The lively vocabulary of shapes, colors, gestures, folds, titles, and material and symbolic simplifications that governs Shintani‘s practice serves as the basis for a regime of subtle and diligent disobedience in which she operates. By making the boundaries between art and life malleable, the artist draws on the contradictions of the art system to question its regimes of visibility, circulation, construction of meaning, and uses.

Tuiuiú, 2017. Intervention among public, private and institucional spaces (an invitation from Coletivo Sem Título s.d.)

On June 24, 2017 (St. John’s Day), three immense flags fluttered (with a fan help) within the small showcase of the Brazilian Association of Bookbinding and Restoration. Following the gaze, we proceeded to traverse the shopping gallery corridor leading to Dom José Gaspar square (an intense area of lower classes passersby), adorned with similar yet smaller vibrant flags reminiscent of Tibetan prayer flags, gently swaying in the breeze. Each flag bore familiar geometric patterns reminiscent of the Oscar Niemeyer buldings adorned with Athos Bulcão’s concrete tiles, where TV reporters narrated the daily proceedings of the National Congress’s efforts to impeach then-President Dilma Rousseff. On the square’s sidewalk, the small flags, now resting on Bolivian tablecloths, were freely distributed by apparent street vendors, as Military Police horses ambled by, observing the unusual activity in the square.

Beyond, a fluttering column of additional small flags came into view, adorning the rear wall of the exhibition room at the Mario de Andrade Public Library in the very heart of the square. Within the library, concealed from most passersby, an exhibition showcased elegant works of American canonical conceptual art. Among them were Robert Barry’s 5 Telepathic Pieces instructions, lacking any Portuguese translation; a typewritten document signed by Ian Wilson, also in English; untranslated publications by Seth Siegelaub and Lucy Lippard; and the captivating video of Joseph Beuys silently engaging with his coyote.

At the entrance to the library room, a stack of local exhibition catalogs awaited visitors. Suddenly, some of these catalogs vanished; later reappearing in the stack adorned with discreet graffiti resembling the patterns of the outside Tibetan-like flags, alongside an additional folder containing Portuguese translation for the 5 Telepathic Pieces.

Prayer Birds was an extension of the Tuiuiú flag series (2017-ongoing). The series is based on the intersection of two reference sources: the Tibetan prayer flags, whose fluttering inscriptions are traditionally spread by the wind; and the geometric-universalist patterns of Athos Bulcão’s concrete tiles present in iconic Brazilian modernist public buildings. In various sizes, shapes, and assemblies, the flag series aims to openly and playfully engage with the public at large within the political, social, and cultural contexts in which they are installed.

The city foundation of Sao Paulo is intertwined with a long history of memory erasure and politics of invisibility.

Informal workers sporting yellow vests bearing the phrase COMPRO OURO (I BUY GOLD) are a ubiquitous sight in the area. Known as “signmen,” they receive precarious pay for the hours they spend promoting advertisements with their bodies. Though visually conspicuous, they often remain invisible in terms of their humanity within the crowd.

Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB), a prominent cultural institution from the oldest national bank, sits at the heart of São Paulo’s historic center, around which the city was initially established and expanded through the forced involvement of the original inhabitants. Despite this, historical and cultural establishments in the area provide little to no acknowledgment of the legacy of these people and the violent circumstances of the colonization process. This absence of references stands in stark contrast to the tributes paid to politicians, religious figures, and primarily to the gold-seeking “white pioneers” named in all around streets, avenues and squares.

COMPRO OURO proposes a nuanced exploration of seemingly disconnected situations within São Paulo’s historic center: the invisibility of indigenous peoples and the conspicuous visibility of the “sign-men,” with the assistance of outsourced art education and cleaning teams from a cultural bank institution, themselves somehow precarious and invisible workers in the eyes of the art system.

The project aims to foster an open and egalitarian experience with the bustling passersby in the area, allowing each viewer to form (or not) their own connections based on their perceptions and personal life experiences.

COMPRO OURO (I BUY GOLD), 2019

On a late Friday afternoon, amidst the bustling public crossing that birthed São Paulo city, an outsourced team of art educators from the Bank of Brazil Cultural Center (CCBB, a significant cultural institution sponsored by the oldest national bank) meticulously inscribes a bodily symbol of the Guaraní ethnic group with charcoal, accompanied by amplified Xavante chants sourced from the internet. Over the following hour, the charcoal inscription is ceremonially adorned with red annatto powder, with spontaneous assistance from passersby. The chants gradually fade, making room for the uniformed CCBB cleaning team, also outsourced, who meticulously collect the remnants. The action concludes under the watchful eyes of participants and onlookers. Just a few hundred meters away, Guaraní protesters persist in occupying the City Hall building, while nearby televisions continue to broadcast intense coverage of the French Yellow-Vest protests from overseas, dominating the mainstream news.

From 2013 to 2016, she closely observed the dynamics and changes in Brazil’s urban and political fabric while working full-time as a street vendor, selling brigadeiros (a traditional Brazilian sweet) in the streets and open-air markets of São Paulo’s financial district.

An invitation from our backyard neighbor, Casateliê: to propose some kind of sensorial experience with food for Sarau #2, which would take place two weeks later, right after Carnival.
At the time, there was an endless debate about who could eat what from whom, who could wear whose turban, who could speak for whom. We thought: let’s mix it all.

Just two blocks from the kitchen, our newly elected mayor was beginning his crusade toward the gray-beautiful city. We gathered still-fresh banana leaves along the edges of the corridor of Avenida 23 de Maio, while the graffiti-covered walls of the avenue were being erased with gray paint by the city government. We imagined a menu with everyday soborô dishes and prepared our bento-style lunchboxes.

The Tupinabentôs were sold during the Sarau under special rules: there was a suggested price, but you could drop in whatever amount you could, or wanted, or if you wanted, in a discreet box at the back of the table. There was also the “suspended Tupinabentô” option, where one could purchase Tupinabentôs to be shared with homeless neighbors.

Based on the adaptation of a recent project carried out in a public square in São Paulo, we used the dining room as an atelier for the preparation of three hundred tuiuiús—fabric flags spray-painted with color—which once again transformed the atmosphere of the residence and sparked lively reactions among the space’s users (the previous week, the occupation of the kitchen with cassava starch, brushes, and paint for the preparation of three hundred tapiocas for the Family Lunch had already created a mood of excitement—some even reported it was the first time they had seen someone use brush and paint at Delfina).

After two weeks of studio work, we presented an immersive installation with the tuiuiús in the dining room, in dialogue with works by the other residents scattered throughout the house. The tuiuiús were freely shared (distributed) with an effusive visiting public—composed of collectors, students, artists, gallerists, curators, journalists, exhibition installers, and accidental onlookers—as a small symbolic drift: “Collecting as (everyone’s) Practice.”

When we moved to the farmhouse in Raffo (neighborhood of Suzano, Greater São Paulo), it was a relief. The place had electricity! Up until then, I had accompanied my parents in exploring two or three other rural properties, I guess in Jundiapeba or Itaquaquecetuba. They were places with very strange dark ofuro baths remnants of Japanese immigrants who had already passed to a better place, and I kept wondering how life would be without a fridge (as I was still unaware of the kerosene-based refrigeration, or even coal irons…). And the worst part, how I would negotiate the kitchen with the ghosts of the old owners, just relying on an oil lamp.

At Raffo, aside from the luxury of having light, the structure we found had been built by another family much more traditionally Japanese than ours, just like the previous sites we had visited. The place used to be a poultry farm, which later turned into a strawberry plantation. My parents tried to go ahead with the strawberries, but I think something was lacking to take care of the berries. It was necessary to keep manual thinning and, from time to time, covering the beds with black plastic. And I found the way we had to assemble the bowls somewhat strange: putting the small and deformed strawberries at the bottom, and the big, beautiful ones only on the top layer. The result was that shortly after, we started dispatching boxes of lettuce, watercress, and kale in my uncle’s F-4000 trucks to the Ceasa wholesale market in São Paulo.

Even though it was brief – the strawberry venture lasted just one season – it was practically the only red experience we had during our time at Raffo. We tried a later attempt with tomatoes, but I guess, judging by everyone´s glances, my father had a serious accident with pesticides, and the tomatoes were definitively aborted.

After all, tomatoes were not strawberries, and strawberries were sweet, even though we couldn’t eat them, small or large, at the always imminent risk of intoxication.

Alice Shintani, 2007

Menas [Less] (2015-2021) is an installation whose arrangement and composition change within each context and space that it occupies. The artist devised its elements during a period when she was distanced from the conventional contexts of exhibiting and circulating contemporary art. At the time, Shintani was working directly on the streets, selling brigadeiros [chocolate homemade candies] and observing gradual changes to co-existence in a country that was, and still is, going through a profound dismantling of its social and political structures. At home, she meticulously painted, sewed and folded papers, creating a collection inviting to visual exploration. The physically light collection can be packed up and transported with little effort, but opens up in a similar way to assembling a market vendor’s or street seller’s stall. The structures that give its forms volume and rhythm are cardboard boxes taken from supermarkets in the city.

Mata [Forest / Kill] (2019-2021) has been developed gradually, without a pre-established project. The work consists of a series of gouaches based on the Brazilian flora and fauna images, especially from the Amazon rainforest. The option for a classic pictorial subject, as well as the inviting and flat iconography, seems to suggest a self-referential and pacified work; yet most of the elements explicitly or implicitly portrayed are at risk of extinction. In this sense, the gouaches intensely black background contributes to highlighting the color luminosity the artist uses to represent the vivacity of something. But it can also be read as a metaphor for the uncertainty and opacity that characterizes our time from an ecological, social, and political point of view.

In this way, Alice Shintani’s incursions across supports, scales, and situations—marked by a political attentiveness to ways of living and coexisting in the world—find particular resonance in her stretcher-based paintings. Far from signaling a disciplinary return, these works allow the memory of expanded experiences to reverberate within contained surfaces: in them, color and form emerge as traces of collective journeys, of the friction between art and life, and of the persistent effort to think of painting as a porous field, capable of absorbing the real and returning it under the sign of synthesis. In this play of condensations, Shintani reinscribes on the canvas both the vitality and the precariousness of the world, making economy of means a strategy for opening up to other temporalities and modes of relation.