Read Part I of II click here.
The big surprise for me at this exhibition was video art. Haven’t been a big fan of it, Sometimes I’ll manage to sit through a short video, but I hadn’t been wow-ed until this show.
At the Yokohama Museum of Art, Zhao Zhao’s 120min video of getting a refrigerator into the Taklamakan Desert is not my idea of a way to spend 2 hours of my life. However, with an understanding of short attention spans, Zhao Zhao’s video was split into nine repeating segments. So one can see where the video is going without standing around for 2 hours wondering what he is doing with this electric cable and refrigerator in the middle of a desert.
After taking the free shuttle bus to the Red Brick Warehouse we saw the work of Terunuma Atsuro. This artist chose to integrate the video & digital work into the paintings. One piece, Mienai Nozomi, contained a video monitor and a digital photo frame. Whereas the other colorful piece, Mieteru Nozomu, had a fun video projection bringing the painting to life.
The best video installation was by Ragnar Kjartansson from Iceland. A completely enclosed room with about eight large screens shows musicians each in their own room of a home, playing a beautiful musical piece together. Only connected with each other by what they hear through the headphones. The details are haunting, mysterious, as one seeks to learn where they are, and laughing at grandpa in his lawn chair. One wonders who is conducting and in the end it doesn’t matter so much to the viewer as does the connection being made.
