Until today, readers of the story interpret the concluding scene to be either Joe’s last smile before his death on stage or Joe overcoming his prolonged exhaustion of fighting in life. After defeating his opponent, the protagonist, a delinquent juvenile whose life was invigorated by boxing while in prison, is illustrated colorless and lifeless. The boxer Joe Yabuki is seen smiling in his final image in the popular manga series. Such bleeding of fiction into life was even more fascinating with the participation of Shūji Terayama and his avant-garde theater group Tenjō Sajiki who further dramatized the event by pushing the theatricality of death, mourning, and loss in staging boxing matches, band performances, and other rituals of aliveness.Īshita no Joe artifacts: The last scene of Ashita no Joe featuring the protagonist Joe Yabuki The 1970s cult following of the influential manga Ashita no Joe can be represented in these photographs taken during the funeral organized by the publication’s avid fans. In this post-hospice scenario, the visitor-performer is always (a) patient, awaiting the therapeutic touch of a collective.Īshita no Joe artifacts: A funeral staged by Ashita no Joe fans with the participation of Shuji Terayama
For example, the white cube is a therapy room or a lecture hall, where contemplation meets abstraction and therapeutic touch meets conceptual distance. It uses the idea of a space-social and affective-that can accommodate forms of therapy, of performance, and abstract thinking. In its iteration in the Biennale, You Are is presented as a document: objects that the artist commonly utilizes in her performance and the video documentation that recorded her execution of a performance. The found audio of a hijacking incident envelops these matters, conjuring a mood beyond terror and instead about permission to perform death while alive. All of them fictionalize the chasms that separate life and death-conclusion and suspension-in which these artistic expressions belabor on the idea of social and affective spaces where death or life is neither mourned nor eulogized.
These scenes show the diversity of relationships when death supersedes life as the primordial force of exhibiting aliveness. While they may look appropriated today, the recordings of Popa’s performance with some of her tools in occupying a space are juxtaposed with the drawing of the protagonist’s final image in Ashita no Joe and found materials related to a funeral organized by Shūji Terayama for one of the fighters in the manga. Three years after her death, Alina Popa’s You Are is resurging in the exhibition economy in conjunction with anecdotes and myths from Japan’s 1970s cultural scene: the enthusiastic restaging of events from the famous manga Ashita no Joe in real life.
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