Concept
In January 1995, an earthquake hit Kobe, where Tanaka's studio is located. The damage to the city was unimaginable, with leaning buildings, distorted ground, and gray spaces all around the studio. We could not determine where the horizontal and vertical parts of the buildings should have been, and the city had lost the standards that we had unconsciously sensed in our daily lives. In the midst of anxiety, confusion, and helplessness, the great sense of discomfort I felt in this space without standards became the impetus for me to think about the standards surrounding my own life. We create standards at various levels to form the society and culture of Japan, and we operate in spaces that are physically and mentally organized to make our lives easier, but we are usually unaware of their existence.
And while the common concepts held by people living within these standards are necessary for communication, they also constrain our freedom of thought and creativity. It is difficult to recognize what exists as a matter of course, and we do not think that this causes us to have mental closure, and we are not easily aware of these restraints. The world is built on diverse criteria, and people live within one or a few of these criteria, and all friction and conflict between races, nations, and religions is caused by differences in these criteria to a great extent. If this is the case, if we can relate to the phenomena with a broad perspective and tolerance, the world will become a softer space, and people will be able to live with more flexibility, which was the beginning of the work that continues to this day.
In order to function as a device for reconstructing people's concepts, this series begins by deconstructing what is already recognized. In other words, he obscures the context in which the object exists in order to make it recognizable. The light bulbs, eggs, and spice tubes that he uses as the building blocks of his installations are not things that are usually displayed in galleries or museums, but things that make sense in everyday life. The axis of this series is to make them exist in a way that the viewer has no clear criteria for selecting the components of the work, such as the number and arrangement pattern, etc., and that their meaning changes depending on the discomfort of placing them in an art space, the number, arrangement form, and distance between the viewer and the work. These devices create a gap in the viewer's preconceived notions.
The series also includes a jigsaw puzzle that makes the definitions (standards) of three-dimensional and two-dimensional, abstract and figurative, and so on relative to each other. The original design of the jigsaw puzzle allows for an infinite series of pieces, and the distance between the viewer and the work changes the way the work is seen, from abstract to figurative, and from figurative to abstract. Some also embody the transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional.
All are devices designed to blur fixed standards by causing a slight shift in the viewer's conception. This slight shift in perception can be experienced as a softer way of relating to the world. We hope that this series of experience devices, which are designed to cause a subtle shift in perception, free people's thoughts with a sense of confusion, and then reconstruct their concepts, will cause changes in the world like the butterfly effect.
