クラシックDJ、AoiMizuno 名盤を換骨奪胎
ユニバーサルミュージック傘下のクラシック名門レーベル「ドイツ・グラモフォン」(DG)が創立120周年を記念、名盤に現代の感性とテクノロジーで大胆なミックスを施し、まったく新しい音楽体験を生み出すアルバム「MILLENNIALS」(ミレニアルズ)を発売した。作品を選び、40以上の音源を駆使して7曲の「作品」に仕上げたのはザルツブルク留学中の24歳で自身がミレニアル世代に属する指揮者、水野蒼生だ。(Excerpt from the text)
2 results
4 results
ユニバーサルミュージック傘下のクラシック名門レーベル「ドイツ・グラモフォン」(DG)が創立120周年を記念、名盤に現代の感性とテクノロジーで大胆なミックスを施し、まったく新しい音楽体験を生み出すアルバム「MILLENNIALS」(ミレニアルズ)を発売した。作品を選び、40以上の音源を駆使して7曲の「作品」に仕上げたのはザルツブルク留学中の24歳で自身がミレニアル世代に属する指揮者、水野蒼生だ。(Excerpt from the text)
Sus escenarios se reparten por diversos barrios de Tokyo (Shibuya, Harajyuku, Daikanyama, Ginza, Iidabashi, Ochanomizu, Suidobashi y Odaiba), donde se multiplican festivales de video, artes visuales, música, debates, etc., organizados en colaboración con instituciones niponas y de otros países.(本文抜粋)
Japan’s digital dominance is now on vivid display in the capital’s museums and galleries. The trick is finding them
I WAS WADING through a white-walled gallery in Tokyo last winter, where 2,300 intricately mottled and bearded orchids dangled from the ceiling. Each living flower was kitted out with motion sensors so that strands of the hanging vines gently rose into the air as I approached, creating a flower-tunnel effect wherever I walked. The surreal delicacy of the experience was heightened by a tinkling, ethereal soundtrack piped into the room for an effect that was equal parts heaven and allergy commercial. It was also just plain cool.
The artists behind this work, “Floating Flower Garden," are teamLab, a Tokyo collective specializing in site-specific, digital installations. teamLab also designed the Japan pavilion at Expo Milano 2015 (through Oct 31) and have exhibited at Milan’s Salone de Mobile, Hong Kong’s Art Basel and several other events. Last year, teamLab was picked up by the New York-based Pace Gallery—which also represents blockbuster contemporary artists including Kiki Smith and Sol LeWitt, an unexpected crossover between the all-too-often cloistered worlds of art and technology. What wasn’t a surprise was that the high-tech work came from Tokyo, a city that has never shied away from electronics and artful digitization.
Tokyo’s contemporary art scene has long been overshadowed by Hong Kong and Beijing and dominated by Pop-movement artists like Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama. But in the last five years, a small group of contemporary Japanese artists including Tabaimo, Hiraki Sawa and teamLab have begun quietly embracing digital and other high-tech methods, often as a way to express modern interpretations of more traditional Japanese art forms—such as woodblock printing, ikebana (flower arrangement) and even anime, bringing the city to the global fore in the realm of digital art.
Since English is scarcely spoken in Tokyo and galleries are scattered widely around the 5,200-square-mile megalopolis of 38 million people, the best way to experience this new genre is to hire an art guide. I arranged mine through the Palace Hotel Tokyo, which recently joined with Blouin Artinfo, the media company behind art magazines including Art + Auction and Modern Painters, to offer customized tours of Tokyo’s art scene. Blouin offers eight-hour private art tours to non-hotel guests for about $415 a day; the Palace Hotel Tokyo’s three-night Transcendent Tokyo package costs $1,645 and includes breakfast, drinks, club-lounge access and a deluxe balcony room in addition to the private art tour. After a few email exchanges with my guide Darryl, a Harvard grad from Singapore who has lived in Tokyo for 8 years, we met up for lunch at a trendy soba noodle place in the popular Ebisu district to map out our tour.
Our first stop: NADiff A/P/A/R/T, an art book shop and complex of galleries housed in a discreetly marked glass and steel structure on an Ebisu back street that I never would have found on my own (Shibuya, 1-18-4, nadiff.com). NADiff is one of Tokyo’s best places to see the work of young, avant-garde artists. At the G/P Gallery, on the second floor, we viewed Takashi Kawashima’s high-definition black-and-white landscape photographs, which are beautiful in their own right but were overlaid with projected film clips—a still volcano puffed ghostly plumes of smoke, a quiet mountain is orbited by moving clouds (gptokyo.jp).
Next up, Darryl led me to the annual, late-winter Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, which runs in February and March and showcases new-media technologies (1-13-2 Mita, Meugro-ku, yebizo.com). This year it included exhibits by Noriko Yamaguchi, whose “Keitai Girl" is a sexy she-bot made of cellphone keypads, and Fujiko Nakaya, who opened Japan’s first video art gallery in 1980 and specializes in “fog sculptures."
Darryl was a font of arty intel and had plenty of suggestions for where to go on my own after the tour was finished. These included a reservation at Tsuru Ni Tachibana, a “punk-rock kaiseki" restaurant (Asagayakita 2-4-7, Suginami-ku, falco.sakura.ne.jp/tsuru ) and Bar Zingaro, an artist-project/cafe hidden deep in a manga mall in the off-the-path neighborhood of Broadway Nakano (5 Chome-52-15, bar-zingaro.jp ).
Those who prefer to explore on their own should download Tokyo Art Beat, the exhaustively comprehensive iPhone app, ($2), which is hands down the best guide to the city’s art world and updated regularly with exhibits, events, parties and art fairs. It allows users to search for exhibits by genres that include video installation, digital and performance.
Clicking on its “digital" tab led me to the Tabaimo exhibit at Gallery Koyanagi hidden away on the eighth floor of an office tower in Ginza (Koyanagi Bldg. 8F, 1-7-5, gallerykoyanagi.com). I am a fan of Tabaimo’s work and had seen her at Art Basel and in shows at New York’s James Cohan Gallery. She lives in the Nagano Prefecture and uses a unique method of capturing the “color" of Edo-period woodblock prints by hand drawing them, then scanning the images into a computer to create animated shorts that often have a dark twist. Some of Tabaimo’s pieces are projected into the adjoining corners of the wall and ceiling with different panels playing out different dramas, others onto a wall with pieces of sofas and coffee tables protruding from it, blurring the lines between 2-D and 3-D.
“I don’t want to be thought of as a ‘digital artist,’ " Tabaimo told me when I met her at the gallery. “It’s not that I don’t use technology, but the term suggests something else and I’d hate to disappoint audiences expecting something more high-tech. For me, using the computer is just a tool to get my art to the world."
Annoyingly, what the Tokyo Art Beat app doesn’t let you do is search by artist, which I discovered after trying to find one of my favorites.
I first encountered Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa in London, where he now lives, but his work—an elegant layering of film and animation—is regularly on display at Tokyo’s OTA Fine Arts and is distinctly Japanese (6 Chome-6-9 Roppongi, Minato, otafinearts.com). His high-definition films of airplanes flying past bathroom sinks and lush waterfalls are often looped on minuscule flatscreens and sometimes hidden inside hand-carved wooden boxes, creating a sort of digital jewel box.
If you only have time for one stop in Tokyo, head to Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, which is equal parts EPCOT and Art Basel and located in Tokyo’s Odaiba district, about a 30-minute subway ride from Shinjuku Station (www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en ).
It was here on a Saturday afternoon that I waited for an hour to see teamLab’s Floating Garden exhibit (which has since moved on). Fortunately, there’s no shortage of artwork in the 10-floor mega space; other teamLab exhibits include gigantic galleries lined with interactive screens, some with elaborate 3-D graphics, others with motion sensors that alter the image depending on audience interaction.
Transition has been on my mind of late. Maybe that’s why I gravitated towards the insight noted in The Experience Machine’s catalogue essay on the industrial age making way for the “electronic era", allowing for renewed “ways of seeing and experiencing our world".How then does our current electronic era influence art? More than ever, artists are using technological advances to alter and challenge their practices and processes, giving rise to ‘New Media Art’, which comprises “constantly evolving hybrid technological art forms such as video art, digital art, interactive installation and customized software art". The semantics of art then comes into question. Can the programmed digital software John F. Simon Jr. used to create what I heard some visitors call a “Microsoft screensaver" be called art? Ambivalence about popular acceptance of such unfamiliar art forms has clearly not deterred co-curator and owner of Ikkan Art International, Ikkan Sanada, from presenting a plethora of unconventional, tech-savvy and wonderfully bizarre works that the local art scene has probably not yet witnessed. After all, what is transition without the slight discomfiture and strange newness of change?With change comes a reconfiguration of habits and customs. Technology allows and promotes the manipulation and reconstruction of our visual, social and perceptive norms, engendering new sights and experiences that challenge the beliefs we have become used to. Iconoclastic and irreverent, Morimura Yasumasa’s contemporary takes on the historically famed Vermeer painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring, challenge art-historical and social ideas regarding the male gaze. By reconstructing his Japanese, male identity into that of a Western, female figure, Morimura subverts the conventional notions associated with the invasive, voyeuristic male gaze, confounding the viewer and prompting him to look beyond the superficiality of representation. He employs more physical reconstruction and metamorphosis than technological (although his use of video alone in the appropriation of Vermeer inserts a wholly new artistic dimension and comparison): notorious for being contemporary art’s “most famous drag queen", Morimura paints his face and painstakingly transforms his sartorial, facial and overall physical appearance to that of his subjects. From artist to subject (and object), male to female, Asian to Western, hidden to exposed, Morimura boldly appropriates a revered historical piece, only to playfully, completely turn it on its head.One of the things I love about contemporary art is its ability to engage audiences in participation and dialogue. Performance alone does not suffice, as the distance between artist and audience is sorely emphasized. By engaging the senses and encouraging activity, art ceases to be a hierarchical distinction and moves into a new realm of participation, reflection and agency.The magnum opus of The Experience Machine is SISYU+teamLab’s installation that presents a visually captivating spectacle, allows visitors to participate and act, and uses technology to reflect, not manipulate or violate, a natural milieu. Upon walking into a specially constructed black room, I was surrounded by screens depicting a surreal, otherworldly 3D landscape of nebula and falling kanji (Chinese characters). Intrigued, Mr. Sanada then prompted me to ‘touch’ a falling character. My action caused the kanji signifying ‘bird’ to transmogrify into an animated version of a bird. Mr. Sanada then proceeded to enliven ‘tree’, which the bird then flew to. This is just one of many instances of the everyday, arbitrary interactions between nature, the elements and animals that the installation mirrors with surprising accuracy. While we might often think of technology as automated, soulless and clinical, What a Loving, and Beautiful World demonstrates how SISYU+teamLab has invigorated their animation with the unpredictability and simple beauty of nature.While some might get lost in SISYU+teamLab’s technological playground, my favourite work from the show was unenviably positioned in a quiet corner in the neighbouring room. Walk into the room flashing with Jim Campbell and Ben Rubin’s light installations, and you might just leave without noticing Bea Camacho’s video, located on the floor in a corner next to the door. Interestingly, the artist herself made the curatorial decision to place her video screen in a negligible place.Enclose isn’t meant to scream out at you. On the contrary, as the title suggests, it wants to be hidden, isolated. Besides forcing the viewer to bend, squint and make a physical effort to watch her video, Camacho has refused to make Enclose a performance piece, isolating herself from the glare and scrutiny of a surveying audience and their emotional and auditory responses. By choosing not to sensationalize her emotions, Camacho makes a bold statement about artistic and personal integrity. Enclose is thus poignant because it is an act of catharsis, not a lurid, effusive spectacle.Having never been physically or emotionally close to her family, Camacho channels the rejection and loneliness she experienced (or is experiencing) by literally ensconcing herself in a crocheted cocoon. While crochet might evoke memories of familial warmth and affection, for Camacho, it refers to “an idealized version of home". Challenging the futility of fulfilling a romanticized fantasy, Camacho pushes herself to physical extremes by crocheting non-stop for 11 hours, going without rest, food or water. The artist as sufferer, a familiar concept popularized by Marina Abramovic, is here given new life by Camacho, who allows us to witness and experience her pain vicariously through her creative process. As The Experience Machine shows, this shiny new electronic age has more heart than we might think.
3 results