Sayaka Abe

The work A tent village – Private into public, is a drawing of a tented village in the middle of Tokyo. In 2014 the artist Sayake Abe interviewed dozens of people in the city, in search of the meaning of ‘uchi’ (home). On a hot day in July she discovered the tented village in Yoyogi park, right in the middle of the city with its millions of inhabitants. She spent the whole summer there and listened to conversations of its inhabitants. This allowed her to observe the reality, the meaning and the society of Tokyo. But it also raised the question ‘How can private and a public spaces exist alongside one another in this part of Tokyo?’ She tries to explain this question by making drawings of this tented village. This meant that Abe was serving not only the inhabitants of the tented village, but also all of Tokyo’s residents, because the tent poles with their canvasses, the cooking utensils, air beds and blankets form a portrayal on a small scale of how we interact with our world on a larger scale.