The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is proud to present the first solo exhibition of award-winning artist Yukako Tanaka, who currently lives and works in London. Tanaka’s practice spans a range of media from video and sound installations to the use of the latest viewing technologies including holographic visualisation and tactile 3D modeling. These modes of creation culminate in a fusion of art, science and philosophy where her art is positioned as a potential vessel that contains and informs disciplinary processes and their varying approaches to knowledge production.
As well as being her first solo show in the UK, this exhibition is specifically tailored for the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. Tanaka has produced a new site-informed work that responds to the Foundation’s Cornwall Terrace location overlooking Regent’s Park, its Regency history & architecture and its former resident, Arthur Lasenby Liberty, the founder of Liberty. The new work sits alongside the transformation of existing work into a further site-responsive piece in which she re-enacts performance work into film shot on the premises. The exhibition, informed by Tanaka’s prolific practice and amalgamated interests in science and its evidence-backed methodologies, is both conceptually and visually provocative. The show, which includes but is not limited to astrophysics, neuroscience and philosophy, asks us to consider the relationships between the core quest of furthering human knowledge, and the role of artistic approaches and perspectives.
Tanaka reflects on the accelerated transition of the human condition in a new era which can be defined as posthuman/transhuman, where human realities are a hybrid generation of physical and virtual experiences. The accelerated blurring of the boundaries between virtual/online and AFK (away from keyboard) experiences, forced by the global pandemic, poses new questions to our comprehension of the world at large. For Tanaka, this transition emphasises existentialist questions: who are we?; why are we here?; and how do we apprehend our reality and ensure that we (continue to) exist? Such deep-rooted philosophical questions manifest in her works through explorations of memory-experience, time-space, and presence-absence.
In Tanaka’s words, “the 4-dimensionality of existence not only orientates itself in space but is complemented by the recognition of time passing.” Taking the form of an inquiry into the phenomenology of perception using the 4-dimensionality of existence (3D space + time), Tanaka’s exhibition is composed of four installations, an online public conversation and a workshop that experiments with the possibility of surpassing the two-dimensionality of screen presence into an experienced event.
