It was my great joy to present the outcomes of my curatorial project, DO NOTHING, to the public between June 15 and June 25 2023, during Art Week Exeter, as part of the MA Curation final exhibitions, entitled Bare Life. I would like to thank everyone who supported and assisted me in bringing this to fruition. This Arts and Culture blog provides an opportunity to give some more thorough explanations of my project that I would like to offer to audiences or other interested parties.

DO NOTHING reflects upon the recent Japanese phenomenon of a "low desire society" which has emerged as a reaction against the workplace culture of "Shachiku", where an employee is completely subservient to their company, never complaining about overwork or any other issues; a wage slave. These two terms represent the extremes of today's 21st-century consumer society. In 2017, Japanese scholar Kenichi Ohmae noted in his book The Low Desire Society, that "Japanese youth no longer want to take risks and debts, lose their desire for material things, success, marriage, children, and even sexuality, and turn away from fashion, from designer brands, from buying cars, from drinking, and even from falling in love."

The DO NOTHING project featured two related performance works. The first referenced the suffocating feeling of queuing for an interview and the second was the feeling of nothingness, lying in bed. A choice-making process in the first performance was the only way to find out if you could progress on to take part in the second part. The basic tenet of DO NOTHING is that it does not matter whether you decide to do something or nothing. The project gave the audience an option; they were not forced or purposefully directed to make a decision.

The overall artistic concept was inspired by the unique phenomenon of Japanese otaku culture, the widespread idea of Asian Corporate wage slaves, and the history of the new technology revolution. The project reflects upon the idea that we are compelled to continue ahead like zombies in a black hole of societal pressure that has no emotional worth, to the point where we have no desires of our own, we can only see the end of our lives, and feel that our lives have no significance. As a result, we are left with a choice to leave this oppressive atmosphere, to ‘do nothing’, to take a break from the feeling of suffocation to consider what we actually value and enjoy.

For the first ‘interview’ performance, the interviewee, the interviewer, and the leaflet distributor represented a microcosm of the whole company operation where graduates are looking for a job, and each role being performed is trapped in a closed loop, with the participants wanting to escape but not having the courage to break free. They might envy the person on the other side of the shop window who has chosen to DO NOTHING, lying on the bed, but they are afraid to question their own motivations or face the pressure of having to make a choice. The cycle of interviews of the participants who perform the interviews also represents the process of job hunting in society. They answer the same questions repeatedly and become increasingly smooth and boring, after having been ‘rusty’ and nervous at the outset. They also represent the phenomenon of the large number of workers who have been abandoned by society, leaving those who are left behind having to keep searching for jobs in society to try to survive, which can be interpreted as job-hopping or needing to be further vetted because of redundancies. When the audience enters the queue for the interview area, it also means that they are the ones who are about to start being judged by society.

Interviewees who receive the DO NOTHING stamp at the end of this process have been deemed by the interviewer (or society) as surplus to requirement; workers who lack the ability to compete and are outcasts from society. This is because when the interviewer asks the participant questions, it actually gives them the first opportunity to think about themselves and their role in this workplace culture. If the interview for the ‘Do Something’ firm is unsuccessful, the participant is given the chance to pause in this artificially competitive setting and to reflect on the meaning of ‘doing nothing’.

Thus, the real meaning of DO NOTHING is to think and explore options rather than simply doing nothing, lying flat on a bed. There is no requirement for that person to simply give up and ‘zone out’ in the bed area. Likewise, the audience entering this installation can engage with the person on the bed in a variety of ways.

The significance of DO NOTHING really lies in giving a space for each person to reflect on the meaning of life, in the midst an homogenizing work culture, which can feel suffocating and impersonal. Of course, life does not necessarily have a meaning, but in the constant pressure of work, and the helplessness of existence, most people forget about the true weight of being alive, which is far more than the reality of the harsh facts of survival under the technological revolution. The passing of life is not only for the sake of becoming a numb body to live in the world, existence is worth thinking about, worth exploring. Life is worth loving, worth choosing our own distinctive path.

To sum up, I hope that the participants and audiences who have joined the project, DO NOTHING, will have come away with questions or will be more interested in learning more about alternatives to the workplace culture which dominates our lives. This is why I am writing what may seem to be a quite formal explanation of the project. Even though I had expected that the curatorial process would be challenging, it is only through bringing the project into being that I fully understood the reality of being the project's curator and artist. At the same time, I was able to meet new people, gain new knowledge, and realize a clearer sense of purpose, all of which were very welcome gifts for me. Whether the gift is recognized by all or not, I hope that anyone reading this will feel a twinge of curiosity, a curiosity that may give you the gift as well. I hope you can feel as grateful as I do for this gift of reflection.

You can watch a short film about the installation below.