Listening Histories: Miya Masaoka in Conversation with Miki Kaneda

Miya Masaoka. Photograph by Heike Liss.

"KOTO-monster," is how miya masaoka describes the wired-up and electrified Japanese zither that she's known to play and compose with. Her instrument is a "Japanese Frankenstein, a mutant Godzilla, a deformed hybrid." A cultural amalgamation, traditional and contemporary, masaoka's koto is not just a cross-cultural hybrid, but also a temporal mutant: "it has its foot in three millennia."¹ The koto was also her way into gagaku, which is typically described as traditional imperial Japanese court music. But the idea of gagaku as the music of the nation is actually a modern concept. (It was in fact a strategic move during the Meiji restoration in the late ninteenth century that an emphasis on gagaku's continuity now served to bolster the image of the uninterrupted power of the Japanese emperor.) In contrast, masaoka wants you to know the story of gagaku repertoire that was a part of lively transcultural jam sessions sometime around the seventh or eighth century, when "musicians from Persia, India, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and China performed and improvised together."² Whether as a composer, improvisor, practitioner of traditional Japanese performing arts, sound artist, or a "vibration artist" as she recently called herself, masaoka's practice over the past few decades has consistently troubled the borders and the violence of national and other impositions of identity in projects like Ritual for Giant Hissing Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches (1995), What is the Sound of Naked (Asian) Men? (2001), and Triangle of Resistance (Innova Recordings, 2016). Paired with this pursuit is an investigation into the workings of sound and vibration propelled by a genuine joy in finding out ways of communication between bodies across species through projects like Pieces for Plants (2007–) and the Bee Project (2000).

Since 2016, Masaoka has been spending time with her project Vaginated Chairs, which she has presented internationally in several iterations. But "presented" is not quite the right word. The project is at once a musical composition, a sound art piece, and an array of chairs to seat a group gathered for a conversation. It's as much an open score, or guide to improvisation, and an invitation for any number of participants, as it is a sound installation piece. It has also been growing, in conjunction with a theoretical manifesto of sorts that proposes ways of reconceptualizing the vagina as a site for listening and perception. Masaoka asserts that "the vagina is the third ear," challenging the idea of the vagina as the symbol of sexualized reproductive female bodies.³

Like many of Masoka's projects, Vaginated Chairs defies conventional categories that divide artworks and musical practices by medium and genre. This has some implications for attempts at representing her practice that privilege experience and participation. Her work resists representation. This is because communication between participants and the conversation they generate—the sensory perception of the vibrations of the chairs against the "concentrated nerve endings in the vagina," and the act of imagining the possibility of listening with the vagina—are constitutive of the piece, not latent effects or mere "responses."⁴ Photo, video, and audio documentation are not enough, and verbal and written descriptions also have limits. For this reason, while Vaginated Chairs is the starting point, this dialogue aims at conversing with the piece, rather than necessarily talking about it. We began speaking of the power of naming, then virtuoso sitting, interspecies communication, and listening as survival and performance. Wrapping up, we discussed how Masaoka continues to embody the history of forced dislocation and the internment of her family in concentration camps during World War II. As it stands, recognizing that "for people of color, the body in a social context is the racial body in a hierarchy" is no less urgent in 2019 than it was in 1942, as she explains in the conversation below. And yet, in almost every utterance, as in her creative practice over the years, Masaoka exudes humor, delighting in composing, naming, performing, and sensing new ways of...