Koki Tanaka is a “mixed-media artist who uses video and found objects to create iconic reflections of everyday life”. His art “invests mundane objects and actions with meanings both amplified and understated“.
The main strength of Tanaka’s deceptively understated art is using ordinary objects in unpredictable and unusual ways to change our perception of everyday existence. Gutai, one of the earliest group of performance artists, was created in Japan in the early 1950’s. It’s good to know that performance art in Japan is alive and thriving in the hands of artists like Tanaka.
Tanaka’s official site has photos of his projects, videos, an interview and a statement of his art:
There are so many possibilities we are granted, but we have to choose one of them in order to somehow reach our “goal.” And we are fixed into a belief that there is only one goal and all the other places you get to are purely wrong. But wait a minute, is there only one goal really? No, there are so many possible goals before even thinking about making choices. When we get some kind of an outcome, we tend to believe there is the only one choice you are entitled to make, and we don’t even think for one second that we have other possibilities — but we do. We do always have alternative ones and we can go through this process over and over again, even though we might have already chosen something before.
Tanaka’s art presents us with those unusual choices that we usually discard in favor of the more “rational” and “pragmatic” ones that we make in the course of our everyday lives.
*hypnotic: adj. 1. Inducing an altered state of consciousness, characterized by heightened suggestibility and receptivity to direction; 2. Inducing sleep. Take your pick.
{via Not Wild Style}
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