Yu Araki 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. The following is an excerpt from a talk held on November 28, 2022.

Edited by Ishii Jun’ichiro

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I’m going to quickly go over some recent works, starting with one exhibited at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art. It’s called «Noise». At first glance, it looks like ordinary TV static, but actually, every frame is individually hand-painted. Frame by frame, I meticulously painted each noise. The piece runs at 30 frames per second, in a continuous one-second loop.

This work was part of an exhibition by Toshiaki Hikosaka, a friend of mine and a teacher here at the university. He invited me to participate as part of his solo show.

I find it interesting how the perception of “noise” shifts depending on cultural context. In Japan, this analogue TV static is called “sandstorm” but for example in America, it is referred to as “snow”. Since Toshiaki’s exhibition was titled “Sand Story”, I felt it was fitting – especially as a video artist – to create a piece that explored the concept of the sandstorm.

I really like that it doesn’t immediately look like an art installation. At first sight, it could just be a broken TV – until you take a closer look and realize it is a hand-drawn animation. Next piece also from 2022 is a work called «Bivalvia: Act II». This is an installation shot, and as you can see here, I’m experimenting with the idea of not synchronizing the images, even though this is a dual-channel work.

This is called «Away/Home», a work I presented in the same year. In the Japanese title, the order is reversed as «Home/Away». I created this piece in response to a commission from the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka. What you’re seeing now is the installation view. As part of the commission, three invited artists, including myself, were asked to create new video works based on an archive of home videos collected from local citizens.

For this installation, I worked backward from the given exhibition space – the museum lobby – to find the most effective way to present the piece. When I first visited the site, the space immediately reminded me of an airport terminal. Inspired by that image, I installed carpet and placed benches and potted plants reminiscent of those found in airports. From three suspended monitors, home videos from different eras are displayed. Though they come from distinct time periods, their content synchronizes across time. By working with time-based media, the piece reveals both the similarities and discrepancies in how people from different eras perceive the world. In a way, it creates a simulated time-travel experience.

Now, after this lengthy introduction, how do these three seemingly different works connect?

As Osaka-san mentioned earlier, in today’s talk, I’d like to discuss my work through the scope of “reenactment”, “remake” and “reanimation”.

When I analyzed my past works, I realized that these three concepts are deeply interconnected. Naturally, this led me explore them even further.

To be honest, my attempt to categorize my work within these three realms had already fallen apart.

As you can see, “remake” inevitably had to be replaced with “reinterpretation”. So, the more accurate title for this talk would be “reenactment, reanimation, and reinterpretation”.

I’m deeply drawn to the concept of the prefix “re-“. This fascination likely stems from my own experience as a returnee who moved back to Japan from the U.S. The prefix “re-” inherently carries the idea of returning to an original state or place. When I started listing words that begin with “re-“, I found them not only intriguing but also closely connected to my artistic practice.

I tend to get bored easily, which is why I take one a wide variety of projects. However, when I look back at my practice, I notice a pattern – although broad – that seems to spiral through the areas I showed in the previous diagram.

＊ 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.

The exhibition, “The Way Things Do”, of course,a reference to «The Way Things Go» by Fischli and Weiss.

Daniel Jacoby and I have been friends since 2010. For this exhibition, we decided to collaborate on a project. We traveled to Obihiro, Hokkaido, to create a video piece, which we planned to exhibit at the Joan Miró Foundation. Screening video works in a museum setting is always challenging. We had to find a way to either resist the typical format or, at the very least, make better use of the space.

At the same time, we wanted to avoid the standard museum loop and instead present the film in a way that could be watched from beginning to end. Balancing these two aspects – integrating the work into the exhibition space while maintaining the experience of watching a film – became our biggest challenge.

The subject of this work is Ban’ei Horse Racing [*1]-unique style of horse racing. The last remaining venue for it is in Obihiro, which is why we shot the film in Hokkaido.

For the installation, we designed a moving screen for a 20-minute video projection. At the end of each screening, the projection stops, and the screen slowly moves along a railing before returning to its original position. This slow movement mirrors the pace of Ban’ei Horse Race, which is also quite deliberate. Once the screen completes its cycle, the projection begins again.

A common challenge with museum commissions is that once the work is exhibited, there’s no guarantee it will be shown again. Daniel and I talked about this and thought, “Okay, we’ve made a solid new film – why not bring it to a wider audience? So, we completed the color grading and mastered sound, and then submitted it to film festivals. Fortunately, the film won the Tiger Award, the Grand Prix at the International Rotterdam Film Festival. Winning an award like that is incredibly rewarding – not only for the recognition but also because it opens doors. After that, many other film festivals started inviting us to screen the work at various 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.

In this photo, the person to my right is Daniel. He is based in Amsterdam, while I was in Tokyo at the time. Because of this, we generally divided the invitations to film festivals between us – he covered continental Europe and South America, while I primarily handled Asia.

At film festivals, attendees receive festival badges with their titles, such as producer, filmmaker or actor and so forth. On this particular occasion, I wasn’t there, but Daniel attended this film festival in Zurich, one of the festival staff mistakenly wrote “filemaker” instead of “filmmaker” on his badge.

In the end, we had a good laugh when we realized that, in a way, we were making “files” rather than “films”. After all, most of our time was spent sitting in front of a computer, clicking a mouse. Instead of handling physical celluloid film, we were creating digital files like MP4s or QuickTime files. Ironically, “filemaker” turned out to be a surprisingly accurate description – we were just file makers striving to become real filmmakers.

[Continued to Part 2]

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Yu Araki

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 at the Kyoto University of Arts on November 28, 2022.