Koki Tanaka: Vulnerable Histories (An Archive)

A case study of global social issues.

Fully documenting Koki Tanaka’s latest project "Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie)" (2018) conceived on the occasion of his exhibition at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, this publication focuses on a pressing issue from the artist’s native country—the mutual incomprehension and mistrust between Zainichi Koreans and ethnic Japanese—to plead for vigilance when it comes to racism and discrimination. Reacting to the urgent problems facing global society such as immigration, xenophobia, and nationalism, the project centers on a series of conversations in various settings between two protagonists—the Zainichi Korean Woohi Chung and the Swiss of Japanese descent Christian Hofer—who have not met before. The artist’s camera follows them traveling to several locations in Tokyo to grapple with questions about (their own cultural) identity and how to take a stand against the simplistic and selective worldviews of racist groups.

How do communities organize the way we live together? This is the question around which the work of the Japanese performance artist has revolved since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. He looks for answers by staging participatory actions that he documents in photographs and videos. His practice is based on the observation that humans exposed to exceptional situations and the associated disruption of everyday routines coalesce into short-lived micro-communities.

The book brings together different layers of the project, combining the postal conversation by Woohi and Christian in which they introduce themselves to each other, image material from Tanaka’s film and documentation, as well as reflective texts by the artist on the project. This is accompanied by texts from Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst director Heike Munder, art historian Elsa Himmer, and Tong-Hyon Han, an associate professor of sociology at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image in Tokyo and expert in the field of the ethnicity of Zainichi Koreans in Japan.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the artist at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (August 25–November 11, 2018).

—Quoted from jrp-editions.com

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.

Photo by Wen Peng

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

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