VIDEOGRANISM - Infinite Mutation
Masayuki Kawai
July 4 – August 22, 2015
Selected Works
Chi-Wen Gallery is pleased to present Masayuki Kawai’s third exhibition with the gallery, “VIDEORGANISM – Infinite Mutation”, on view from July 4 – August 22, 2015. The artist will be present for an opening reception on July 4, from 3-6pm.
Masayuki Kawai usually creates video works in a unique style that takes radical visions of philosophy and politics from the standpoint of the consideration and the criticism of informational society about the essence of media. He explores his broad styles and activities unconstrained by existing genres such as films, contemporary arts, and media arts.
In the artist’s third solo show with the gallery, this exhibition will showcase several new video works which included Video Feedback Aleatoric series, Video Feedback Configuration series and Noise, Tuned and Framed. The works are made with an analog video feedback from a closed circuit system with free-flowing electronic data. No outer video/sound source is used; the video machines and circuits contain subtle noises that are amplified in the loop to generate infinite data flows. When these are put into the video input, they display the various figure and colour mutations. When they are put into the audio input, they make sounds that are synchronized with the image. It is impossible to make these images and sounds by computer programing-simulation because the digital process eliminates the noise and gives privilege to the signals. Thus, through these works, we can directly experience an organic creation of singularity with analog electronic video.
Masayuki Kawai (b. 1972, Osaka, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. His works have been shown in over 30 countries and has received numerous awards in media art festivals and exhibitions around the world. A collection of his works can be seen at the Queens Museum of Art in New York and at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan. To establish a critical roll for video art in the society of spectacle, he founded an organization for video art, Videoart Center Tokyo in 2001 and was director till 2004. He also worked as an art director in Phaidros cafe, an innovative video art cafe in Shibuya, Tokyo from 2001 to 2004. He has been involved in many projects containing video art such as curating programs, festivals, and published magazines world-wide. He also writes critical discourses as an author in various books and magazines.
Kawai resided in New York from 2005 to 2007 as a grantee of Japanese government cultural department program and POLA art foundation program. He has completed residencies in Jerusalem at the Jerusalem Center for the Visual Arts and in Paris, France at Le Cube and Cite International des Arts. He worked as a member of the jury for 58th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 2012. In 2011 and 2012, he served himself as one the founder and program director of “Hors Pistes Tokyo”, a cutting-edge annual moving image art festival co-organized by Pompidou Centre.