PinchukArtCentre

Yu Araki

Yu Araki was born 1985 in Yamagata City, Japan. Araki received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis, U.S.A. in 2007, and completed his Master of Film and New Media Studies from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010. In 2013, he was selected to participate in Tacita Dean Workshop hosted by Fundación Botín in Santander, Spain. During 2017-8, he was a guest resident at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea as well as Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Recent exhibitions include the National Museum of Art, Osaka, MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; and Okayama Art Summit, Okayama. His films have been programmed in international festivals such as BFI London Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Recontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, where he won the Ammodo Tiger Short Film Award in 2018. Since 2016, Araki has been a member of Art Translator’s Collective and ARTISTS’ GUILD. He currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. http://www.yuaraki.com/
Yu Araki was born 1985 in Yamagata City, Japan. Araki received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis, U.S.A. in 2007, and completed his Master of Film and New Media Studies from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010. In 2013, he was selected to participate in Tacita Dean Workshop hosted by Fundación Botín in Santander, Spain. During 2017-8, he was a guest resident at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea as well as Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Recent exhibitions include the National Museum of Art, Osaka, MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; and Okayama Art Summit, Okayama. His films have been programmed in international festivals such as BFI London Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Recontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, where he won the Ammodo Tiger Short Film Award in 2018. Since 2016, Araki has been a member of Art Translator’s Collective and ARTISTS’ GUILD. He currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. http://www.yuaraki.com/

The current focus of Yu Araki’s artistic practice deals with personal confrontation with extreme sense of loss. With his new multimedia installation Bivalvia, Yu Araki invites a viewer inside a shipping container, a contemporary metaphor of a portal to various places, cultures, contexts, and eras. The first part of the container refers to the original karaoke boxes, a Japanese innovation in which utilized actual containers. He is expanding the idea of karaoke, which literally means kara (emptiness) + oke (orchestra) in Japanese language, while kara is also homonymous to shell. Araki was particularly interested in the idea of a song being covered as a way of rebirth in different time and place, analogous to reincarnation. The video Bivalvia: Act I is an unscripted, patchwork narration combining a real-life story about a young couple who committed suicide in the sea between Japan and Korea, with the legend of St. Jacob, with French phonetics lesson, with various representations of oysters. In the second part of the container, Araki showcases the glimpse of his fluid filmmaking process through video sculpture Exercise in Silence (Scenes for Bivalvia: Act II). It consists of a series of improvised screen tests in which an actress is assigned to communicate nonverbally, alluding to a passage from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). Combined with a fragment from Disney cartoon Alice in Wonderland (1951), these raw footages are filmed as a prelude to Bivalvia: Act II. The image of oysters interweaves the whole project, as a classical symbol of vanitas.

Videoprofile