Simon Shimizu

Bioart · Sound · Relational art

Linz, Austria · Japan

My practice uses chemical thinking and material experiments to examine the relationship between humans and their environments. I focus on what tends to be excluded when chemistry aligns with technology and capitalism: sensory experience, embodiment, and the “human” within scientific systems. Currently, my work combines material experiments with research into the Anthropocene and its conditions.

Portrait · Bokyung Jeong

At Zvjezdane Staze

Yielding Trap · Hvala lijepo

1 July / 16 August 2026 · Mijakovići, BiH

Six weeks in the village. In his words: “We shared no common language. Yet through the repeated act of giving and receiving, a relationship emerged.” On 14 August 2026 he presented Yielding Trap, firewood from the village, drilled, filled with fermenting liquid, and hung from a tree, with contact microphones listening to the insects that gather and Yutong Zhang on sound; and Hvala lijepo, a return for what the neighbours had given him, with tempura and noodles for the guests.

Yielding Trap ↓ Hvala lijepo ↓

Three people standing in front of a house and a wooden shed, a forested hill behind them, Mijakovići — Mijakovići · July 2026 · Photo: Simon Shimizu

Yielding Trap

Bioart, bio sound art · 14 August 2026 · Sjelište

This is a trap left to insects, wind, humans and materials.

I pour fermenting liquid into drilled firewood and hang it from a tree. Insects are drawn by the smell and gather, and through contact microphones I pick up their vibrations, footsteps, wingbeats and chewing. I do not catch them. The same piece of wood appears as a different world to a fruit fly, a wasp, an ant, a human. Uexküll’s Umwelt. An installation and sound performance that listens, from a distance, to a world just outside human perception, and asks who draws the boundary: what is invited in, and what is shut out.

Simon Shimizu in a white suit beside drilled firewood hanging from a tree, the audience seated along a fence behind him — Yielding Trap · Sjelište · 14 August 2026 · Photo: Markus Passecker

Drilled pieces of firewood hanging on lines above a mown slope

Simon Shimizu standing by the tree with the hanging firewood, Yutong Zhang kneeling at the mixer

Photographs · Markus Passecker · Zvjezdane Staze

Hvala lijepo

Relational art · 14 August 2026 · The yard behind the house at Zvjezdane Staze

Receive, create, return. An attempt to form a wordless circle of gift-giving.

[…] In The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss argued that gift-giving carries three obligations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. The gift is not an economic act but an act of binding and sustaining relationships — communication itself. Handing over vegetables, cooking them, returning them. This circle of action repeats among those gathered. That the circle keeps turning, smoothly and warmly — that is the core of this work.