Contemporary Art Gallery

Tadasu Takamine’s Cool Japan

“The Lost Lawsuit Room”
Installation view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito 　Photo:Yoko Hosokawa

Tadasu Takamine is known for a body of work that brims with both humor and a keen sense of criticality in relation to the systems of oppression and control concealed within contemporary society.
Just before the outbreak of the war in Iraq in 2002, Takamine depicted the imperious power wielded by the United States and its complex structures of control and domination in his video work “God Bless America”. Ten years after this work was first exhibited, and following the disasters of March 11, 2011, Takamine finally returns to tackle the subject of his home country, Japan.
The “Cool Japan” in the title of the exhibition is a catchphrase devised by the Japanese government. It is a self-branding exercise that encapsulates its active attempts to promote various forms of Japanese culture to an international audience. Takamine uses the catchphrase in ironical way to search for what has built “Japaneseness”.
For this exhibition, Takamine will showcase installations in each of the galleries that draw our attention to words, slogans and images that the Japanese have unconsciously promoted, disseminated, and deployed in an oppressive way from the postwar period up until the present. These newly commissioned interactive works will offer visitors a taste of Takamine’s vision of a “Cool Japan”.

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“Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” In other words, the process by which one’s individual self-consciousness emerges is profoundly influenced by an awareness of the larger collective. This notion, it seems to me, is gradually taking on a larger significance in contemporary Japan. Having become all too familiar with the idea that “one is not born, but rather becomes, Japanese”, there are many things that have never really entered our consciousness – perhaps because they have been skillfully manipulated and doctored in a way that hinders us from paying them too much attention. Now, at long last, we find ourselves in a situation where we are actually confronted with the experience of these things.
What are we made up of, and how are our selves and identities created? This seems to be the question that has emerged, like a plume of smoke, in the wake of March 11. What is it that humans live for? This age-old question, continually pondered and philosophized since ancient times, is one that I would like to think about together with the audience, superimposed onto the trajectory of each of our lives thus far.”