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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to the “On “Re” and Related Works: Part 1“

I would like to show my graduation work from undergraduate studies. This is a one-minute version, but originally it was in a continuous loop, so it was called «Horses in motion».

Obviously, there’s a reference to the early Eadweard Muybridge, «The Horse in Motion», in 1878, theoretically this is what led to the development of moving image. In a way, I did my own version. It oscillates between recognizing multiple horses, but at the same time, it gets a perception of one horse galloping.

This idea of circulation also comes back to this other work from 2012 called «Almost Down». This work was from 2012, and I made it in response to I must say the March 11th (2011) earthquake that struck the northeastern coast of Japan.

When I visited Rikuzen Takata, there was this one crow that kept failing to crack a walnut. It would just repeat this action over and over in front of me. I had my video camera. I just kept recording on this repeated action. Eventually, this bird flew away and I was kept wondering why he failed to crack the nut. This is just my imagination, but perhaps because all the cars got washed away from tsunami and the site was quite deserted, could be one speculation.

I just wanted to relate this circular movement of this cycle of birds trying to crack the nut. At the same time, I was using this film looper. So for 16 millimeter film looper, it’s a circular looping system.

I originally shot it in digital, and then I reshot it using 16 millimeter film camera because a lot of the damages after the disaster, all the digital equipments got wiped away basically, and the analog film or photographs are the ones able to recover.

I’m using this Japanese company called Elmo, and the film projector is still running, but they stopped the maintenance service. The availability of the lamp also would be critical to have this work being projected.

I’m very interested in this idea of casting in both cinematic term and also or cinematic and theatrical and in relation to molder.

I was invited to make a work for Volvo Studio Aoyama, which is a showroom in Tokyo.

Volvo being a Swedish company, I decided to “Swede” a film. Do you know the word Swede? [*2] It’s like a made up word coined by Michel Gondry. I was recreating the shots from David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” as a Japanese recreation and went shot by shot to try to get it accurate, but at the same time, it’s a Japanese version.

[*2] “Swede” is a film term that refers to remaking a movie in a low-budget, handmade style. It originated from the 2008 film Be Kind Rewind, directed by Michel Gondry.

I’m just showing this as a comparison of, like, how much I try to be as accurate as possible. But I’m very interested in the difference when the original and the imitations or copies are being juxtaposed.

It’s really interesting to me how casting can mean, you know, pouring material into a mold. But at the same time when you cast somebody for a film or a drama, you’re casting a person or molding somebody to create this character.

This exhibition explored approximately 150 years of artistic exchange between Japan and France. I was thinking about this 150 years, and I came across this one photograph. It’s a self-portrait by Adolph de Meyer. This photo is interesting because you get this really rigid composition, but then that’s Adolph himself, but he’s unable to sit in the seiza（正座）position. I realized on the photographic paper has these white dust particles.

I noticed these white dots on this print kind of resemble seiza（星座 / a constellation）, and that’s how I get my inspiration from it.

＊ Araki introduced his work «HONEYMOON» (2020) here.

The music I used was from “Madame Butterfly.”

This is a scene from a 1954 film. I was trying to think about this cross cultural exchange and one of the epitome would be international marriage.

This is my version of the “Madame Butterfly”.

Film brochure of the Madame Butterfly, the 1954 version. This film is important because it’s a co-production between Italy and Japan. Every time, historically, Madama Butterfly, the opera gets performed, there’s always this wrongly depicted idea of Japan.

This co-production was successful in a way that it is said that the Japanese filming team went to Cinecittà in Italy. They tried to depict Japanese scenery or, you know, the kimonos and all that as accurately as possible.

The way I installed it, you see the screen, but again, I was paying attention to these dots on the vintage flyer, and I punctured a hole so that you get the light from the outside space, and then this light would cast light to create fake constellation.

Tattoos were important in terms of when I needed to cast somebody because it’s another way, arbitrary way of, you know, like constellations in the sky, like all the images that you imagine in the night skies are arbitrarians on its own.

Because one thing that inspired me by making this film actually has something to do with Ariana Grande.

In 2019, she released this single called «7 Rings». Since she loves Japanese culture, she decided to tattoo her hand, but she actually misspelled it, not misspelled, but she did a direct translation. So “Seven Rings” was translated as shichirin (a traditional small charcoal grill from Japan).

It was considered like one of the epic Japanese tattoo fails on celebrities and it went viral. But this anecdote, there’s something interesting about this because this was targeted as so-called cultural appropriation.

She got many criticisms, not only for the misspelling but also for the act itself, which was seen as cultural appropriation. There’s just so much in the political correctness today, she was targeted as being politically incorrect. So she gets a lot of backlash.

But at the same time, I was very interested in the fact that no one actually questioned how strange is it to name a charcoal grill as Seven Rings? Even Japanese don’t know.

That’s why I got really interested in this idea of what is correct and what is traditional and what’s appropriate. That was one of the reasons I wanted to deal with seiza [*4].

Well, I think in the end, what I’m interested in is this idea of reanimation because I never consider myself being an original artist.

[*4] Seiza (正座): In Japanese, the word seiza consists of the characters 正 (meaning “correct” or “proper”) and 座 (meaning “to sit”).

I always feel like I’m making copies of existing things. In that sense, this idea of…, I feel like whatever I make is like remake of something that already exists.

But I do use references from the past and sort of recast them and reintroduce in today’s context. In that way, I’m kind of reviving or resurrecting.

As an imperfect person myself, I resist being molded or being labeled. As an imperfect artist, I’ve decided to stop aiming to make perfect imitations. As an imperfect filmmaker, I would like to cast light, project and celebrate differences that do not necessarily fit into that mold.

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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.