In recent years Koki Tanaka has employed a variety of methods to produce works on the relationality that arises between human beings. In Tanaka’s works, it is possible to see the process of people who have the same occupation, who employ a common language that only they understand, clashing with each other. As well as this, there are what Tanaka calls “collective acts”: experiments of various sorts which still lack a fixed destination
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In his diverse art practice spanning video, photography, site-specific installation, and interventional projects, Koki Tanaka (born 1975 in Japan, lives and works in Los Angeles) visualizes and reveals the multiple contexts latent in the most simple of everyday acts. In his recent projects he documents the behavior unconsciously exhibited by people confronting unusual situations, e.g. a haircut given by nine hair stylists or a piano played by five pianists simultaneously, in an attempt to show an alternative side to things that we usually overlook in everyday living
https://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=3541&menu=
HH Of course you can see the contrast with artists like Kenji Yanobe, for whom the dangers of nuclear power have long been a subject matter and who went to Chernobyl with his Atom Suit Project in 1997. His work is very evident and straightforward. Chim Pom did this very funny piece around Fukushima which is a little bit ambiguous. Also there are many artists and architects who have been working directly to propose solutions for reconstruction. It seems that you have a very different role in this case.
KT I think so. Toyo Ito did a project called Possible Here? Home-for-All, for the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. It’s a series of buildings, community housing for Rikuzentakata, where the tsunami washed away the entire city. He asked three architects to collaboratively build a house for the local community, directly linked to the site, the situation and people. They showed their process through a lot of architectural models, and I was impressed. But my conception of the Japanese Pavilion for the Venice Biennale the following year was abstract. The idea was conceptualised with Mika Kuraya, the curator of the pavilion. It addressed how we can share someone else’s experience as our own. This issue was raised after the disaster in Japan. I aimed to capture the utopian moment of the postdisaster situation that happened, even in Tokyo, after the earthquake. This was the moment we didn’t have compassion for others but simply shared uncertainty, and people started to help each other to get over that uncertainty. I focused on the collective and collaborative aspects of such a moment, and brought it into different situations, such as collaborative creations. In the show there was the video documenting how five poets could write a single poem together, or another showing how five potters could make a work of pottery together, and so on. It shows the beauty of people’s collaboration but at the same time the ugly side of human nature – the battle of ‘egos’ – and collaboration’s failure.
https://artreview.com/april-2015-feature-koki-tanaka/