Aine Nakamura’s hands on tape encompasses a year-long research project at The Lab, taking shape as an installation and series of performances throughout June and July. The work points to disparate subjects of the raw silk trade, the erased labor of both women and silkworms, and the metamorphosis of bodies and materials. Nakamura draws a connection between the city of San Francisco (“mulberry port,” as written with Chinese characters) and her maternal family’s city of Hachioji, Japan (“mulberry city”), shortly before her family’s historical home was sold and left the family. Drawing on her longstanding practice of embodied performance, Nakamura takes on the role of an oni, with a devil mask, as a guardian of her family’s historical home in Hachioji, with photographic documentation threaded through the installation, while further drawing connections between bodies and buildings—a process of healing and release.
At the center of the exhibition is the work “Devil Mud,” comprising 445 pieces of plaster removed from The Lab’s walls, as if these scraps of plaster were taken out through surgery and mended with silk bandages. A suspended sculpture entitled “Moths” involves the same number of scraps of Japanese paper screens belonging to her great grandmother, a transformation of women’s endurance in her family into the air as dust or dreams. These works are surrounded by the photographic documentation of Nakamura’s performance as oni, alongside archival photographs and objects drawn from the site in Hachioji, from The Lab, and from her father’s childhood at a U.S. military base near Hachioji. Poetry and words in both Japanese and English, functioning both as her scores and reflections, are dispersed throughout the space tracking the changes of her inner shape and process. As these hidden stories and spaces across and between sites draw closer together, the walls of The Lab become a skin, the seams seen as scars, the stains as wrinkles, and our attention is drawn toward the hidden places behind walls and under floorboards.
The title hands on tape draws attention to the physical architecture of both sites, the mending and transformation process at The Lab alongside Nakamura’s embodiment of past surgeries out of necessity due to her family history and genetic traits. Nakamura traces the healing of wounds beneath the surface, and the continuing process of departure from her family’s role in silk textile manufacturing through its relation to war, trade and gendered labor. Stories engraved in bodies may be difficult to reach, but we are able to put our hands on tape that is affixed to a scar, acknowledging and imagining what may be beneath it.
Nakamura will perform throughout the course of the exhibition, both solo and with a number of longstanding Bay Area collaborators.
Opening Reception & Performance: Friday, June 13, 2025, 6pm - 9pm
Opening performance (7pm) including a duo with Ava Koohbor
Performance: Saturday, June 28, 2025, 7pm
Duo performance with Kanoko Nishi-Smith & collaborative work with Hyeyung Sol Yoon
Closing Performance: Saturday, July 12, 2025, 7pm
Closing performance including a duo with Jacob Felix Heule
The Lab’s gallery hours are Friday & Saturday, 12pm - 5pm, unless otherwise noted
Lead photo by Takaaki Asai.
Travel funds for Aine Nakamura’s research have been provided in part by the Center for Japanese Studies at UC Berkeley.
Aine Nakamura
With her unique transnational background growing up between Japan and the United States, Nakamura has developed her transborder and interdisciplinary art of voice and movement. She tells stories through her performances, exploring nuanced potentialities of voice and body, and of listening and sensing. Her recent works include her solo performance of sung and spoken voice and body Under an Unnamed Flower, presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale; solo performance project Circle hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains, presented at Theatertreffen at Berliner Festspiele after its premiere at the Gallatin Galleries; and Shades of Edge, premiered at The Lab in collaboration with Olivia Ting, transcending between two worlds, which was a part of the process for Nakamura to see the interior wall as a membrane and change of shapes. Nakamura has been awarded the Venice Biennale Site-Specific Performance Grant, the Fulbright Fellowship (Berlin), and The Leo Bronstein Homage Award.
About The Lab
Established in 1984, The Lab provides significant funding, time, and space to traditionally underrepresented artists. Located in the historic Redstone Labor Temple in the Mission District of San Francisco, The Lab presents hundreds of artists, with thousands of visitors annually for events and exhibitions ranging from experimental music and sound practices, poetry and literary arts, theater, visual arts, film and expanded cinema, and multidisciplinary work.