In 2007, I wrote a short text titled “Dictionary of Ei Arakawa: Excerpts from a Preliminary Edition.” In its first entry, I introduced an emerging performance artist as follows.¹

Arakawa: This lexiconic study concerns Ei (b. 1977), a performance artist who came to New York in 1998, not Shūsaku (b. 1936), a conceptualist who came to New York in 1961. Just like the younger filmmaker Kurosawa Kiyoshi who has to contend with the qualifier, “not Akira, no relation,” Ei stands in the shadow of his well-known predecessor.

Almost 20 years later, now known as Ei Arakawa-Nash (they/them), the junior Arakawa is building a prolific global career, whereas the senior Arakawa passed away in 2010. A revised and expanded edition is overdue. Here, I will put forth some thoughts for revising the first two entries in the 2007 dictionary, “Arakawa” (name) and “Collectivity.” 

Name is no trivial matter for Ei Arakawa-Nash. One of their earliest works, Make Your Name Foreign (2005), is a multilayered video rumination on the name and signing practices of On Kawara, whose persona construction intrigued Arakawa-Nash as they explored their own diaspora identity. With their marriage in 2023 to a US male, they were firm in their desire to have and raise children through surrogacy, and the newly wed couple decided to hyphenate their surnames. To my question about the new name, they responded in a personal e-mail to me.