Araki Yu is an artist who primarily works with video installations and actively engages in artistic activities both in Japan and internationally. Having transitioned from sculpture and translation work to filmmaking, he has expanded his practice to include 16mm film and digital video.
The following is an excerpt from a talk held on November 21, 2022. In this talk, Araki reflects on his artistic practice through the lenses of “reproduction,” “reperformance,” and “reanimation,” using the English prefix “Re-” as a key to explore his creative process.

Edited by Ishii Jun’ichiro (ICA Kyoto)

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I’m going to quickly go through recent works, and this is one at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art. It’s called «Noise». Basically, it looks like a normal TV static noise, but actually these are all individually hand painted. So I literally took one noise and then I hand painted. These are all 30 frames per second, and it goes on a one second loop.

It was part of this exhibition by Toshiaki Hikosaka. He’s a friend of mine. He’s also the teacher here, but he invited me to do this show as part of his solo exhibition.

I like the fact that the Noise, depending on the cultural context, in Japan this is called Sandstorm. Just because I got an offer from Mr.Hikosaka as part of his exhibition called Sand Story, as an artist working in video, I thought it’d be appropriate to do work about the Sandstorm.

I really like the fact that it doesn’t really look like an art installation. I mean, if you have to take a closer look, but unless it’s just a broken TV. This was from 2022 this year, and then there’s also another work called «Bivalvia: Act II». I’m just going to go over and then quickly show installation shots. I’m going to try to see how these can connect, but this is actually a dual screen experiment.

Then another work called «Away/Home» but in the Japanese title, I switched it to «Home/Away». It was an installation view at Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka, and I was invited as one of the three artists to make a new video work based on home videos. It was one of the grand opening shows.

When I first visited the museum, this lobby space, it reminded me of an airport. I had installed these carpets and fake plants and also the bench. These each individual screens are showing home videos from different decade.

These all three works can seem to be very different, but how are they tied together?

As of today’s talk, as Osaka-san said, I’d like to talk about through the scope of “reenactment”, “remake” and “reanimation”.

But then as I was gathering all my past works and started to analyze, I realized that these three realms are so closely connected. So I simply had to add more.

I’m going to confess that the overall premise of trying to talk about my work in three realms actually already failed an attempt.

So remake, you know as you realize, I have to switch “remake” and then to “reinterpretation”. Actually, it’s going to be “about reenactment and reanimation, maybe reinterpretation”.

I’m very interested in this idea of prefix “re-“. I think it’s partly something to do with me being a returnee from the U.S. to Japan. As the prefix re suggests, as it’s defined, it’s coming back to its original place. As I was jotting down all the words that starts with “re-“, these are all the words I’m still interested in that’s also reflected in my practice.

Partly the reason for me doing a completely different types of work is that I get bored very easily. I feel like when I look back in my practice, but I did notice these tendencies that can be loosely divided into these categories, but it’s almost like going in a spiral.

＊ Araki introduced a video of the group exhibition “The Way Things Do” at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, which was a significant experience for him.

This exhibition, “The Way Things Do”, obviously has a reference to «The Way Things Go» by Fischli and Weiss.

Daniel and I – we’ve been friends since 2010. For this exhibition, we decided to collaborate on this one project. We made a short film in Obihiro. It’s always difficult to show a video work in a museum, and we have to come up with a way to kind of resist or at least trying to still take advantage of the space.

But at the same time, we wanted basically to show the film from the beginning to an end instead of those looped videos that you see in museums.

The subject of the work is this unique horse race called Ban’ei Horse Racing . There’s a very last standing venue is in Obihiro. That’s why we shot it in Hokkaido.

We came up with this device, a screen. It’s about 20-minute video projection. Whenever it gets to an end, the projection stops and then the screen would move. It would circulate around the railing. It moves very slow and that’s kind of reflected to the Ban’ei Horse Race, which is also kind of slow. So every time after each screening, it would circulate slowly and come back to its original position and then the screening would begin.

It’s always a problem when you have a commission work from a museum and then we exhibit in the museum. But we don’t know when it’s going to get shown again. Daniel and I, we discussed and we thought about, okay, we made a good, you know, new film and why not just get it exposed to wider audience? So we decided to do a color grading and master sound, and then we submitted to film festivals. Luckily, with this work, we won Tiger Award. It was at the Grand Prix at the Rotterdam Film Festival.

And it’s such a rewarding experience once you make a film and then once you win an award, all these film festivals will start to invite you to show in many other venues.

[*1] A type of horse race held only in Obihiro, Hokkaido, where horses pull a one-ton iron sled and compete in strength and endurance to overcome obstacles.

That’s Daniel on my left. He’s based in Amsterdam and I was in Tokyo at the time. So, we basically had to split all these offers to attend the film festival. He was in-charge of the more European continent and also South America, whereas I was in-charge of Asia.

When you go to film festivals, you get these festival badges that has your title, you know, as a producer or filmmaker or actor or whatever. There was one festival in Zurich that I didn’t get to go, but Daniel went. One of the festival staff misspelled filmmaker as file maker.

We had a good laugh because in the end, we realized we are making files. I mean, we’re sitting in front of a desktop or a laptop and just clicking a mouse. I’m not making a physical celluloid film, but we are making MP4 or QuickTime files. So this was very accurate. I’m a file maker striving to become a real filmmaker.

to the “On “Re” and Related Works: Part 2“

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Araki Yu

Araki majored in sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis (USA) and furthered his studies at Graduate School of Film and New Media Studies, Tokyo University of the Arts (Japan). As a failed English/Japanese interpreter, his central theme has been revolving the idea of mistranslation. Recent exhibitions include venues such as Sydney Opera House (2021), Pola Museum of Art (2020), Shiseido Gallery (Tokyo, 2019), and Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2019). His films have been screened at Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, 2021), FIDMarseille (2021), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018,2020) and many more. During 2017–18, he was a guest resident at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju as well as Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Araki was selected as one of the finalists for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019. He is scheduled to present a new commission work at the 15th Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions in February 2023.

* This talk was held online on November 28, 2022.