Art guerrillas Chim Pom stage show in a box

It’s only appropriate that, when I finally meet Neo-Dadaist art collective Chim↑Pom, it is not in some stuffy gallery or art museum, but in an abandoned hospital scheduled for demolition near Hatsudai Station in Tokyo.

The group has come here to participate in ArtGig, an occasional event that packages art more like a club night or a rave. Downstairs in the basement the frenetic art-punk of the band Trippple Nippples thunders away.

As five of Chim↑Pom’s six members sit opposite me, two of them in wheelchairs, in an abandoned ward where there are still some items of medical equipment, I try to get behind the fast-developing myth of the group.

What are they up to? What drives them? And why does Ellie, the group’s only female member, look like a trashy angel but talk with a voice like a cute drain?

Cute ‘n’ sleazy

Since their debut on the Tokyo Art scene a few years ago with their “Super Rat” project, Chim↑Pom -- whose name, incidentally, sounds like “penis” in Japanese -- have worked hard to maintain their avant-garde edge and position as the enfant terrible of Japan’s art world.

In these terms, “Super Rat” was a hard act to follow. It involved catching live rats in Shibuya’s notoriously scuzzy Center Gai, and having them stuffed and made into cute, Pikachu-themed sculptures -- apparently a comment on the conflation of cuteness and sleaze for which Shibuya is justly world-renowned.

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Subsequent projects have served to maintain their status as Japan’s premier “art terrorists.” In 2008 they hired a skywriting plane to write “Pika” -- the Japanese term for a blinding flash -- in the sky above Hiroshima during the commemoration period for the atomic bombing.

Then, in April this year, they “assaulted” one of the nation’s art treasures, “Myth of Tomorrow” by Taro Okamoto, secretly adding an image of the broken Fukushima nuclear reactors to the giant sprawling mural that is displayed in Shibuya Station.

Trick or treat?

Chim↑Pon hit the headlines with this post-Fukushima addition to “Myth of Tomorrow” by Taro Okamoto in Shibuya.

With such a reputation for notoriety, the first bit of cognitive dissonance that strikes you when you meet the group is how sweet and down-to-earth they are.

The group’s youthful-looking leader Ryuta Ushiro is far from the surly avant-garde artist angered by the world’s inability to understand his art.

Beer can in hand, the amiable 33-year-old suggests that we just chat rather than have a formal question-and-answer session, while Ellie stops proceedings for a moment to don a pair of flashing plastic horns -- quite appropriate, as an upcoming ArtGig, organized by the Israeli-born promoter Shai Ohayon, has a Halloween theme, with many of the attendees in costume.

Maybe Ushiro’s aversion to a formal interview has something to do with the fact that he has an appointment the next day at the public prosecutor’s office to answer some quite different questions about the addition to Okamoto’s mural.

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An addition, it must be said, designed to be removed without damaging the original.

“We do respect the law as a kind of masterpiece of humanity,” Ushiro says in slight penitential mode. “But still there are some things that might be more important than the existing legal system.”

But while skirmishing with the law or offending certain sensibilities -- the Hiroshima stunt drew the ire of survivor groups -- may be part of what they do, the essence of Chim↑Pom is their rejection of the narrow confines of Japan’s art world.

With its rules and conventions it can at times resemble a ghetto, effectively limiting its interaction with the wider citizenry. Much of the group’s work can be seen as an attempt to break through these barriers.