Fluxus events, editions, and communal life. Shiomi and Shigeko Kubota had flown over together on the same flight, and both initially lived near Maciunas's loft in Soho. As a result, Shiomi worked closely with Maciunas, Kubota, and Takako Saito, hosting communal fluxus dinners whose labor primarily ended up falling to the women, and producing Fluxus editions in the evenings until Kubota and Shiomi took up part-time evening work. After her arrival in New York, Maciunas continued to incorporate many of her works, such as Water Music (1965) and Disappearing Music for Face (1965), into Fluxus editions. His enthusiasm for incorporating her work into Fluxus editions secured her place as a seminal member of the loose collective, and has led many artists and musicians—both in and beyond Fluxus—to perform her work at both impromptu events and formal concerts.
While based in New York, Shiomi participated in several live performances, including the Perpetual Fluxfest at Washington Square Gallery in 1964 where she performed six pieces—Double Windows, Direction Event, Air Event, Passing Music, Water Music, and Disappearing Music for Face—which all incorporated audience participation, expanding the role of "performer" within her work. While living among other New York-based Fluxus artists, she also came to more actively re-conceive the boundaries of performance beyond formal events. Upon her arrival, Maciunas had secured temporary living arrangements for Kubota and Shiomi and helped them move extra furniture from his loft to theirs, in what Maciunas jokingly referred to as a "carrying event." She described her experience in New York as a time during which she "looked at various things in [her] daily life from different viewpoints and transformed them into nondaily actions (performance), and made a feedback of these actions into [her] daily life again."