Prolific to the extent that only a collective of this many members could be, Chim↑Pom’s garbage, rat, crow, explosion and vomit favouring spur-of-the-moment projects are so broad and bountiful that they are difficult to keep up with.
Having joined forces in 2005 after meeting through Makoto Aida, the six members have really done a lot of stuff in not a lot of time; some of it politically charged, some of it hilarious, some of it just odd. They have, for example:
- Mustered hundreds of wild crows in the sky around the Shibuya 109 department store using a stuffed crow and a loudspeaker broadcasting crow sounds.
- Blown up Louis Vuitton handbags in Cambodian landmines.
- Called little old ladies and tricked them into revealing their bank account details, and then transferred money to them (a reverse Ore Ore scam).
- Filmed Ellie (the group’s only female member) in a pink mini skirt vomiting pink liquid (apparently they had never heard of Mike Parr, who got sick of art in the 1970s).
- Collected feral rats in Tokyo’s Shibuya district and turned them into SUPER☆RATs – taxidermically stuffed and painted to look like Pikachu.
- Held a reverse auction of their work where prices were set as high as $100 million to be bided down until someone was willing to pay the price, with the proceeds going to charity.
- Made miniature figurines out of filth scraped from their bodies.
- Conducted numerous ‘living sand sculptures’ (see above) by painting themselves in sand and posing for prolonged periods at parties or on the beach.
- Held an exhibition where Toshinori, one of the group’s members, spent two weeks with a rat and a crow in a room, living off garbage.
And so on and so forth. Chim↑Pom (meaning something like ‘bunch of penises’) will have a series of video works featured in Spooky Action at a Distance, which opens at 6pm at Black & Blue next Friday and runs for two weeks. BYO strawberry milk.
