Koki Tanaka：Reflective Notes (Recent Writings)

Having Koki Tanaka’s first solo exhibition in Korea, Art Sonje Center co-published an anthology of Tanaka’s recent writings before and during the pandemic with Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, Japan. In his diverse art practice spanning video, photography, site-specific installations and interventional projects, Koki Tanaka has employed a variety of methods to produce works on the relationality that arises between human beings. Tanaka calls this “collective acts” as experiments of various sorts which still lack a fixed destination. 

Working with various people with different backgrounds and reflecting the conversations with them, Tanaka presents his recent writings. Written in Korean, English and Japanese, Koki Tanaka's book, 'Reflective Notes (Recent Writings)' is about his artistic practices and its methodologies in times of pandemic as well as his recent exhibition Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie) at Art Sonje Center, Seoul. 

About  Works:

Koki Tanaka: Impossible Project

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. He currently lives 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.

Photo by  Su Man
Image and Text: the shop, ©Authors, the shop, 2021