YUKA TSURUNO GALLERY is pleased to announce from the future, a solo exhibition of artist Eugene Kangawa who uses video as his primary medium. A short concert in collaboration with musician Terry Riley will also be held within the installation created by the artist for the exhibition.
Eugene Kangawa is an artist who has attracted attention for his beautifully airy video works that emphasize process. from the future is a video/photography work that was produced from 2012 to 2013 as part of the “supervision” series, in which Kangawa employs his unique expressive method to elegantly capture demanding subjects that come to light when two different contexts are traverseved. In this exhibition, the work will be showcased in the form of a three-channel installation.
The process of creating from the future involved inviting to Fukushima a person living abroad who had no information regarding Fukushima and its surroundings, and asking the person to write a imaginary story about “what happened here and when” as well as to record the scenery around. Composed of such materials that present the viewpoint of someone with no knowledge of the place, from the future attempts to virtually visualize a possible “future” in which the memories of Fukushima as a place have been forgotten.
The artist focused on the sentence “this place resembles Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge” found in the imaginary story, and took footage of the remains in Phnom Penh that have become tourist sites, and of the same place in Fukushima that he had visited in the past. The resulting video dismantles the two contexts that have no intrinsic connection between them, but connects them through diverse common traits, evoking questions of artificiality, nature, life and death, and circularity. Portraying issues such as disconnection and connection as well as the fading of memory by employing not a direct approach but rather a firm critical stance, this work will elicit in the viewer the important subject of which memories are wearing thin as time passes.
Legendary musician Terry Riley, who pioneered contemporary music, will be invited to hold an installation performance (short concert) with the artist as the closing event. A reception with the artist will also be held on the same day.
Artist profile
Eugene Kangawa was born in the U.S. in 1989 and is currently based in Tokyo. He presents installation works using different media including photography and sculpture, with a particular focus on video. His delicate and airy videos that emphasize process and archive, as exemplified by the group of videos entitled Desport that was produced as a collaborative research on sports with multiple academic communities, have attracted significant attention. He has participated in exhibitions in and out of Japan since he was a student, and was invited to give a talk at the Ginza Graphic Gallery (ggg) as a leading young designer. He has also established ON, inc. (object of null, inc.) to carry out collaborative research on urban planning and technology, as well as software design. His participation in a project led by the Serpentine Gallery illustrates the public interest in Kangawa as an artist of the next generation.
*image(left)
Eugene Kangawa,
from the future, 2013,
video installation, 25m 12s (reference image)
courtesy of the artist
