Tadasu takamine biography
- Tadasu Takamine is a controversial, thought provoking, and irreverent media, video, and installation artist.
- Born in Kagoshima, Japan, in 1968, he has exhibited extensively throughout Asia, North America and Europe, as well as Australia, Israel, Mexico and South Africa.
- Born in Kagoshima in 1968, Tadasu Takamine currently lives and works in Tokyo.
- •
Contemporary Art Gallery
Tadasu Takamine’s Cool Japan
December 22 (Sat.),2012,to February 17 (Sun.),2013
“The Lost Lawsuit Room”
Installation view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito Photo:Yoko Hosokawa
Tadasu Takamine is known for a body of work that brims with both humor and a keen sense of criticality in relation to the systems of oppression and control concealed within contemporary society.
Just before the outbreak of the war in Iraq in 2002, Takamine depicted the imperious power wielded by the United States and its complex structures of control and domination in his video work “God Bless America”. Ten years after this work was first exhibited, and following the disasters of March 11, 2011, Takamine finally returns to tackle the subject of his home country, Japan.
The “Cool Japan” in the title of the exhibition is a catchphrase devised by the Japanese government. It is a self-branding exercise that encapsulates its active attempts to promote various forms of Japanese culture to an international audience. Takamine uses the catchphrase in ironical way to
- •
Tadasu
Takamine
Tadasu Takamine, who was born in Kagoshima, Japan, in 1968, began as a member of the influential Japanese multimedia-performance group Dumb Type, which has existed since the nineteen-eighties. He has now been active for over a decade as a freelance director and artist, and has devoted himself to a theatre practice that he develops experimentally in workshops in dialogue with local participants. Both in the theatre as well as in artistic projects, he grapples with gnawing social questions provocatively and with dark humor.
This can already be read in the title of his most recent exhibition project “Cool Japan” (2012): with it, he makes reference to Cool Japan, the campaign for marketing Japan that was launched in 2011. In light of the ecological effects of the reactor catastrophe in Fukushima, promoting qualities such as the ‘coolness’ or serenity of the Japanese people illustrates the political efforts to utilize the population within the framework of the image campaign. On the attempt of the government, quasi in the slipstream of the catastrophe, to exert in
- •
TAKAMINE Tadasu
- Born 1968 in Kagoshima, Japan
- Based in Akita, Japan
Takamine Tadasu lays bare buried issues in society through the prism of his own personal experiences and physical sensitivities, employing various media including video, installation and stage performance. Created at the site of a former manganese mine which still bears traces of Japan's history of Korean forced labor, A Lover from Korea is a work inspired by his relationship with his partner. Another work, The Unwelcomed, takes as its theme an immigrant ship washed ashore on a nearby coast. Both works are laced with a sense of pain and frustration coming from the artist himself--emotions which can't be dismissed as mere empathy for others. Placing his audience in uncomfortable situations, Takamine pointedly calls into question their sense of belonging, while conveying, through untrained, awkward bodies, an underlying warm, naive humanity that longs for others.
Selected Works & Awards
| 2012 | Tadasu Takamine’s Cool Japan (solo), Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki, Japan |
|
Copyright ©rimpair.pages.dev 2025 |