Friday, November 11
opening: 6-8pm
Yamato-Takeru was made during Masayuki Kawai's JCVA (Jerusalem Center for Visual Arts) residency, during November 2004 in Israel.
Video work YAMATO-TAKERU (2005) is part of the in-progress trilogy work "Kojiki," an experimental video story on the spirit and consciousness of the present. The story's background is the earliest Japanese literature work, "Kojiki" (The Book of Ancient Matters), written in the 8th century. The Kojiki describes, in mythic/epic form, the complicated stories of the gods and heroes, detailing a process from the beginning of the world to the establishment of the ancient state. In this place, a heroic story of prince Yamato-takeru is referred to.
All the images are shot in Israel. This piece represents an odyssey of a sight-consciousness of video/audience, revealing meanings of the landscape and the sacred. Thus it presents a conceptual mixture of history, revelation, religion and human existence, crossing over cultures.
Masayuki Kawai was born 1972 in Osaka, Japan, and lives and works in Tokyo and New York. He holds B.A. in aesthetics from University of Tokyo, As an artist, one of his main themes is media society, and he investigates radical, philosophical, and aesthetic expression of video as a new integral way to perceive, consider, criticize and overcome the present situation. To establish a critical role for video art against the society of spectacle, he started Videoartist Workshop in 1999 and then from 2001 till 2004 he was director of Videoart Center Tokyo and art director of Phaidros cafe. He has contributed to many projects of video art like curating programs, organizing festivals, publishing magazines. He writes critical discourses as an author in many books and magazines. Now he stays in New York for one-year artist-in-residency program with a fellowship of Japanese Government. His video works have been shown, nominated, and awarded in over 15 countries, and included collection of Queens Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of Art, Osaka; Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany, etc.