Opening Reception : 9/9 (Sat.) 6-8pm
*We are open on Wed to Sat. 12-7pm and Sun. 12-5pm
*Closed on Mon., Tue. and National Holidays
*Fuyuhiko Takata will be present at the opening reception on 9/9, Saturday, 6-8pm. The exhibition opens at noon before the reception.
WAITINGROOM (Tokyo) is pleased to present “Cut Pieces,” a solo exhibition by Fuyuhiko Takata from September 9 (Sat) to October 8 (Sun), 2023.
Drawing on fairy tales and myths as a base material, Takata creates video works that deal with themes such as gender, sexuality, loneliness, narcissism, and trauma in a transgressive manner. In addition to his latest work Cut Suits, this exhibition will feature the Japanese premiere of The Butterfly Dream, which attracted much attention at the NADA Miami 2022 art fair held in the US late last year, as well as his recent work, Dangling Training.
In recent years, Takata has been working on a body of work that uses the male body as a motif while disrupting this image in a playful, ludic manner, something that this solo exhibition continues to build on and develop. In particular, his latest work for this exhibition, Cut Suits, depicts a performance given by multiple male models where the artist’s ideas are delegated and handed over to these six performers and documented with a large-scale photographic technique. In addition to displaying the actual props used in the performance, the exhibition will also experiment with a more spatial and sculptural approach, encompassing a more installation-like gesture where the images in the work seem to have spread to the exhibition space.
《Cut Suits》2023, video still
About the artist, Fuyuhiko Takata
Born in 1987 in Hiroshima, currently lives and works in Chiba. He completed the doctoral course in oil painting at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2017. His recent exhibitions include a Group exhibition “Storymakers in Contemporary Japanese Art” (2022, The Japan Foundation Sydney, Sydney), a solo exhibition “LOVE PHANTOM 2” (2021, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo), a Group exhibition “Lost in Translation” (2021, @KCUA, Kyoto), a Group exhibition “When It Waxes and Wanes” (2020, VBKÖ, Vienna), a solo exhibition “MAM Screen011: Fuyuhiko Takata” (2019, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo), solo exhibition “Dream Catcher” (2018, Alternative Space CORE, Hiroshima), solo exhibition “LOVE PHANTOM” (2017, Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo), solo exhibition “STORYTELLING” (2016, Kodama Gallery, Tokyo), group exhibition “MOT Annual 2016 Loose Lips Save Ships” (2016, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo), and many others.
《The Butterfly Dream》2022, video still
A glimpse through a tear in the cloth
A young man is taking a nap in the shade of a tree, and in his dream, a chimera of a butterfly and a pair of scissors appears. The butterfly flits around the young man, and as soon as it flaps its wings, it moves the scissors and cuts through the young man’s clothes. The Butterfly Dream, which recalls the old Chinese tale by Zhuangzi, also makes references to Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. This work, in which the assembled audience members take turns one by one to cut off the artist’s clothes with a pair of scissors, is well known as one of the earliest examples in the history of performance art that questioned the desire to “see/be seen,” and the problem of being active/passive.
The fantastical stories of male subjects depicted in The Butterfly Dream are continued in Takata’s latest work Cut Suits, where men dressed like salarymen happily cut up each other’s suits and shirts with the pairs of scissors in their hands. While this seems to be an allusion to an eroticized glimpse of men in suits, it is also a kind of liberation from the social norms surrounding Japanese conceptions of masculinity.
As Takata himself says, “the theme of my work begins with the question of seeing/being seen,” and it is this desire to see/be seen, with both its pleasurable and violent aspects, that is at the root of his work. A constant presence within the works presented at this exhibition are elements that seem to be contradictory, such as passivity and action, pleasure and violence, or sadism and masochism, which exist alongside each other in an act such as “cutting (with scissors) and being cut (with scissors).” While there is a certain sense of discomfort that comes with watching Takata’s works, there is also a kind of helpless fascination that stems from how the viewer becomes aware of the hidden character or nature of human beings related to pleasure and madness — as if one had caught a glimpse of what lies beyond a tear in the cloth — while at the same time realizing that these feelings also clearly reside within us.
At past exhibitions and screenings, most of Takata’s work has been presented only as video pieces, with little attention paid to the storyboard-like elements of the drawings, or the sculptural appeal of the props that actually appear in his works. This time, in addition to these exhibits, Takata will also present sculptural pieces using multiple monitors and video installations, where the images in his works seem to spread to the exhibition space in an experimental deployment. This will be Fuyuhiko Takata’s second exhibition at WAITINGROOM, and his first solo exhibition as an artist in two years.
