In April 2025, a reading session was held in front of A Fable Told by the Wind, part of the collection exhibition at the Takamatsu City Museum of Art, featuring finger puppets: the Collared Scops Owl and Fur-chan.
On the left is curator Ishida (the Collared Scops Owl), and on the right is Fukuda (Fur-chan).
A Fable Told by the Wind was first presented in the 2015 solo exhibition Fundamental Violence and is a bear tapestry created in collaboration with local craftswomen from Akita. The story is a metamorphosis tale in which snow melts into water and repeatedly transforms into various living and non-living things.
You can see that the audience members also have finger puppets on their hands.
Some even wear a finger puppet of a snake, knitted from yarn, around their necks.
By wearing the finger puppets on their hands, it seems that a “pathway” to the artwork opens up instantly. Unlike sight, the sensation of skin contact seems to create a kind of friction that resonates with the surroundings.
Around the same time, a puppet troupe from the Takamatsu City Museum took a ferry to visit Ringwanderung on Oshima, part of the Setouchi Triennale. Each person wore a finger puppet on one hand as they hiked up the mountain. They had lunch while gazing out over the Seto Inland Sea at a spot called “Howl from the East,” and later shared stories together in a finger puppet hut nestled in a bamboo grove.
