The experience of time in everyday life is now perceived as data to be consumed and calculated, making this perspective inevitable in the sensory experience of mass culture and art. Fragmented emotions are converted into data and accumulated to become commercialized products designed to stimulate specific sensations. While this has driven the advancement of visual technologies, it has also led to the universalization of visual experiences.The challenge that contemporary art faces is no longer to create emotions but to make time an individual experience and lead people into exception.
The works presented in this screening resist fixed sensory stereotypes, attempting to construct an exceptional temporality through the interactions between reality, the virtual and materiality. These images do not separate the audience from reality through narrative; rather, they serve as a means for the creator to return the accumulation of personal time to the world. The time spent in the creation of these works is completed and redistributed through the audience’s experience. By focusing on the experience of time both within and beyond the screen, each work becomes an opportunity to re-open the boundaries of reality, expanding virtual dimensions within perception and generating a new sense of exceptional time.
Moving images are not made to become just a video:they function as a method of renaming—a moment that bestows meaning upon things. Each image holds the potential to open a doorway to something else, that is always existing but not to be seen in our daily life. While continuing the experimental approach that non-syntax has pursued, this program critically examines the fragmentation and redistribution of temporal experience in an era oversaturated with images, prompting us to reconsider how we see and how we understand the world.
Curator
Qiuyu Jin
The inspiration for this video work, which has the San Francisco Peace Treaty as its theme, was spending time as an artist-in- residence at a former military facility near the Golden Gate Bridge. While doing research there, I discovered that the facility still had a battery that was built to defend against Japanese forces, the small room that was probably used by Japan’s prime minister Shigeru Yoshida when he came to sign the treaty, and masses of eucalyptus trees that were planted to hide the facilities from Japanese attackers. Eucalyptus trees, which were imported from Australia because they grow quickly, are protected as part of the local landscape, but today they pose a threat as a result of the wildfires that occur frequently because the trees have a high oil content. Looking back at these facts and decisions from an overall perspective, they can’t all be dismissed as foolishness. Amending the Japan-US Security Treaty that was signed along with the San Francisco Peace Treaty is a specific concern at a time when issues with the Japanese constitution are being discussed, but this background continues to have a significant impact on us today, including the overall historical relationship between Japan and the US, and the strange fact that it all began in San Francisco. By taking an abstract approach to examining this historical background, I attempt to suggest the possibility of finding a new path forward.
Video exhibition at Jyu (Chapter 2/Beautiful daydream) at CON Gallery in 2024.
A young high school student becomes obsessed with drawing angels to fill the hole in his heart after the death of a classmate in a car accident caused by a train.
As he finds inspiration to draw angels in his daily life, his fantasies gradually intersect with reality and he witnesses an angel.
Jump scare, originally used in horror films, was used for the scene where he witnesses the angel.
This work is a video piece that compiles fragmented scenes related to "castles" and creates new perspectives through editing. While archetypal figures such as princes, heroes, fairies, and horses appear, they do not fulfill their conventional roles; instead, they continuously speak nonsensical words, rendering any coherent narrative absent. Amid an unpredictable rhythm, majestic castles, absurd rituals, and exaggerated gestures intertwine, forming a humorous and surreal world. However, language does not function as a tool for storytelling but rather as noise, disrupting the viewer’s understanding. What unfolds in this work is not a "story" but the inherent uncertainty and fluidity of language itself. As these iconic characters behave in ways that deviate from convention, a distorted sense of a fable-like world emerges.
"Our Songs - Sydney Kabuki Project", a single-channel video installation documenting a performative event that took place at Centennial Hall, Sydney Town Hall, on 28 January 2018. Inspired by Kabuki, a 400-year-old form of Japanese theatre, Takayama invited residents of Sydney, people who have come from across Australia and around the world, to share their family stories and cultural traditions through poems and songs.
Gathering at Sydney Town Hall, participants were invited one by one to walk along a specially constructed "Hanamichi" - a raised path that is a traditional element of Kabuki - to the stage, where they each performed a song or recited a poem passed down from their ancestors through generations and across geographies. Created in collaboration with award-winning filmmaker Hikaru Fujii, "Our Songs - Sydney Kabuki Project" acts as a documentary archive of oral and intangible histories while at the same time bringing together individual voices that collectively celebrate the diverse social and cultural fabric of Sydney.
A video work created entirely from pre-existing 3D models found on the internet, distributed as "assets." These "assets" are the materials of digital content production—at once actors, laborers, and in the most literal sense, assets. Within the game engine, programmed sequences set their bodies in motion, making them jump, bounce, and contort. However, just as a game’s rules exist solely for the sake of play, the program itself has no purpose. This is an ensemble cast of data adrift in a cycle of production and distribution without purpose.
This work draws from a series of video interviews Kyoko Kasuya conducted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2023. Through social media, she invited women to participate in the project, ultimately bringing together five individuals from diverse backgrounds: a doctor, a psychologist, a medical student, an IT professional, and an immigrant studying at an online university. Against the backdrop of Saudi Arabia’s sweeping societal transformation under the Vision 2030 government initiative, the work captures candid testimonies and everyday footage of women navigating the tensions between societal expectations and their personal aspirations.
A 10-minute sound poetry/ using Hatsune Miku. Beginning with a passage from Allen Ginsberg's poem, a personal narrative poem about the imbalance of the world and very personal love is read through the artificial voices of Siri and Hatsune Miku, and the digitally modulated natural voice of the author. This audio/visual work reinterprets Hatsune Miku, normally used for singing, as a tool for recitation. The main character runs through the uninhabited, devastated parallel world of Akihabara.
In his lecture in 1948, John Cage spoke about the idea of selling the silent piece by the title “Silent Prayer” to Muzak Co. Cage explained his concept for the piece as follows: It will be 3 or 4½ minutes long—those being the standard lengths of “canned” music— […]. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility.
The silent piece that later earned singular status in the music history as 4’33” was initially given a frame to convert silence into a work of art in several ways. Like Rauschenberg’s idea of converting white painting into an empty canvas, Cage took its meaning of duration from the format of commercial music, the work impression from floral metaphors, and gave silence the meaning of pray.
In 1952, Cage wrote and performed 4’33”, which was made up of three instructions for rests. 4 minutes and 33 seconds is equal to 273 seconds, and it is likely to be a reference to -273 °C which is the temperature for absolute zero. At this temperature, the molecules stop moving, and it is the perfect temperature for complete silence. (Perhaps “science” also serves as a pun on “silence.”) The emotion that ought to fill the musical composition is extinguished, leaving only the framework, oblivious of what lay within.
And in 2020, from February to May, COVID-19 brought the world to a standstill. Unable to venture out, we headed online with a virtual vengeance, until the world started to move again from late May. Just as all looked to pick up again, the killing of a black man, George Floyd, by the police officers in the United States triggered a massive wave of protests, a proliferating tide of confusion and collision. Social media was flooded with black squares tagged #blackouttuesday, and behind this timeline, a pent-up desire for protest bubbled over. Now we are standing at the exit door of our long and silent lockdown and seeing the world of chaos.
This work reproduces 4’33” for today as something that generates an intentional silence. From 273 records by black musicians, this work joints the silent parts of the records. By using the Silent Prayer discarded by Cage, these silences fill the frame of 4’33”, a frame that theoretically, anything would have sufficed.
The term "KiyaKiya" comes from the old Japanese expression "mune ga kiyakiya suru." Kondoh first encountered it in SHIBUSAWA Tatsuhiko's “Introduction to the collection of girls” in the chapter written about "childhood experiences."
This expression, which describes “an enigmatic, nostalgic, disturbing feeling,” or an impression of “déjà-vu”, is at the origin of the "KiyaKiya" series.
Giant spiral incense coils are being turned into ashes and smoke over several days at various temples in Asia. In various places around the world, people are spending their time puffing on cigarettes and inhaling smoke. We live in various units of time, not only in the time measured by the clock.
"Till We Meet Again" is an American pop song written in 1918 by Richard A. Whiting (music) and Raymond B. Egan (lyrics), The song was sung by Henry Burr and Albert Campbell, and was also performed by Whiting’s daughter, Margaret, who wrote the song. The song has been covered by many famous singers, including Whiting’s daughter Margaret Whiting, Patti Page, and Doris Day.
The title of this song, "Till We Meet Again," is a reflection of my recent travels and reunions with close friends from across the ocean.
I spent three months in Europe from July to September 2013 for exhibitions in Vienna and Dusseldorf, I reconnected with some friends in Austria, Germany, and Italy. The lives of the friends I met for the first time in a long time have also changed a lot over time, albeit gradually. They have reached a turning point in their lives. I was wondering "When will I see them again? When will I see them again? And I wonder if I will be able to come back here like this again. I began to wonder where the rest of my life would lead me. As I meet new people on my journey, I also feel the loneliness of saying goodbye to the same number of people I have met in the past. I also feel the loneliness that comes with the same number of good-byes. Meeting people I have met in faraway places again was the main purpose of this trip.
In my work, photographs and video are the primary means of depicting the stories that emerge from memories and records. In this work, however, I have placed conversation and voice at the center of my work.
When I listen to the recorded voice, the time that has passed comes back to life in my body, and it takes on a vividness that is different from that of a photograph. It is a vivid image of the time that has passed.
On the other hand, the small fluctuations in the wind and the movement of people and objects in my eyes, which I do not usually pay attention to, suddenly make me realize that I am indeed "alive," and I am able to see the images of these things. I was made aware that I was indeed "alive," and I captured them on film.
Even now, after the trip is over and I have returned to my daily life, I think about the lives of my friends on the other side of the sea and how their lives are being carved day by day, and once again, I silently think about my friends and family in my own country. I also quietly think about my friends and family back home. I am reminded of the natural "awareness" that comes as we all grow older. I created "Till We Meet Again" with my thoughts about my own life and the lives of others in mind.