Koki Tanaka: On a Day to Day Basis

I’m looking for a possibility in everyday activities. We use everyday objects, but I think we use them unconsciously, even when we just use a cup, we never rethink about what a cup is. It is a functional tool for us. But if we rethink about the materials as not ‘mere things’, probably we can discover other aspects related to them. Then eventually we could find other ways to use them or different possibilities that we never realized before. Let’s say that these possibilities are not hidden, maybe they are already there but we simply didn’t notice them before.

—Koki Tanaka

About Koki Tanaka (田中功起)

Born in 1975 in Tochigi, Koki Tanaka graduated from Tokyo Zokei University (BFA) in 2000 and Tokyo University of the Arts (MFA) in 2005. Currently live and works in Kyoto, Japan.

In his diverse art practice spanning video, photography, site-specific installations and interventional projects, Tanaka visualized and reveals the multiple contexts latent in the most simple of everyday acts. In his early object-oriented works, Tanaka experiments with ordinary objects to explore ways offering a possible escape from our everyday routine. Later in his works, Tanaka asking the participants to collectively navigate tasks that in and of themselves are out of the ordinary, he then documented behaviors that were unconsciously exhibited by people confronting unusual situations, such as one piece of pottery made by five potters and a piano played by five pianists simultaneously, seeking to reveal group dynamics in a micro-society and temporal community. Following the disaster on March 11. 2011 in Japan, Koki Tanaka has employed a variety of methods to produce works on the relationality that arises between human beings, there are what Tanaka calls “collective acts”: experiments of various sorts which still lack a fixed destination.

Image and Text: the shop, ©Authors, the shop, 2019

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