I want to capture this invisible thing in a visual form as much as I can …

Especially as I stick to not the flow of time, but the depth of time …”

(Handwritten text by Norio Imai on Time Clothing, 1979)

Norio Imai, born in 1946, developed mainly a production of white relief objects in the ’60s and steadily presented his works as a young member of the Gutai Art Association, which he had joined at the age of 17. In the ’70s, Imai became skeptical about production and shifted his focus to an attempt to utilize nonmaterialistic projection media.　Imai developed truly extensive and unique experiments with images from the ‘70s through to the beginning of the ‘80s. His photography installation, entitled “Vision – Film” demonstrates the gap between looking through the naked eye and the camera lens as well as the gap between real space and framed space. Then, with “Video Snap”, “Time Collection” and others, Imai copies those images brought to daily life through the TV and captures them as layers in time. Finally, the series “Time Clothing”, “Self-Portrait” and others illustrate the immediacy of the instant camera (Polaroid) as well as the simultaneity of video. Throughout the process, Imai consistently seeks to embrace the feel of “time” and then make sure of it. Thus his reflection on “time” continues.

The exhibition is held in conjunction with the publication of “Imai Norio, Time Collection” (to be published in February 2015), a collection of Imai’s works at tracing his attempts through projection media.