慶應義塾大学アート・センター　Keio University Art Center

Introduction to Archives XIX & Pleating Machine 3: Ko Nakajima—MY LIFE

Date

Monday,  September 9– Friday,  November 1, 2019 / Monday to Friday, 11:00-18:00
(Closed on Saturday, Sunday and Holiday)

Venue

Keio University Art Space
[Located on the ground floor of Keio University South Annex]

2-15-45, Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 108-8345
Tel. 03-5427-1621　Fax. 03-5427-1620

JR: Tamachi station on Yamanote - and KeihinTohoku Line
Subway: Mita station on Mita Line, Akabanebashi station on Oedo Line

Audience

Everyone welcome

Cost

Free participation

Enquiries and bookings

Keio University Art Center
+81-3-5427-1621

pj.ca.oiek.tsda@ijnet-ca

Organiser(s)

Organiser: Keio University Art Center
Grant: The Kao Foundation for Arts and Sciences

---

If each day of your life were a single frame of animation, just how many frames would it take to compose a single lifetime? . . . The question of how I should create and refine visual images of myself in an integrated manner over the course of my lifetime . . . is how my ideas are informed by animation. I am not slavishly devoted to editing every single frame in a composition. In contrast to artists who aim to edit single frames to make shorts, I am someone who sees animation as constituting a biological cycle.  . . . A major difficulty is learning how to situate oneself somewhere within a longer work as I do, and still create short pieces resembling trailers that convey the semblance of completed works while persevering with the ideal of one lifetime representing one piece of art.

Ko Nakajima, from a clipping in the Ko Nakajima Collection, Keio University Art Center (KUAC) Archive  

While this passage would appear to have been extracted from a magazine interview, the particular publication and date are unknown.

　Ko Nakajima is engaged in a diverse array of activities. Animation, photography, video art, sculpture, installations, group art (“Video Earth Tokyo”), corporate commercials, writing, history of animation studies, regional revitalization (intersecting with the idea of an “Anime Shrine”), education, and more . We might say that the key perspective to achieving an intrinsic understanding of this diversity is considering Nakajima’s life in and of itself.　
　Nakajima has been working on the piece MY LIFE (1971–), which focuses on his family, over a period of approximately 50 years, and this is ongoing even today.  This exhibition is an attempt to collate and compress a record of events spanning several decades into a piece some tens of minutes in length. As long as this remains “a life’s work,” all such production activities can at the same time serve as resources (raw materials) toward this single piece. In addition to being an artist, Nakajima is also an archivist, and as such is engaged with the creation of a vast repository of resources which are contained within this as-yet incomplete piece. We will consider the work involved in creating an archive through Nakajima’s method of folding together the diverse fragments and occurrences in his artwork.