In the early 1960s, Shiomi was part of the radical group of composers Group Ongaku in Japan. By January 1964 her 1963 works had been published by Fluxus, and she had become an important presence in Fluxus performance in New York. On her return to Japan, Shiomi devised a system of global events called Spatial Poems where artists and friends throughout the world could perform events, sometimes simultaneously, and send reports to her in Japan, which were then published in New York by George Maciunas for Fluxus. The first such piece was _word event: “_Write a word or words on the enclosed card and place it somewhere.” When all these individual realizations were gathered, the information was printed on small flaglike pieces of paper and placed on pins stuck into a map of the world in the location where the word event took place.
Gallery label from There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33”, October 12, 2013–June 22, 2014.
