Koki Tanaka Brochure.pdf

PAUSE Practice and ExchangeSEP 25–NOV 28KOKITANAKANOTHING RELATED, BUT SOMETHINGCOULD BE ASSOCIATED.YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTSDAREInnovations in art, action, audienceVisit www.YBCA.org for more info.

DARE: Innovations in art, action, audienceKOKI TANAKANOTHING RELATED, BUT SOMETHING COULD BE ASSOCIATEDA NOTE FROM THE CURATORDuring my first visit to Tokyo, I stayed in a flat just outsideof the Shinjuku district; when I asked about the closesturban icon from the local metro stop, my host becameexcited and mentioned that the flat was located next to thebest 100 yen store in Tokyo. It was indeed an inexpensive brilliantstore with colorful, beautiful disposable and collectible materials. Ilater learned that these stores were the by-products of the late 1990srecession in Japan. Unlike the US recession of the 1980s, which led toa sharp increase of generic products packaged in plain white labels,Japan’s recession led to the development of everyday commoditiesthat were more colorful, excitedly infatuating and embraced ascollectible fetishes. Koki Tanaka’s work is, among many things, areflection of the recession in Japan. More specifically, he emergedfrom the post-recession generation of Japanese artists who largelyused their work to respond to and explore the economic recessionand its impact on Japanese life in their work.The exhibition Nothing related, but something could beassociated is a display of a new body of work commissioned by YBCA,as part of the Big Idea series titled DARE: Innovations in art, action,audience. Video, sculpture and photography are integral forms toTanaka’s practice, while ordinary objects and everyday life are hisprimary subjects. Through playful and sometimes absurd actions,Tanaka challenges traditional definitions of art and beauty as wellas the viewer’s relationship to these notions. Yet, much like theFluxus artists of the 1960s, from the found or readily availablematerials he uses, Tanaka paradoxically elicits the same degree offormal beauty that is associated with traditional art. From the pile ofred plastic chairs-cum-ladder in his work Approach to an Old House(2008) to the crates of oranges he tossed down a stairwell for TakeAn Orange and Throw It Away Without Thinking Too Much (2006), hedares us to forget, for a moment, that art is supposed to be a seriousendeavor. Instead, he asks us to enter the immediacy of his work,without “thinking too much,” because if we do, we might just missthose decisive moments that shift his work into sublimity.Julio César Morales, visual arts adjunct curatorOBSERVE, ASK, SUPPOSERolls of pink toilet paper, a crate of oranges, red plastic lawnchairs, tin basins: these are some of the objects—materials—that have appeared in the work of Koki Tanaka.Collect, pile, throw, tie, scatter: these are some ofthe verbs that describe how Tanaka uses the materials to make hisworks of art. In a sense, what is art-making after all if not aggregatingand arranging disparate elements into a coherent whole? There are, ofcourse, subtractive processes in art-making—for instance, carving ablock of wood or stone to make a sculpture, as has been done by artistsfor centuries, from Michelangelo to Rodin to countless artists workingtoday. Instead, Tanaka has released the toilet papers, the basins andthe oranges from states of equilibrium to free arrangements on thefloor by the force of gravity, and roughly tied the banal plastic chairsinto a mound for him to climb on, rather than to sit on. Tanaka recordsthese seemingly random or mischievous gestures and resultingdesigns as short videos or simple photographs, or present them asobjects per se in the physical space of exhibition.An important aspect of Tanaka’s work is about therelationship between the world of innumerable objects we all livein and the possibilities of some of those objects used, linked andredefined in unexpected, ingenious and even ludicrous ways. In thatsense, we need to make an imperative addition to the list of verbsabove: “observe.” Take for examples: a photograph Tanaka took at hisparents’ house of the dish with a mound of used bars of soap (Soaps inTheir Hands, 2008); another photograph of the artist’s own hand, takenat the moment when he realized that he has the unusual ability to holdhis thumb parallel to the rest of his fingers when closing them into ahalf-fist (Monster in My Hand, 2008); and a beautiful swirling doublehelix created by attaching colorful ribbons at the ends of the wings of aceiling fan, inspired by the contraption used by street meat vendors inChina (The Fly Never Gets Inside, 2009). These become the artist’s ownsculptures precisely because he suddenly recognized the prosaic yetinventive and heeded attention to what normally does not warrant anote. Tanaka has stated, “Even things and movements that have hardlyany significance seem to contain something never seen before whenthey are singled out and looked at,” 1 and it is this attitude that enableshim to go on the search for “the possibility of infinite number of worlds”in what we customarily think of as a singular material world. Theworlds Tanaka has created thus far are not quite infinite but alreadymany. Add to the list of descriptions above an umbrella dancing inmid-air and milk cartons placed in a single file on the road and thensquashed by a car in an instant. Are these mere visual gags?All art—to be more precise, all serious art—needs to “ask” and“suppose”—two more critical verbs. Besides his quest for the “infinitenumber of worlds,” then, what is the question Tanaka asks and whatare the ways in which he supposes in his art? Despite the simplicity ofhis gestures, I have the feeling that the artist’s questions are not of afundamental kind but are rather spontaneous, responsive to situationsand contingent on contexts. Accordingly, in the group of works—orbetter, the web of propositions—he presents at YBCA (ranging from ahaircut performed by a team of hairdressers to placing his artworksin a thrift shop to showing his sculptures to a dog), then Tanaka doesnot expect, I imagine, his viewers to engage in every proposition. Moreexactly, I believe he hopes that his viewers will be stimulated by thevarious—some of the infinite—possibilities to think again (or for thefirst time perhaps) about the world of things and the attendant, mostlyautomated, behaviors that govern our lives each and every day.Doryun Chong, associate curator of painting & sculpture,Museum of Modern Art, New YorkNOTES1Koki Tanaka Works 1997–2007 (Tokyo: Akio Nagasawa Publishing Office, 2007) 63.IMAGES courtesy of Koki TanakaGENEROUS SUPPORT FOR NOTHING RELATED BUT SOMETHING COULD BE ASSOCIATED provided by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan, Aoyama Meguro Gallery,Vitamin Creative Space, Art+Culture Editions and Electric Works.YBCA VISUAL ARTS PROGRAMMING is made possible in part by Mike Wilkins and Sheila Duignan, Meridee Moore and Kevin King, The National Endowment for theArts and Members of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. YBCA is grateful to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency for its ongoing support.YBCA PRESENTS contemporary visual art, performance, film/video and public programs that celebrate the artistic and cultural diversity of the Bay Area as well asinnovation and experimentation by national and international artists.DESIGN: crystal am nelson