Mieko Shiomi (composer) facts for kids

Mieko Shiomi (塩見 允枝子, Shiomi Mieko, born 1938) is a Japanese artist, composer, and performer. She was a very important member of an art movement called Fluxus. Shiomi is famous for exploring what sound and music can be. She co-founded an experimental music group in Japan called Group Ongaku.

Her art has been shared all over the world. Many of her most famous works were created in the 1960s. These include her Spatial Poem series, Water Music, and Endless Box. Even in her eighties, she is still creating new art.

Biography

Early Life and Music

Mieko Shiomi was born in Okayama, Japan. She started taking music lessons when she was a child. In 1957, she went to the Tokyo University of the Arts to study music.

While she was still a student in 1960, she helped start a group called Group Ongaku. The name means "Group Music." The group wanted to explore new ways of making music, often through improvisation and action. They used everyday objects like vacuum cleaners and kitchen tools to create sounds. This challenged the traditional ideas of what music could be.

After finishing her studies, Shiomi started creating "action poems." These were not written with musical notes. Instead, they were instructions written in words. The performer would read the instructions and decide how to perform the piece.

Moving to New York and Fluxus

In 1964, Shiomi was invited to New York City by George Maciunas, the founder of an art movement called Fluxus. Fluxus was a group of artists, composers, and designers from around the world. They believed that art should be fun, simple, and part of everyday life. They often created "events," which were simple actions that could be performed by anyone.

Shiomi's "action poems" were a perfect fit for Fluxus. Maciunas was so impressed with her work that he used it to help pay for her flight to New York. From 1964 to 1965, Shiomi lived in New York and worked closely with other Fluxus artists. She created many famous pieces during this time, like Water Music and Disappearing Music for Face.

Living in New York changed how she saw art. She began to see that everyday activities could be turned into performances. She said she learned to "look at various things in [her] daily life from different viewpoints and transformed them into nondaily actions (performance)."

Return to Japan and Later Career

Shiomi returned to Japan in 1965. She continued to connect with Fluxus artists through the mail. This is when she started her famous Spatial Poem series. She sent instructions to people all over the world and asked them to respond. Their collected responses became the artwork.

After getting married in 1970, Shiomi's life changed. She was busy raising a family in Osaka. This made it hard to travel for performances. However, she found creative ways to continue her art from home. She used the postal system to create her Spatial Poems, turning a household task into a global art project.

Once her children were grown, she became more active in the art world again. She began to experiment with technology like computers and telephones in her art. Today, Mieko Shiomi continues to create and perform new works. She lives and works in Minoo, Osaka.

Famous Artworks

Action Poems and Events

In the early 1960s, Shiomi began to question what music really was. She believed it wasn't just about sound, but also about the feeling of time and action. This led her to create "action poems." These were simple, written instructions for a performance.

One example is Boundary Music, which instructed performers to "make the faintest possible sounds of a boundary condition." Another was Endless Box, a set of boxes nested inside each other. A performer could open the boxes one by one. These pieces were less about making music and more about the action itself. When she learned about the "event scores" of other Fluxus artists, she realized her work was similar and began calling them "events."

Water Music

Shiomi created Water Music in 1964. It is one of her most famous pieces. The instructions are very simple:

1. Give the water still form.
2. Let the water lose its still form.

The instructions can be interpreted in many ways. When she first performed it, she simply offered someone a glass of water to drink. Later, the instructions were printed on bottles. During a performance, she passed the bottles to the audience and asked them to perform the second instruction. This made the audience part of the artwork. The piece shows how a simple, everyday action like drinking water can become a moment of art.

Spatial Poem

The Spatial Poem series is perhaps Shiomi's most ambitious work. She started it in 1965 just before she left New York. It was a series of nine events that took place over ten years, from 1965 to 1975.

For each Spatial Poem, Shiomi mailed instructions to Fluxus members and friends around the world. She asked them to perform an action and send her a report of what they did.

• For Spatial Poem No. 1 (Word Event), she asked people to write a word on a card and "let it be in an unexpected place."
• For Spatial Poem No. 3 (Falling Event), she asked participants to drop something from a high place and report what happened.

The responses came from many different countries. Shiomi collected all the reports, maps, and photos. Together, these responses created a single artwork that connected people across time and space. The Spatial Poem series showed that a performance doesn't have to happen in one place at one time. It can be a network of actions happening all over the globe.

Selected Artworks

Mieko Shiomi creates events that mix music with actions in the environment. Some of her works include:

• Mirror, 1963
• Boundary Music, 1963
• Endless Box, 1963–64
• Events and Games, 1964
• Air Event, 1964
• Water Music, 1964
• Disappearing Music for Face, flipbook, 1965
• Spatial Poems no. 1-no. 9, 1965–1975