Vernissage TV has done a short video on Chiharu Shiota’s solo exhibition at Haunch of Venison in New York. The show is centered around a towering installation of found window frames from East Berlin, as well as some of the artist’s small box-like sculptures in which personal found objects are tangled up in webs of black thread.
Art Space Tokyo publisher Craig Mod talks to Graham CopeKoga about his philosophy of bookmaking while in London for the DO lectures, held in Wales, where he spoke on September 19th.
The video contains previously unseen footage of the second edition of Art Space Tokyo in mid-production at the printers in Tokyo.
Aki Sasamoto is a young New York-based performance artist whose work is a surreal cycle of tragicomic vignettes that combine distorted everyday objects (elongated forks and wooden clogs with knives built into the soles, for example) with lectures on pseudo-mathematics and reminiscences on childhood memories.
In this video she is performing Love is the End of Art (2009) in collaboration with British artist, writer and musician Momus at Zach Feuer Gallery. While Sasamoto performed her own sequences of actions, Momus stalked her, playing both the roles of the art critic and the unrequited lover.
Sasamoto will be performing in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (February 25 – March 30).
In the following video, produced for the Biennial, she muses about the formal and physical relationship between chikuwa (a type of cylindrical fish cake), donuts and the body—ideas that may inform her work-in-progress for the exhibition.
Update (February 25)
The New York Times has uploaded a video of Sasamoto in her studio, talking about and performing part of Strange Attractors, her piece for the Whitney Biennial.
In an endeavor to find low-maintenance ways of keeping this blog active and of interest to our readers, from now on I will regularly post videos about Japanese contemporary artists found on YouTube.
Let’s start with some quirky explorations of space by Berlin-based video/installation artist Yukihiro Taguchi.
Moment (2007)
Nest (2008)
Nest No.2 (2009)
Recently I came across this video artwork by Isao Hashimoto,
1945–1998.
It is a haunting visualization of the 2053 atomic explosions that occurred on this planet, from the “Trinity” test at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945, to the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998.
Using different sounds and colors to denote explosions—by the United States, the USSR, Britain, China, France, India and Pakistan—over 53 years, it is a haunting piece of minimal music that also visualizes the half-century of the nuclear arms race.
It is well worth watching the entire 14 minutes. As it says on the host site, it sounds eerily like a conversation.
Another video by Hashimoto, Overkilled, shows a hand dropping a single ball bearing to represent the Hiroshima bombing, which killed more than 140,000 people. A second ball bearing represents the death of 70,000 people from the Nagasaki bombing.
The remaining minute of the video shows a cascade of 20,590 ball bearings, representing total global nuclear weapons stockpiles (in June 2004).
A random discovery on YouTube… Daito Manabe’s channel which documents an unusual experiment in performance, kinetic art and sound design.
A place to keep abreast of Art Space Tokyo related news, reviews, events and updates.
Art Space Tokyo is a 272 page guide to the Tokyo art world produced and published by Craig Mod & PRE/POST.
It was originally published in 2008 by Chin Music Press.
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