About
MIMAI is an independent platform for contemporary art and research, founded by visual artist Silvia Y. Tam and scholar Shingo Shimada, whose respective practices move across visual art, international literature, modern Japanese studies and comparative sociology. Based in Düsseldorf and Middle Rhine Valley, Germany with a research base in Atami, Japan. MIMAI develops exhibitions, publications, films, archives and collaborative projects across different geographical and cultural contexts.
MIMAI looks at history through a particular lens: an individual life, an image, an object, a place, an overlooked document. What seems small or private becomes a window onto larger historical and cultural structures—migration, cultural translation, memory, belonging, and the ways histories are lived and transmitted. Artistic practice and theoretical inquiry work side by side, neither required to illustrate or legitimise the other.
Origins
MIMAI grew out of an ongoing dialogue between Tam and Shimada. Their collaboration took shape around the exhibition "Shanghai 1920–1945: Pipe, Turpentine and Fugue (Goethe Open Space, Shanghai, 2024)." At its starting point were two family histories marked by movement across countries, languages and political systems. Shanghai became a point of convergence, and the questions raised there soon reached well beyond family history - cultural translation, representation, historical narration, the movement of people, objects, images and ideas across borders and time.
Approach
Neither founder works within the boundaries of a single discipline. Shimada moves between comparative sociology, cultural studies, modern Japanese studies, migration research and microhistory. Tam came to visual art through comparative literature, photography, moving image and archival research, and her work exemplifies a symbiotic relationship between these disciplines and mediums. Both continually cross the boundaries between theory and practice, image and text, personal experience and historical structure.
MIMAI treats this in-between space not as an uncertainty to be resolved, but as a method: a space where different disciplines, geographies, generations and forms of knowledge can meet without being reduced to a single category. It is from this in-between that new connections—between individual lives and larger histories, 'between' places, practices and ways of knowing—can become visible.
Founders
Shingo Shimada
Shingo Shimada, born in Osaka in 1957, was professor of modern Japanese studies at Heinrich-Heine-University until 2023. His works move between social sciences, cultural studies, and art. Thematically, he connects family micro-stories with perspective of globalhistory, with transnational migration movements playing a central role.
Silvia Y. Tam
Silvia Y. Tam, born in Hong Kong in 1987 and based in Düsseldorf, is a visual artist whose practice explores the instability of reality—how images, memory, language, and imagination continually reshape what appears to be real. Working across photography, film, painting, creative writing, and research, she often begins with fragments of personal and historical experience, tracing how what is absent, displaced, or imagined continues to impact the present.