Art-U room presents Tomoko Inagaki’s “Forcing House”, her first solo exhibition at Art-U room in a decade, following her “Soap Opera” show in 2004.

Inagaki works with a mix of different forms of media, including video, photography, and installations, focusing attention on the actions and customary behaviors that we normally engage in unconsciously in our daily lives. Through an additional manipulation, such as extreme exaggeration or excessive repetition, these works highlight the irrationality and violence that lurks within such behavior. This is an allusion to the systems of our consumer society, which are so sophisticated that people don’t even realize they are being manipulated. As if wielding her art like a crystal ball, Inagaki has seen right through to the anxiety of modern-day people, who find themselves at a dead end amidst the whirlwind of information that excites both their ambitions and, paradoxically, their insecurities.

The video installation “Forcing House” based on a greenhouse enveloped in one-way mirrors, was exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition “Project ‘Mirrors’” at Kyoto Art Center in February 2013, and is now being exhibited in Tokyo for the first time. The title “Forcing House” alludes to a greenhouse in which the growth of crops is intentionally speeded up, as well as to a house in which certain deeds are forced upon whatever is trapped within. A greenhouse at first seems to be a utopian environment for plants, with controlled temperature and environment, but it can be reinterpreted in a contradictory light when seen from another perspective, such as its use to force the rapid growth of crops in order to increase profit by shipping them to market as soon as possible. Visitors can enter the greenhouse, which has plants placed on the floor. Behind the plants are projected images of a woman bent over in a pose that would make it hard to breathe. This situation can be seen as reflecting the circumstances of modern-day people who live in a consumer society that initially appears to be a paradise, but, like the plants in the greenhouse, are constantly being forced to do things against their will, the victims of various forms of codified oppression.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Art-U room