Kishi the Vampire
Royce Ng & MRBL
Sunday
13.09.2026
15:00-15.30
Kuppelhalle
Credit: Royce Ng
Kishi the Vampire narrates the life of Japanese bureaucrat, colonial administrator, economic planner, war criminal, prime minster and nobel peace prize winner Nobusuke Kishi as a vampire story. Kishi’s long life,sexual corruption, greed and disregard for human suffering make him the perfect amoralprotagonist for a phantasmagorical retelling of 20th century East Asian political economy.
Between his time in the Japanese colony of Manchukuo in North East China in the 1930’s to his death in the mid-1980’s, Kishi would live to see the South East Asian ‘tiger’ economies like Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea adopt the ‘state authoritarian capitalist’ development model which he invented in the cold expanses of Manchuria.
The performance is accompanied by an animated manga that visualizes this ghost story from Asia’s Modernity. The work borrows its visual style from the erotic graphic vocabulary of Japanese shunga prints and the decadent eroguro nanesensu images from the 1920’s which formed the subversive cultural parallel to the violence inflicted at pre-war Japan's colonial periphery. The video installation will be live narrated by the artist as a lecture performance, dressed in a 1939 'propaganda kimono', summoning the ghost of Kishi that continues to haunt modern Asia.
Royce NG’s Kishi the Vampire will be performed by MRBL.