The Tokyo Contemporary Art Award, established in 2018, is a prize intended to encourage mid-career artists to make further breakthroughs in their work by providing winners with several years of continuous support. Here, the two winners of the award’s fourth edition each present shows that, despite their creative diversity, both involve visitors and their actions becoming key elements of the art. Through this, both shows lead audiences to examine their relationships: with fellow humans, animals, and society’s expectations.
Saeborg, born in 1981 and based in Tokyo, creates and performs as a latex bodysuit-clad ‘imperfect cyborg, half human and half toy’ that enables the female behind this guise to transcend such characteristics as age and gender. Here Saeborg presents ‘I Was Made for Loving You’, for which a section of the venue has been transformed into a life-sized toy farm. Visitors will experience a highly immersive installation-performance that transcends the boundaries between the body and synthetic materials, and between human and animal.
Michiko Tsuda (born in 1980 and working in Ishikawa prefecture) presents ‘Life is Delaying’, an installation that uses video to explore the notion of physicality. The work recreates the private world experienced by a family at home through the perspective of someone operating an old-school video camera. The piece was inspired by Tsuda’s childhood memory of a video camera appearing in her family residence. Here, fictitious documentation of a family, the smallest basic unit of society, is expanded upon to examine the positions of individuals within larger groups and systems.
The exhibition is closed on Monday (except April 29 and May 6), April 30 and May 7.