In Japan, fine art is way less popular than other art genres. Especially speaking of contemporary art, the majority of people think of it as hard to understand or as clear as mud. Compare with the other western industrialized countries, it is obvious that Japanese people disregard fine art. I produced an art exhibition at a popular fashion store BEAMS JAPAN to satirize such situation in Japan.
The theme of the exhibit is the attendance for contemporary art exhibitions. Utilizing the powerful advertisements of BEAMS, I orchestrated various ways to draw people creating elaborate invitation cards. Of course I, as an artist, would do my best, however, we have no chance against the number of customers who come for popular fashion store, BEAMS. Standing such obvious fact on its head, I aimed to exploit the fashion store's power of drawing people for my own art work.
I made eight partially different colored invitation cards based on who receive them.
1.Artists
2.Curators, Gallerists
3.Critics, Writers
4.Collectors, Art Lovers
5. Media representatives
6.Designers, Illustrators, Architects
7.Students
8.BEAMS's networked customers
The most important part of this exhibition is the performance in the opening night. Then, the artist Shiro Masuyama stayed in a shop-window on the second floor of the BEAMS JAPAN building and other staffs checked the invitation cards at the entrance on the first floor. Masuyama counted the number of people categorizing them by checking the color of invitations using nine traffic-census-counters. Each analog number of the counting was transferred into a digital data and interactively functioned to the animation projected on the gallery wall in BEAMS Japan.
The animation started at the moment when the attendance of the public without cards reached 10. The animation sets up a group tour where the public people that should be majority in the store go to a miracle world attended by Shiro Masuyama. That is something like a computer game with a black joke; where, associated with the number of audience for the exhibit-namely, art people, the enemy characters come out and kill the public people. That is to say that the game plays out with binary opposition with the public who are not interested in art and the people in the art circuit. If the number of the public is greater than the art people, the public can enjoy and pursue the tour until the end. But if the number of the art people is greater, the public people would be all killed and the game would be over in the middle of the tour. Since the majority of the customer for BEAMS is in animation and video game generation, this experimental project tried to draw their attention utilizing the medium that they are familiar with.
In the gallery, the main installation is the projection of the animation as well as the two video monitors projecting the live-image of analogue counters set at the show-window and the image of the different kinds of the invitation cards. I made it clear that the all projected images relate to each other by purposefully organizing the installations.