Takashi Makino
Solo Exhibition
Collage and Anti-cosmos
2023.10.7 (Sat.) - 11.4 (Sat.)
*Due to its popularity, the exhibition will also be open on 11.3 (Fri., National Holiday)
【Opening Reception】
10.7 (Sat.) 17:00 − 19:00
*Artist will attend the reception
【Live Performance & Talk Event】
10.20 (Fri.) 19:30 – 21:00
Live Performance “Space Noise 3D” (Open 19:00 / Start 19:30)
Takashi Makino x Gen Umezu Talk Event (Approx. 45 min.)
Admission: ¥1,500 (with 1drink)
For more information about the event, click here
We are pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition by Takashi Makino titled Collage and Anti-cosmos at our gallery. The exhibition will run from October 7 (Sat.) to November 4 (Sat.).
Takashi Makino (born in Tokyo in 1978, currently residing in Kanagawa Prefecture) graduated from the Fine Art Department of Nihon University College of Art with a degree in cinema. Upon his graduation, he went to the United Kingdom, where he received insights into film, lighting, and music at Koninck studios, the London atelier of the Brothers Quay. Subsequently, he worked as a colorist and was in charge of coloration for many theater movies as well as CFs and music videos. While refining his skills related to film and video, he began showing works of his own in 2004. He shoots natural phenomena, people, streets, and other existing objects in film, video, and a variety of other formats. At the editing stage, he makes constructs that look as if they go on forever by superimposing these images. The resulting works, which are extremely organic and imaginative, have been highly praised internationally. While currently based in Japan, he is presenting films, music, installations, and audio-visual performances in countries around the world. He has also been energetically involved in projects of collaboration with prominent musicians including Jim O’Rourke, Otomo Yoshihide, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takuma Watanabe, Machinefabriek, Lawrence English, and Grouper.
Makino has won numerous awards at international film festivals overseas, and took the Tiger Award (the equivalent of the Grand Prix) in the short film category at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2012. In recent years, in addition to film festivals, his works have been shown at museums in Japan and other countries, e.g., MOMAS (the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama), Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, documenta 14 (Greece), San Francisco MOMA, MoMAPS1, New Museum of Contemporary Art (USA), White Chapel Gallery (UK), and the Austrian Film Museum.
Using an enormous amount of film and video materials that he employed to shoot things around him and overlapping them many times, Makino builds layered worlds. By adding noise and electronic music to this mix, he deepens the character of the output as a work charged with physical sensation. Each viewer comes into contact with Makino’s works as an individual experience.
Anti-cosmos, a new work shown for the first time at this exhibition, received much inspiration from the book Cosmos and Anti-cosmos by Toshihiko Izutsu. In this book, Izutsu defines cosmos as “a meaningful existential order (space for existence that is ordered in a meaningful way)¹” and goes on to describe it as “a single, complex, ordered body composed of countless individual semantic units, that is, a single, harmonized, self-complete whole produced by the multilayered arrangement of an infinite number of semantic units (so-called phenomena and potential phenomena)².” The term “anti-cosmos” is definitely not a negation of “cosmos”; the focus of the work is squarely on providing stimulation, dismantling the cosmos, and continuously jolting our vision.
Makino offered the following comment for this exhibition.
With the exception of some early collage works, all of the works shown in this exhibition were made during the pandemic (2020-2022). My motivation for making Memento Stella in 2018 was a deep apprehension and anxiety about the future. More specifically, I thought that it may become impossible to produce and exhibit works like this while traveling around the world. And as things turned out, this became a reality, and we were compelled to live in a closed, stifling world of a sort we had never before experienced. Under these circumstances, the only thing I could do was just keep producing works, although I had no idea when I could show them, and to whom. This production was done entirely within my own studio. I took a second look at many paper materials and a huge amount of video materials I had shot, did some daydreaming, and kept my hands in motion. It was solitary work, and made me feel as if I were forever writing a letter that would have no recipient.
This activity bore fruit in the form of many collages on paper media and two film works.
Anti-cosmos, the main work at this exhibition, was inspired by Cosmos and Anti-cosmos by Toshihiko Izutsu. This book was full of valuable insights into the relationship between cosmos and chaos, microcosmos and macrocosmos, and outer and inner images that I have explored in my artistic activities so far. What I have done in my practice of extreme abstract expression so far has always been to produce films as devices for stimulating and amplifying the viewer’s powers of imagination, and to show these films around the world. The term “anti-cosmos” refers to the very act of stimulating the cosmos already existing (which I interpret as order, common sense, and fixed conceptions) and throwing open the door to a new world. I realized that my own activities per se could be described as of an anti-cosmos nature. I shot several concrete objects of the sort I had never used before, and devised a whirlpool of light like the common worldwide memory by superimposing, synthesizing, and inducing a resonation involving thousands of images from this footage. Microcosmos, the other video work, is a short film using numerous collage works on paper media. I produced it to see what kind of unexpected journey into the state of unconsciousness I could create solely by means of limited materials and my own imagination. I quietly interwove scenes like fragments of a dream seen in a meditative experience during production of the collage, and arranged them like constellations.
Takashi Makino
People have long continued to produce certain existential dichotomies and create self-contained, strait-jacketing cosmoses for which they then engage in mutual showing and feuding. This is something that we who have watched the war in Ukraine and the pandemic unfold can keenly feel. In connection with his production of collage works in parallel with video, Makino has stated his desires for the birth of works in which the various materials enhance each other as in film instead of killing each other.
It would be a total misreading of the situation to say that our world is becoming chaotic in the extreme; it is, on the contrary, going too far in seeking cosmos. Is what lies ahead of the movement toward ordering the world around a single ism and single structure really a utopia?
We would be delighted if exhibition visitors open the door of their own closed cosmos and discover a new world outside it, through Makino’s works.
Furthermore, critic/curator Gen Umezu, who has followed Makino’s work for many years, has contributed the text Takashi Makino: Involuntary Memory or The Art of Premonition on the occasion of this exhibition. Please read it as well.
2021_04_28_sleep_in_the_air (2021) collage on paper, H22.4×W15.1cm ©︎Takashi Makino
2021_06_16 (2021) collage on paper, H18.6×W16.0cm ©︎Takashi Makino
1.,2. Toshihiko Izutsu (1989). Cosmos and Anti-Cosmos: For Oriental Philosophy, Iwanamishoten, 220.
「コラージュとアンチコスモス」展示風景
【Related Information】
Takashi Makino is participating in the 14th Shanghai Biennale starting November 9.
His film installation works will be presented, additionally, he will give a live performance during the exhibition.
14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema
2023.11.9 (Thu.) – 2024.3.31 (Sun.)
Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China
Nivhek (a.k.a. Grouper/Liz Harris) is going to tour Europe with a film work by Makino.
Live performance “Space Noise 3D”, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2013
©︎Takashi Makino, Photo by Johann Lurf, Courtesy of International Film Festival Rotterdam