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“Happy Spring,” the latest retrospective of Japanese artist collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group (formerly known as Chim↑Pom), brought together works from the past 17 years. Organized by different themes, the works spanned a range of topics, including Tokyo’s urban development, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. As part of the show, the collective also hosted interactive spaces such as a daycare center, a museum shop, and an indoor asphalt-paved street with potholes, streetlights, and flyers. In general, Chim↑Pom’s works can be categorized as socially-oriented projects, events, interventions, and even parties, from which artifacts and videos are left to impart the seed of the moment. The sociopolitical themes they work through, however, seem to be venues through which they engage in their most facile medium and urgent topic: collectivity.

The first arena of collectivity is the internal dynamic of Chim↑Pom itself. Many of their works, while responding to the specific time and history of the world, depart from the personal moments and desires of Ellie, one of the group’s members. This was evident in the multiroom section of the retrospective detailing her contributions and eerily praising her qualities. Ellie’s role seems to be at times akin to the art-historical female muse, whose being becomes fair-use artistic fodder, and at other times an empowered trickster, who directs the group to fulfill her own wild fantasies.

In Thank You Celeb – I’m Bokan! (2007), which was inspired by Ellie’s fantasy of philanthropic celebrity-ism, Chim↑Pom members defused landmines in Cambodia with Ellie’s luxury items and a plaster sculpture of herself. They then returned to Japan to hold a charity auction with the exploded items-cum-artworks. Although the work is framed as a critical gaze at global wealth disparities, the grounding of the work in Ellie’s fantasy underscores a relation of fetish, care, and the indulgence of whims between the members. Their work becomes a playground in which collective efforts are complicated with friendship, love, admiration, and reified gendered roles.

On another level, Chim↑Pom’s works operate on an innate understanding of Japanese societal structures. Positioning themselves as a part of street culture, they explore collectivity both inside and outside, from the scale of the body to the magnitude of the city. In the video KI-AI 100 (2011), they bring to life a visceral solidarity that can only exist after disaster. Standing amid rubble in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake, the artists and local residents join arms in a circle and shout 100 cheers, ranging from “Do your best, Tohoku!” to sillier phrases, such as “I want a girlfriend this year!” In the videos Black of Death (2007–13) and Super Rat (2006– ), uncomfortably close physical encounters and assaults with ravens and rats remind the viewer of the precarious distance between humans and their nonhuman counterparts as they cohabit the communal body of the city. 

Some works, such as The other side (2014–17), lack this vitality. Prompted by the denial of Ellie’s entry into the United States, Chim↑Pom, with the input of local residents, built a tree house that looks over the US-Mexico border and a tunnel that went underground. However, in this context, Ellie’s frustration is clumsily displaced onto the Central American migrant’s experience of the violence of the US-Mexico border, and the replication of the tree house in the exhibition did little to spatially generate the meaning and experience of the original project. Instead, the work fell flat in its attempt to encompass the possibilities of border transgression in a group that seems to be able to play best with border transgression.

Chim↑Pom’s works live on the edge between a performed and an embodied reality, between a defiant response to expectation and a desire to explore to their hearts’ content. Their works, whether in the indulgence of fantasy or exploration of their own mistakes, make this radical gesture: collective movement does not always have to make sense. It is not necessarily righteous or clean. Rather, it must be fun, in failure, in struggle, in absurdity and perverse delight.